The U.S. Education system is founded on a Eurocentric focus of curriculum, and students of color are not achieving as high as white students on the National Assessment for Education Progress in science. This research aims to repay the education debt owed to students of color by decolonizing science curriculum through the implementation of lessons…

It is widely acknowledged that understanding of science is key to becoming global citizens and to embrace technological advancements. Although research suggests that girl's performance in science has improved over the years, there are still concerns about the under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)…

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between high school students' understanding of carbon compounds, including their transformations, and their ability to trace matter in the carbon cycle. The rationale of this study is based on the hypothesis that the students' lack of knowledge about carbon compounds and their…

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact a specific socio-scientific inquiry (SSI) unit has on student achievement and attitudes over the course of two years with two different implementations of the unit. Specifically, this study addressed the following research question: What impact does participation in an SSI unit have on student…

The purpose of this study is to investigate students' mental models of the marine environment and to further examine how these models are related to their perceptions of marine problems. One hundred twenty-eight ninth grade students from a large harbor city in southern Taiwan completed a survey including a drawing activity and a set of two-tier…

Parasites evoke an array of emotions that subsequently can govern our action as well as our precautionary measures. If parasites are unknown, an important question is how people can be educated about this parasite. Bedbugs are blood-sucking human parasites that (i) stigmatise hosts, (ii) are hardly correctly identified by people in the western…

This study investigated the effects of teachers' use of "focus questions" on students' knowledge structures and classroom teaching-learning process by re-analyzing selected data from a quasi-experimental pre-post video study (Wadouh, 2007). Focus questions are content-related anchoring questions highlighting the key content taught in…

Understanding of evolution helps solve biological problems in areas that affect our lives. One of the ways of adopting the concept of evolution leads through a conceptual change. We investigated whether inductively prepared educational activities, focused on evolution, have the potential to create conceptual changes in students' conceptual…

Carbon emissions which are one of the most important human sourced causes of global climate change continue to rise rapidly despite all efforts to minimize these emissions. Carbon footprint (CF) education is significant in terms of changing the present situation. The aim of this study is to determine the awareness of high school students about the…

The dominant role of English as the global language of science entails a requirement for science teachers to equip their non-native English-speaking students with receptive and productive language skills for communication in scientific contexts. Although science courses with English elements are part of some schools' bilingual programmes, they are…

Background: Studies have shown that students' knowledge of osmosis and diffusion and the concepts associated with these processes is often inaccurate. This is important to address, as these concepts not only provide the foundation for more advanced topics in biology and chemistry, but are also threaded throughout both state and national science…

The aim of this study is to determine 9th class students knowledge about the internal structures of mice and cockroaches using drawings. Drawings of 122 students from the 9th class of a high school in the center of Konya about the internal structures of mice and cockroaches have been analyzed. Drawings were analyzed independently by two…

Informed understandings of nature of science and scientific inquiry are generally accepted goals of biology education. This article points out central features of scientific inquiry with relation to biology and the nature of science in general terms and focuses on the relationship of students' inquiry skills in biology and their beliefs on the…

Changes in high school students' (n = 94) conceptions of natural selection were examined as a function of motivational beliefs (individual interest, academic self-efficacy), basic prior knowledge, and gender across three assessments (pre, post, follow-up). Results from variable-centered analyses suggested that these variables had relatively little…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether there is a difference in high school students' achievement and retention on standardized tests between students who participate in inquiry-based laboratory activities and those that participate in traditional style laboratory activities. Additionally, student and teacher opinions of…