The teachers should support students in acquiring knowledge and developing skills thus preparing them to think and learn independently. Considering this, the significance of implementing the modified Know-Want-Learn (KWL) teaching strategy, which directs students to perform metacognitive activities, becomes more evident. Quasi-experimental…

There has been an ongoing discussion about the role and level of teacher scaffolding in developing student agency while also meeting intended learning outcomes in inquiry-based science classrooms. This study investigates how teachers practice classroom talk to scaffold students' learning through the inquiry process and how teacher authority and…

The aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of the common knowledge construction model (CKCM)-based instruction on academic achievement and 7th grade students' views about the nature of science (NOS) presented in electrical energy unit at schools of different socio-economic levels. In accordance with this purpose, three secondary…

Learning science encompasses learning the language of science, which can pose considerable challenges to students due to its specialized features and structures. Addressing the three-language problem (the need to transition between daily, general school and disciplinary languages) and the specific language demands of science thus constitutes part…

Studies in science education have explored contextual features that facilitate students' active participation in discussion in argumentation activities. Based on this literature, we aimed to explore students' practices as they shifted their epistemic practices from unproductive to collaborative meaning-making discussion in an argumentation…

The integration of socioscientific issues (SSI) into science teaching requires that teachers manage classroom discussions in which various perspectives are considered and students' contributions are recognized. The present study aimed to provide knowledge of how classroom discussions on SSI can be structured and implemented to pursue specific…

Positioned in the Hong Kong education context, this article evaluates the effects of teaching science through home and second languages (i.e. Chinese and English) in Secondary 2 (or eighth grade) science classrooms. A total of 479 students, divided into two language instruction groups, participated in a teaching intervention comprising 16 lessons…

Given the importance of cultivating scientific literate societies, the integration of scientific inquiry into school curriculum is key to contemporary science education. It is apparent that textbooks have been an accessible source of science information for teachers and students since the growth of public K-12 schooling worldwide. Textbooks are…

This article presents a study focused on analysing the effectiveness of an activity about the use of analogies in science communication. The activity consisted of reading two science articles published in a prestigious digital newspaper about the first image of a black hole. The purpose was (i) to identify and analyse the analogies used in the…

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…

The Community of Practice framework has been used theoretically and empirically to describe the diverse ways people learn from one another through social interaction in a variety of specific contexts. To date, most research of this genre has favored investigating the community and domain constructs of the theory over the authentic practice…

This study aimed to give insights of in-service teachers' experiences of nature of science (NOS) learning and NOS teaching through a co-teaching professional learning context. For this purpose, the co-teachers were encouraged to share and discuss ideas and to improve NOS teaching through reflection and collaborative interaction in the context of a…

The intended curriculum is arguably one of the most important components within any national educational system although those in primary science have not been subject to extensive research scrutiny. Based on reformed primary science curricula from Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan, we compared them on two key features: (1) levels of knowledge…

Temperature and heat are difficult concepts for children to grasp due to their abstractness. An image-to-writing approach, guided by the visualisation practices of scientists, was designed to engage elementary students with constructing images to represent their ideas about phenomena and translating these images into text using scientific…