There are conflicting reports not only on the effect of scientific inquiry on academic achievement but also insufficient evidence on the relationship between understanding the nature of scientific inquiry and academic achievement; more generalizable studies are needed. The purpose of this large sampled study was to investigate the middle school…

Teachers lack effective curriculum-based instruments to assess their students' scientific competence that would provide information for modifying their inquiry instruction. The main purpose of this study was to develop and validate a Curriculum-Based Scientific Competence (CBSC) test to assess students' scientific competence in a 1-semester Grade…

Integrating the nature of science (NOS) into textbooks is one of the challenges in science curricula. This case study assessed the issue based on a sample of high school biology textbooks in Mainland China. We quantitatively compared changes in the extent, quality, and distribution of NOS representations between 2004 and 2019 editions. Three main…

The notion of science identity has been widely discussed in the field of science education in recent years. Many research studies have focused on students' science identity in a general sense in spite of the fact that students are usually exposed to discipline-specific science courses in high school. We argue that it is more appropriate to explore…

An ability to engage in system thinking is necessary to understand complex problems. While many pre-college students use system modeling tools, there is limited evidence of student reasoning about causal relationships that interact in diverging and converging chains, and how these affect system behavior. A chemistry unit on gas phenomena was…

Success in problem-based learning requires both strong information literacy to search for, evaluate, and use information effectively, and argumentation skills to generate coherent arguments. This study investigated the positive and negative effects of computer-based scaffolding to support high-school credit recovery students' information literacy…

In this qualitative study, the researchers explored the ways in which 21st-century skills (specifically communication and critical thinking) are enhanced by Grade 10 beginner Physical Sciences teachers while teaching Particulate Nature of Matter (PNM) through the implementation of problem-based learning (PBL). The study was conducted in one of the…

High school students learn the basic voltaic and electrolytic cell concepts during their last year prior to entering an undergraduate teacher-education science degree. During the 4 years of university, students complete a sequence of topics designed to build on conceptual understanding presented in previous years. At the end of their degrees,…

This study presents 3 case studies that examine the processes involved in the professional growth of physics teacher-leaders (TLs) in a national network of professional learning communities (PLCs). This program has been operating since 2012, using a "Fan Model" where the TLs participate in a PLC (TL-PLC) led by a team from the Weizmann…

Currently, the physics disciplines are represented by a significantly larger number of professional males, compared to females. Although the problem of underrepresentation of female physicists has several causes, one likely reason is the lower interest that female school students have in physics activities. Several instructional solutions have…

Motivated by often passingly brief textbook discussions of industrial capacitors, this study examines how students make sense of textbook descriptions to create an industrial rolled-up capacitor. A total of 37 junior-year students at a top high school in Beijing, China, participated in the study. The participants followed their textbook guidance…

This paper illustrates the role of metalanguage in an explicit literacy instruction to talk about the forms and functions of scientific genres, particularly the genre of explanation. In the context of science, metalanguage refers to the technical terms for talking "about" scientific language using words like law, hypothesis, and…

Inquiry-based science instruction has been advocated for decades. However, the implementation of inquiry teaching and learning in everyday classrooms is rather limited due to various factors. Previous research investigated implementations of inquiry-based teaching at the activity level with self-reported methods. However, little is known about how…

The purpose of the current study was to explore and further elucidate secondary teachers' knowledge of students' conceptions (KOSC) on the topic of evolution by natural selection. Prior research has documented students' natural selection conceptions, but allowing the opportunity for teachers to describe their own students' conceptions can permit…

In this study, we investigated how high school credit recovery students worked in small groups and used computer-based scaffolds to conduct scientific inquiry in a problem-based learning unit centered on water quality. We examined how students searched for and evaluated information from different sources, and used evidence to support their claims.…