This paper examines the affordances of physical objects (e.g. apparatus, models, manipulatives) as they were used by teachers and students to make meaning in coordination with their speech and gestures. Despite the pervasive use of physical objects as material and tactile resources in hands-on investigations or demonstrations, there have been few…

Finland and Singapore are both top-performing countries in international assessments such as PISA. Finland has been consistently one of the high-achievers regarding not only students' literacy levels but also educational equity. Similarly, Singapore has continuously shown outstanding performance in PISA. It outperformed all the other participants…

This case study examines how three science teachers in a secondary school attended to the language demands of science through oral interactions in classes of multilingual students with diverse English proficiencies. It specifically unpacks the intricate role of language in science education, where teachers must address disciplinary-specific…

High stakes examinations can have profound implications for how science is taught and learned. Limitations of school science such as the 'cookbook problem' can potentially be addressed if high stakes assessments target learning outcomes that are innovative. For example, less mindless procedural engagement and more thoughtful consideration of…

Inquiry-based science instruction is widely advocated, but studies based on international large-scale assessments often show inquiry to be negatively associated with achievement. We re-examine this issue by examining whether the association between inquiry and learning depends upon the provision of teacher guidance. Participants were 151,721…

This article presents the development, description, application, and discussion of an analytical framework to examine students' drawings of scientific concepts and processes. Student-generated representation, particularly drawing, is increasingly emphasised as an important learning strategy to help students reason, explain, and demonstrate their…

Great teaching is characterised by the specific actions a teacher takes in the classroom to bring about learning. In the context of model-based teaching (MBT), teachers' difficulty in working with students' models that are not scientifically consistent is troubling. To address this problem, the aim of this study is to identify the pedagogical…

We report here on a comparative study of middle school students' attitudes towards science involving three countries: England, Singapore and the U.S.A. Complete attitudinal data sets from TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) 2011 were used, thus giving a very large sample size (N = 20,246), compared to other studies in the…

Students' attitude towards science (SAS) is often a subject of investigation in science education research. Survey of rating scale is commonly used in the study of SAS. The present study illustrates how Rasch analysis can be used to provide psychometric information of SAS rating scales. The analyses were conducted on a 20-item SAS scale used in an…

Given the abundance of literature describing the strong relationship between inquiry-based teaching and student achievement, more should be known about the factors impacting science teachers' classroom inquiry implementation. This study utilises the theory of planned behaviour to propose and validate a causal model of inquiry-based teaching…

This study analysed 10 top-performing regions in PISA 2015 on their science performances and instructional practices. The regions include Singapore, Japan, Estonia, Taipei, Finland, Macao, Canada, Hong Kong, China and Korea. The science performances of the 10 regions and their teaching practices are described and compared. The construct of…

This study of three science teachers' lessons on heat and temperature seeks to characterise classroom talk that highlighted the ways language is used and to examine the nature of the language demands revealed in constructing, negotiating, arguing and communicating science ideas. The transcripts from the entire instructional units for these…

The purpose of this study is to examines the relationship between the communicative approach of classroom talk and the modes of representations used by science teachers. Based on video data from two physics classrooms in Singapore, a recurring pattern in the relationship was observed as the teaching sequence of a lesson unfolded. It was found that…

This paper reports on the design and enactment of an instructional strategy aimed to support students in constructing scientific explanations. Informed by the philosophy of science and linguistic studies of science, a new instructional framework called premise--reasoning--outcome (PRO) was conceptualized, developed, and tested over two years in…

This study explored an under-researched area in science education--the university programmes preferred by high school students who take physical science subjects and the reasons that matter in their preferences. A total of 1,071 upper secondary and pre-university students in Singapore, who take physical science subjects among their range of…