Growing interest in integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (iSTEM) education has been promoted as one way to increase innovation capacity, support future employment, and enhance learning outcomes in K-12 education throughout the USA. Existing efforts to construct iSTEM curricula have largely focused on finding points of…

Computational thinking is a contemporary science and engineering practice that has been introduced to the US science classrooms due to its emphasis in the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS). However, including computational thinking into science instruction may be challenging. Therefore, for biological evolution (an essential…

The inclusion of engineering standards in US science education standards is potentially important because of how limited engineering education for K-12 learners is, despite the ubiquity of engineering in students' lives. However, the majority of learners experience science education throughout their compulsory schooling. If improved engineering…

This article is about an intervention introducing prehistoric life in primary education. Its objectives were to foster openness and interest for prehistory and archaeology, as well as content knowledge and conceptual learning with a focus on four main facets: basic knowledge about prehistoric life; conceptual learning/change regarding prehistory;…

Curiosity is a wonder of the human mind. It goes to the heart of modernity, as a driving force for learning, novel insights, and innovation, both for individuals and communities. In societies dependent on science and development, finding out what promotes or hampers curiosity and wonder in school curricula and science education is accordingly…

Science education researchers have long advocated the central role of the nature of science (NOS) for our understanding of scientific literacy. NOS is often interpreted narrowly to refer to a host of epistemological issues associated with the process of science and the limitations of scientific knowledge. Despite its importance, practitioners and…

This study explored, from the perspective of intellectual passion developed by Michael Polanyi, the unintended learning that occurred in primary practical science lessons. We use the term "unintended" learning to distinguish it from "intended" learning that appears in teachers' learning objectives. Data were collected using…

This study explores American and Greek primary pupils' visual images of scientists by means of two nonverbal data collection tasks to identify possible convergences and divergences. Specifically, it aims to investigate whether their images of scientists vary according to the data collection instrument used and to gender. To this end, 91…

This article focuses on the impact of a professional play that we developed in order to introduce elementary learners of an urban school to the research of a scientist working at a local university. The play was written in a way that might increase student understandings of the nature of science, scientific inquiry, the identity of scientists, and…

Science lessons using inquiry only or history of science with inquiry were used for explicit reflective nature of science (NOS) instruction for second-, third-, and fourth-grade students randomly assigned to receive one of the treatments. Students in both groups improved in their understanding of creative NOS, tentative NOS, empirical NOS, and…

Opportunities to generate model-based explanations are crucial for elementary students, yet are rarely foregrounded in elementary science learning environments despite evidence that early learners can reason from models when provided with scaffolding. We used a quasi-experimental research design to investigate the comparative impact of a scaffold…

This paper aims at exploring (a) whether preschoolers recognize that offspring share physical traits with their parents due to birth and behavioural ones due to nurture, and (b) whether they seem ready to explain shared physical traits with a "pre-biological" causal model that includes the contribution of both parents and a rudimentary…

There is, in Greece, an ongoing attempt to breach the boundaries established between the different teaching-learning subjects of compulsory education. In this context, we are interested in exploring to what degree the teaching and learning of ideas from the sciences' "internal life" (Hacking, in: Pickering (ed) "Science as practice…

This paper describes life-span development of understanding about pendulum motion and effects of school science. The subjects were 2,766 people ranging from kindergartners up to 88 years senior citizens. The conflict and consensus between children and their parent's understanding of pendulum motion were also analyzed. The kindergartner's…