Simplified, reductionist approaches to curriculum design and delivery are pervasive in science education. In ecological curricula--particularly in, but not limited to K-12--biomes, ecosystems, habitats, and other units of study are simplified and presented as static, easily identified and described entities. Characteristics, components, and…

This study explored the usefulness of the open dialogue strategy to help Saudi Arabian primary teachers teach, and fourth-grade students learn, the key biological concept of classification, which is a significant challenge for students to grasp, especially the concept of humans versus animals. The convenience sample comprised N = 84 Grade four…

Although the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS) have three dimensions, the crosscutting concepts are often the forgotten dimension. One reason teachers may not emphasize the crosscutting concepts might be because they are broad, domain-general constructs that can be difficult to conceptualize in a meaningful way. Yet, when taught…

This research aimed to compare the effect of teaching science through-creative-drama activities and student-centred inquiry-based teaching on the cognitive structures of primary school pupils about the classification of living things. It was designed as an exploratory action research case study and the contribution of both interventions on the…

This paper addresses two methodological issues related to the assessment of teachers' views of science. The first concerns the distinction between the "nature of science" (NOS) and the nature of "scientific inquiry" (SI): should the points related to NOS and those related to SI be analyzed independently? The second concerns the…

The study aims to reveal students' mental models and perceptions regarding the concept of the celestial bodies, for instance, earth, sun, and moon. This research study was conducted as a case study focusing on qualitative data. This study also has used a sample formed of 5th-grade students, in the 2018-2019 academic year; the target sample is…

The aim of this study is to investigate the end-of-unit evaluation questions in 5th grade primary school science workbook according to dimensions of the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy (RBT). For that purpose, 191 end-of-unit evaluation questions of 5th grade science workbook which is approved by the Republic of Turkey -the Ministry of National…

Colonial education worldwide has relied on various concepts, from trying to mirror the content of the sovereign country to developing unique content pertaining to the colonies themselves. In this paper, we examined the nature of colonial education for the Japanese in northeast China ("Manchuria") during the colonial period from the…

In this article, a series of activities on explicit teaching of specific aspects of the 'nature of science' are presented. The authors explore teaching the nature of science through inquiry-based activities on electric circuits. The activities concern classification of objects as conductors or insulators and took place in three classes of 4th…

Here, we describe the development and validation of an automatic assessment system that examines students' hand-drawn visual representations in free-response items. The data were collected from 1,028 students in the second through 11th grades in South Korea using two items from the Test About Particles in a Gas questionnaire (Novick &…

An empirical investigation of elementary school teacher candidates on classification activities dealing with animate and inanimate objects in terms of being living or non-living demonstrates that as the size of the objects increases, subjects are more likely to classify them correctly as either being an animal or having living characteristics.…

The topic 'Animals including humans' runs through the primary science National Curriculum in England (DfE, 2013). Ideally, topics such as inheritance will lead onto adaptation, natural selection and evolution across key stages 1 to 2 (ages 5-11). This article provides nine engaging activities to support the teaching of adaptation and improve…

The authors conducted a qualitative content analysis of the 400 National Science Teachers Association Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K-12 from 2010-2017 selected for their instructional usefulness in science classrooms. The authors examined these expert-recommended science trade books to better understand their design and to identify…

In this article, we present how educational resources for zoology designed by undergraduate students help to propose means of action for teaching diversity and animal evolution in basic education. We realised that activities of creation and analysis of educational resources, in the context of didactic planning, have the potential to approximate…

The purpose of the study was to assess the volume of academic vocabulary in elementary grades disciplinary textbooks. Academic vocabulary was examined in a corpus of best-selling elementary grades textbooks in three disciplinary areas--science, mathematics, and social studies. Academic words in texts were determined through automated procedures…