Teacher professional development (PD) is essential to continuously improve teaching skills, to adapt to diverse student needs, and to promote equity and inclusion. Only a few studies to date have synthesized how PD programs improve teachers' content knowledge and instructional quality, as well as students' academic performance. In this…

With an educational issue that has caught the attention of many countries in the world (study load), a population of 8th graders from a typical Chinese metropolitan city (40,536 from 118 schools), and an advanced statistical strategy (multilevel piecewise regression), we examined whether there was a turning point in terms of the effects of study…

Science educators incorporate collaborative engagement in model-based argumentation to meet curricular goals and build students' capacity for scientific epistemic and social practices. During collaboration, groups encounter various challenges (e.g., lack of task understanding) and engage in social regulation to overcome them. However, little is…

Through the lens of science capital, this research aims to detect the key factors and their main effects in identifying students with science-related career expectations. A machine learning approach (i.e., random forest) was employed to analyze a dataset of 519,334 15-year-old students from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)…

This paper presents a study of children's ideas of the body's internal structure. Children between four and 13 years (N = 170) individually produced drawings. During each drawing session the children explained their drawings to a facilitator and added written labels either by themselves or, if they were too young to write, with the facilitator's…

Access and personalized instruction required for laboratory education can be highly compromised due to regulatory constraints in times such as COVID-19 pandemic or resource shortages at other times. This directly impacts the student engagement and immersion that are necessary for conceptual and procedural understanding for scientific…

The current study investigated how a guidance method that segments a complex task into simpler subtasks affects adults' inquiry-based learning in a science simulation environment. In a multivariate inquiry task, participants were asked to investigate the effects of all variables in one round of inquiry. In another group, participants were guided…

Science education reform efforts in the Unites States call for a dramatic shift in the way students are expected to engage with scientific concepts, core ideas, and practices in the classroom. This new vision of science learning demands a more complex conceptual understanding of student engagement and research models that capture both the…

This paper presents an integrative framework for analyzing science meaning-making with representations. It integrates the research on multiple representations and multimodal representations by identifying and leveraging the differences in their units of analysis in two dimensions: timescale and compositional grain size. Timescale considers the…

The Association of American Colleges and Universities ranks multiple process of science (POS) skills among the top-10 skills employers seek in college graduates. As part of an effort to explore and align the emphasis on POS skills in our science departments, we sought three things: (a) to determine if faculty and students felt enough time was…

Previous research on problem diagrams suggested that including a supportive diagram, one that does not provide necessary problem solving information, may bring little, or even negative, benefit to students' problem solving success. We tested the usefulness of problem diagrams on 12 different physics problems (6A/B experiments) in our massive open…

The aim of the research is to examine the internet addiction of adolescents according to their genders, the type of their high-schools and class level, the time interval that they use internet most widely, their internet usage duration and usage purpose. For that, it is studied with 335 high-school students in Elazig city of Turkey in 2015. The…

This paper discusses the nature of learner engagement with science content during small group discussions in which learners use their home languages. We observed that learners reverted to their home languages in small group discussions, yet very little is known about the dynamics of learner engagement when they use their home languages in…

Although practical laboratory activities are often considered the linchpin of science education, asking students to produce many large practical reports can be problematic. Practical reports require diverse skills, and therefore do not focus the students' attention on any one skill where specific skills need to be enhanced. They are also…

Science education research has recommended cooperative inquiry based science in the primary science context for more than two decades but after more than 20 years, student achievement in science has not substantially improved. This study, through direct observation and analysis, investigated content-related student interactions in an authentic…