Science education researchers and curriculum documents have advocated scientific inquiry for more than six decades; however, inconsistent findings concerning its effects on students' learning outcomes have been revealed in recent analyses of large-scale international assessment data (e.g., the Programme for International Student Assessment…

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…

Data from PISA and TIMSS have recently fuelled the debate on the efficacy of Inquiry-Based Science Teaching (IBST). Some analyses of these data show that the effects of different scientific activities related to IBST carried out with students vary according to the frequency of their implementation. Extending this research, the present study…

This study focuses on the effectiveness of two types of teaching practices (i.e., inquiry-based and teacher-directed) on students' science achievement, an ongoing contentious issue in science education. It examined the direct and indirect effects of the two types of teaching practices, enjoyment of science, and students' science achievement with…

Whereas one of the potential uses of Socioscientific Issues-based instruction in basic education is to engage students in scientific practices, there is a lack of empirical evidence showing that this is indeed what happens in the classroom. On this basis, the present study analysed teachers' adaptations of pre-made SSI-based lessons in light of…

As scientific literacy plays a contributing role in identifying, analysing, and solving environmental matters that our world is facing, there is growing consensus to mandate environmental matters in science classrooms following five decades of efforts in promoting environmental education. However, much remains unknown about the relationship…

The past century has seen a debate on what characterises a scientifically literate citizen. Originally, scientific literacy implied that a citizen should know the products of science but has grown to incorporate processes of science and aspects of the nature of science. Studies on students' epistemic knowledge are rarer than ones on students'…

This qualitative descriptive analysis aims to interpret the complexity of the science items that are integrated with environmental sustainability content. This research was conducted on science test items in the 2013 Curriculum student science textbooks released by the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia. This study…

This study aims to examine the moderating effect of participation in informal science activities on the associations among students' awareness of environmental issues and their attitudes toward science and epistemological beliefs. The data set included 9841 15-year-old students from four Chinese provinces (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and…

This study was aimed to calculate teachers' effective use of time in scientific inquiry lessons. The research was designed as a case study. The study group of the research consists of 5 pre-school teachers determined by the convenient sampling method. Before the study, the participants were taken in-service training program on scientific inquiry.…

This paper addresses how there are still issues with students' performance due to the gender gap in the STEM area. The researchers first analyzed 2012 and 2018 PISA data in Taiwan. They found that the gender difference is polarized. There are more boys than girls at the high score level, this phenomenon is global. Then the researchers used this…

According to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 measurements, Slovak primary school pupils commonly can reach some below average scores in terms of scientific literacy and have less and less positive attitudes towards the natural sciences. Natural sciences and statistics are intertwined disciplines. This implies that…

A great number of studies have investigated science teaching and learning (STL) using data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Nevertheless, there is little effort to synthesise these studies. Reviewing the status of research on STL, including the trends,…

Many studies investigating inquiry learning in science domains have appeared over the years. Throughout this period, inquiry learning has been regularly criticized by scholars who favor direct instruction over inquiry learning. In this vein, Zhang, Kirschner, Cobern, and Sweller (2022) recently asserted that direct instruction is overall superior…

The purpose of this study is to comparatively investigate the science teaching curricula in Turkey, which have undergone changes four times since the millennium. For this purpose, we carried out a technical and taxonomic examination of the learning outcomes listed in the science curricula that were introduced in 2000, 2005, 2013, and 2017…