Guided and open inquiry strategies are found to improve students' attitudes toward science. Yet, confirmation and structured inquiry are more often enacted by teachers. The effectiveness of these approaches involving high teacher guidance remains unexplored. Students in six classes (N = 119, M[subscript age] = 11.25 years) were assigned to control…

Science preservice teachers (PSTs), as successes of the school system, often mimic what they experienced as a student when they start teaching, which can be problematic if they never experienced science taught in contextualized ways. Since not all school students report that they find school science relevant, it is important to provide…

Developing student capacity for the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workforce requires not only better preparation in specific content and skills but also better preparation in understanding the goals that STEM fields can afford. In particular, stereotypic views that STEM fields lack communal opportunities to work with and help…

We examined the effects of teacher education on preservice secondary science and mathematics teacher readiness. The construct of teacher readiness consisted of three dimensions: (1) preservice teachers' understanding of how to implement current standards; (2) their understanding of how to teach multilingual learners (MLs); and (3) their beliefs…

We investigated beginning secondary science teachers' understandings of the science and engineering practice of developing and using models. Our study was situated in a scholarship program that served two groups: undergraduate STEM majors interested in teaching, or potential teachers, and graduate students enrolled in a teacher education program…