Guided inquiry is the practice of allowing students to come to their own conclusions about a set of data instead of verifying a known result using a given experimental procedure. Open inquiry takes this idea one step further by allowing students to develop their own experiment and then analyze the data to arrive at a conclusion. To expose upper…

Currently, there is a focus in science education on preparing students for lives as innovative and resilient citizens of the twenty-first century. Key to this is providing students with opportunities, mainly through inquiry processes, for discovery making and developing their creative reasoning by bringing school science closer to authentic…

In this paper I consider whether forest schools provide a space where we could rethink pedagogy in the Anthropocene. I explore the challenges and possibilities of thinking beyond the business-as-usual of human-centric pedagogies drawing upon an ethnographic study of two forest schools, located in the West Midlands of England conducted in…

To support teaching and learning in the advanced placement (AP) chemistry laboratory, the College Board published a laboratory manual, "AP Chemistry Guided-Inquiry Experiments: Applying the Science Practices," in 2013 as part of the redesigned course. This article provides a discussion of the rationale for the existence of the manual as…

Researchers and practitioners have become increasingly interested in how early childhood programs prepare young children for science. Due to a number of factors, including educators' low self-efficacy for teaching science and lack of educational resources, many early childhood classrooms do not offer high-quality science experiences for young…

Just as individual teachers have orientations to teaching and learning science that influence their practice, we assert that professional development (PD) projects also have an orientation that guides the design and implementation of the entire project; a construct we term "PD Project Orientation". The purpose of this study was to validate the…

In this response to Hewson and Ogunniyi's paper on indigenous knowledge (IK) and science teaching in South Africa, I seek to broaden the debate by setting the enterprise of integrating IK into science education in its cultural and socio-political context. I begin by exploring the multiple meanings of indigenous knowledge in Africa, next consider…

The Biological Sciences Curriculum Studies (BSCS) 5E Instructional Model (often referred to as the 5Es) consists of five phases. Each phase has a specific function and contributes both to teachers' coherent instruction and to students' formulation of a better understanding of scientific knowledge, attitudes and skills. Evidence indicates that the…

We describe a new approach to teaching introductory biology. Our introductory experience for undergraduates is a laboratory course that is entirely inquiry and discovery based. We introduce our students to fundamental concepts in biology in the framework of three multi-week laboratory modules, each of which is an open-ended investigation of a…

We explore how small-format laptops ("netbooks") have been used within evidence-based investigations undertaken by secondary school students, to what extent these are suitable for effectively supporting learners across different locations and contexts, and their implications for open learning. Over the course of seven trials with 300…

The changes that have taken place in the organic chemistry laboratory course since 1980s are reviewed with reference to the quantity and diversity of discovery-based experiments available to date. The data illustrates that significant progress is towards accomplishing dramatic changes such as the almost universal adoption of microscale, the use of…

D. Klahr and M. Nigam (2004) make a case for the superiority of direct instruction over discovery learning in students' mastery of the control-of-variables strategy central to the scientific method. In the present work, we examine acquisition of this strategy among students of the same age as those studied by Klahr and Nigam, as well as follow…

Growing science apathy at the K-12 education level represents an alarming development with potentially devastating consequences at individual, societal and economic levels. Technology has been incorporated in science education without fundamentally improving test scores or student attitudes. We claim the core of the problem is how technology is…

When disequilibrium is integrated into the high school chemistry curriculum, students are challenged by phenomena that cause them to question previously held beliefs. They then develop possible explanations and design methods to test their hypotheses. Discovery learning encourages in-depth concept development, independent problem solving, and…

Learning support studies involving simulation-based scientific discovery learning have tended to adopt an ad hoc strategies-oriented approach in which the support strategies are typically pre-specified according to learners' difficulties in particular activities. This article proposes a more integrated approach, a triple scheme for learning…