In the quest to tackle complex societal and environmental challenges, Norway stands as one of the nations that are increasingly incorporating and transitioning to renewable and green energy solutions, particularly solar energy and technologies. In this context, science and technology education, starting from an early age, have been highlighted as…

Worldwide, there is growing recognition of the importance of science in early childhood education. Doing science or, more formally, "science and engineering practices," is acknowledged as a critical component of early science education that requires support from the adults in children's lives. Moreover, engaging in science practices…

This study, which was reviewed through the Registered Report process, examined the initial efficacy of the Scientific Explorers program (Sci2) on second-grade students' science achievement. Sci2 is grounded in the growing body of empirical research on science instruction, embedding principles of explicit instruction within a guided inquiry-based…

Research Findings: This study examines the complexities of enacting an explicit content-rich curriculum in a large urban school district. Thirty-six teachers from 12 elementary schools, preK through Grade 1 were recruited to teach the "World of Words," an integrated science and literacy supplementary curriculum. Prior to the start of the…

With the growing adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards across the United States, elementary teachers are being called upon to incorporate engineering into their science instruction, creating a need for ways to help elementary teachers better understand what engineering is and how to accurately communicate it to students. The present…

Interdisciplinary studies foster integration of ideas across disciplines. The knowledge building pedagogy, with its 12 principles and associated technology, Knowledge Forum®, provides multifaceted support for linking ideas across disciplines and communities. This exploratory study aims to assess the extent to which elementary-school students…

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) Ready to Learn project, "Hero Elementary," has an emphasis on reaching Latino communities and supporting the needs of children with disabilities. The project embeds the expectations of kindergarten to 2nd grade science standards into a series of…

Background: Research has identified the core skills that predict success during primary school in reading and arithmetic, and this knowledge increasingly informs teaching. However, there has been no comparable work that pinpoints the core skills that underlie success in science. Aims and method: The present paper attempts to redress this by…

This study aims to develop a semiotic declarative knowledge model, which is a positive constructive behavior model that systematically facilitates understanding in order to ensure that learners think accurately and ask the right questions about a topic. The data used to develop the experimental model were obtained using four measurement tools…

Understanding complex systems requires reasoning about causal relationships that behave or appear to behave probabilistically. Features such as distributed agency, large spatial scales, and time delays obscure co-variation relationships and complex interactions can result in non-deterministic relationships between causes and effects that are best…

Elementary students should have opportunities to develop scientific models to reason and build understanding about how and why plants depend on relationships within an ecosystem for growth and survival. However, scientific modeling practices are rarely included within elementary science learning environments and disciplinary content is often…

A rich science learning experience not only captures students' attention but also motivates them to investigate and solve problems and investigate how scientists carry out their work. This article describes how secondary science coordinator Patrick Brown's found success teaching students the nature of science by engaging them in…

Experimentation skills are a central component of scientific thinking, and many studies have investigated whether and when primary-school children develop adequate experimentation strategies. However, the answers to these questions vary substantially depending on the type of task that is used: while discovery tasks, which require children to…

The purpose of this research was to study primary science students' conceptual development as it related to their understanding of materials and their properties: in particular, to determine how and why some students changed their concepts while others did not. The participants were thirty-two Grade 5 (10-11 year old) students. An instructional…

Researchers from multiple perspectives have shown that young students can engage in the scientific reasoning involved in science experimentation. However, there is little research on how well these young students learn in inquiry-based learning environments that focus on using scientific experimentation strategies to learn new scientific…