The need for data literacy is an increasingly pressing priority in society, but most of the work in data-centred education has focused on developing skills at the middle school, secondary, and post-secondary levels, with little attention on the potential for engaging elementary-aged students in reasoning with and about data. This paper reports…

Representation in science is anything that stands for something else--drawings, pictures, graphs, or other representational forms (Danish et al. 2020). Representations serve as public displays of phenomena that make aspects of those phenomena explicit (Gilbert 2008). They can serve to make the invisible visible, communicate ideas, display…

The goal of this dissertation project is to use embodied learning--an emerging approach to supporting student engagement--as a focal point to demonstrate how a multidimensional engagement framework can help us understand, evaluate, and design for new ways of learning. The project is situated in the context of third-grade students learning about…

To address the challenges of teaching and learning among multilingual elementary students, the Philippines, a multilingual country with over 180 languages, implemented the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE). Studies on the use of mother tongue have reported positive results among students who share a common language. However, in…

This paper gives an example of how to address the challenge of designing a learning progression that describes student thinking, with the necessary specificity to align instructional opportunities and assessment tools. We describe the Conceptual Underpinnings of Evolution project and the iterative process of developing a novel learning progression…

E-learning is playing a significant and increasing role in elementary science education. The purpose of this study was to explore how primary Grade 3 students constructed an understanding of seasons through a series of interactive e-learning activities. One class of Grade 3 students from one local primary school was invited to participate in this…

Learning about heredity is important across the K-12 continuum. However, these ideas may be challenging for students. We examined third-grade students' ideas about heredity in the context of a new, six-week, model-based science unit that uses corn as a model organism to support students' ideas about heredity. We analyzed data collected during…

Engaging in systemic reasoning about ecological issues is critical for early elementary students to develop future understanding of critical environmental issues such as global warming and loss of biodiversity. However, ecological issues are rarely taught in ways to highlight systemic reasoning in elementary schools. In this study, we conducted…

The big idea of "celestial motion", observational astronomy phenomena explained by the relative position and motion of objects in the solar system and beyond, is central to astronomy in primary and secondary education. In this paper, I argue that students' progress in developing productive, scientific explanations for this class of…

This study examines, within the domain of science, the characteristics of words that predict word knowledge and word learning. The authors identified a set of word characteristics--length, part of speech, polysemy, frequency, morphological frequency, domain specificity, and concreteness--that, based on earlier research, were prime candidates to…

With the world population recently surpassing seven billion people, it is critical for students to consider how such growth can lead to limited resources. Both the idea of diminishing resources and the magnitude of enormous numbers can be difficult for children (and many adults) to fully comprehend. For this particular lesson, the authors chose to…

Materials science, which entails the practices of selecting, testing, and characterizing materials, is an important discipline within the study of matter. This paper examines how third grade students' materials science performance changes over the course of instruction based on an engineering design challenge. We conducted a case study of nine…

In order to increase the quality and quantity of science instruction, elementary teachers must receive professional development in science learning processes. The current study was part of a larger randomized field study of teacher and student learning in science. In two districts in a southern state, researchers randomly assigned teacher…

Learning progressions (LPs)--descriptive continuums of how students develop and demonstrate more sophisticated understanding over time--have become an increasingly important tool in today's science classrooms. Here the author discusses some of the research behind learning progressions and presents The Science Inquiry Profile for PreK-4. This is a…

With the 2010 Winter Olympic Games prominent in the media, children were exposed to images of athletes skiing down snow-covered slopes, coasting furiously on bobsleds, and skating gracefully across the ice. Therefore, the authors capitalized on their children's natural curiosity about the world around them by exploring the concept of motion in a…