This paper was part of a larger study to examine one primary and one secondary teacher's classroom. The study analysed the classroom discourse to describe the types of interaction and illustrate how the teachers used talk moves to mediate talk for learning science around visual representations (VRs). The study employed ethnographic approaches to…

Increasingly, learning in science and mathematics is considered in terms of induction into the multimodal language practices of the disciplinary community. A strong strand of research in this tradition has involved students being challenged to invent multimodal language forms, and their ideas refined through structured guidance. Often, however,…

A "digital explanation" is a science learning task where learners explain science content to non-expert others, in this case, the learners are primary preservice teachers [PST] in a science methods class. In the task, PST are assigned a prompt based on science content from the New South Wales K-6 syllabus and generate or source multiple…

Science teachers often use visual images to help students visualise the abstract concepts of science. Yet, they may not support students in making sense of these visual representations, wrongly assuming that the students can intuitively do it on their own. Pre- and in-service teacher professional development programmes also seldom explicitly teach…

This paper examines the roles of multimodality and thematic patterns in the teaching of the particle model of matter. Although the particle model is a fundamental topic in science education, there is no consensus on (1) whether or not the model should be introduced in early grades and (2) how to introduce the model to students for the very first…

This study is inspired by laboratory studies demonstrating that distributing study sessions over time better supports learning and retention than clustering sessions. We compare two implementations of a multi-day inquiry science unit: in the clustered instruction condition, students completed an inquiry unit in five consecutive class periods. In…

Going beyond simply measuring the effectiveness of a teaching approach with computer simulations during whole-class science instruction, we investigated the interaction between teachers and their students as well as searched for mechanisms in the pedagogical context related to teachers' implementation of the intervention. Our quasi-experimental…