Most primary school students, although they grasp the scientific concepts of heat convection at the macroscopic level, commonly fail to visualize those concepts. Therefore, our research aims to enact a constructivist teaching sequence (CTS) to restructure students' visualization changes, ultimately enabling them to synergize macroscopic and…

Engineering design is being increasingly included in elementary education, typically to provide students with opportunities to apply science and mathematics concepts while developing their engineering practices. An important question is how to prepare teachers who can help students develop more informed engineering practices during classroom…

The Native American Medicine Wheel is a powerful tool to bring alive curricular connections from science and history to mathematics and civics as part of schoolyard gardening initiatives. As a living lab these gardens also serve as valuable tools to reinforce lessons on habitat enhancement. However, deeper lessons connected to the cultures of…

This study aims to integrate biomimicry into science education by proposing a teaching approach for primary school students. An action research approach was used. The developed 'Biomimicry Teaching Approach' was applied in a 5th grade classroom in a public school in Turkey where one of the authors is a teacher. According to this approach, the…

There is a long tradition of teaching science through inquiry, with broad agreement about the form it should take. Students should investigate researchable questions; gather and analyse data; and develop and represent evidence-based claims. Authoritative teacher or textbook representations are generally used to guide this learning (Buckley &…

Previous research suggests that everyday expressions are commonly used in students' descriptions of nutrient uptake. This study investigate a classroom context in year 5 with a focus on signs of scientific meaning-making about nutrient uptake with an animation as a resource in two different schools. In one of the schools there was also a teacher…

Science and engineering practices (SEPs) and crosscutting concepts (CCs) constitute a significant part of "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" (NRC 2012). As teachers, the role of the authors is to highlight the pivotal role that both scientific knowledge and the practices used to generate knowledge play in learning. This article…

This action research study aimed to find ways to adjust my practice by incorporating inquiry-based, science activities and virtual simulations to improve student conceptual understanding of physical and chemical changes. A multi-lesson, curricular intervention combining inquiry-based activities and virtual simulations was developed using…

Worksheets are common in science classrooms with an aim to support pupils' meaning-making, e.g., for guiding them in performing hands-on activities and documenting their experiences of such activities. Yet, there have been few systematic studies of pupils' disciplinary representations in worksheets. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, we…

The centrality of knowledge construction to student learning is well-recognised in education. In this study, we explore what it means to go beyond knowledge construction to knowledge evaluation, and how knowledge evaluation combined with direct disciplinary access improves opportunities for meaningful learning. We first review literature to…

Science is one of the most important subjects for students at all educational levels. To promote engagement, hands-on experiments can provide a 'realistic and exciting experience of the content' (Holstermann, Grube and Bögeholz, 2010: 744) and hopefully facilitate motivation. In this article, George Stylos and Konstantinos T. Kotsis present four…

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the Context-Based Approach (CBA) enriched by Prediction-Observation-Explanation (POE) on 5th grade students' conceptual understanding of the States of Matter, Heat and Temperature. In this study, quantitative and qualitative data collection methods were employed. The quantitative…

As computational models are becoming more widely used with the release of "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" (NRC 2012) and the "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS"; NGSS Lead States 2013), these models are reshaping the way science is practiced in increasingly diverse classrooms. For students classified…

This study seeks to examine the effect of the 5E learning model, as one of the constructivist learning approach models, supported by conceptual change texts and enriched with relevant guidance materials on eliminating the fifth-grade students' (n=42) misconceptions about "Heat and Temperature". A quantitative research approach was…

Recent national reforms focus on learning disciplinary core ideas through engaging in science and engineering practices. These reforms also call for students and teachers to use crosscutting concepts (CCCs), or analytical lenses, that support scientific sensemaking and connections across disciplines. The "Framework for K-12 Science…