This study analyze data from three national contexts in which teachers worked with the same teaching materials and inquiry classroom activities, investigating teachers' use of strategies to promote interaction and scaffolding when participating in a professional development program. The data material is collected from three case studies from the…

Developing students' critical thinking skills is often seen as an important educational goal for inquiry assignments. In this study, we investigated to what extent pre-laboratory activities of a chemical inquiry assignment influence students' independent critical thinking. We compared two forms of pre-laboratory activities that are frequently used…

The goal of this case study was to examine how a group of young children in a historically marginalized neighborhood in the northern part of the Netherlands perceived their engagement in an out-of-school, STEM community-based program aiming to enhance young children's interest and self-identification with science. We collected data through…

Due to the coronavirus lockdown, home experiments were devised for our first-year physics lab course. In this practitioner contribution we elaborate on the guided inquiries that were set up. Students could carry out the experiments with standard tools available at home, including sensors mobile phones are equipped with. Various design principles…

Without any major changes, a pilot version of a physical science lab course was able to continue when the COVID-19 crisis necessitated the abrupt suspension of on-campus education. The 'Maker Lab' course, in which students conceive and set up their own experiments using affordable microcontrollers, required students to follow the entire arc of the…

Reports on a project in which observations of student and teaching assistant behavior were used to redesign a teaching unit on recrystallization. Comments on the instruction manual, starting points for teaching the unit, and list of objectives with related tasks are included. (JN)