Language is a fundamental tool for learning science. This study highlights the importance of teacher knowledge in utilising language as a tool for knowledge generation in the classrooms. This case study examines elementary teachers' development of declarative, procedural, and epistemic knowledge related to using language, particularly focusing on…

Across science disciplines, light is a common tool for measuring, characterizing, and catalysing molecules and molecular processes. Despite the ubiquity of light-based tools, little research has been done to investigate how students understand light and light-matter interactions (LMI). This topic is typically first introduced in first-year…

It is widely argued that Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (NST) is going to affect several aspects of our life. Therefore, students need to develop their nanoliteracy to cope with the everyday issues related to NST. Although there is an increasing interest in introducing NST content to primary school students, the theoretical frameworks for…

Scientific argumentation as a scientific practice has become an important issue in scientific concept learning. We systematically searched five databases to assess the potential of scientific argumentation to promote multidimensional conceptual change in science education. The systematic literature search and coding of studies were carried out by…

The field of science education has put effort into providing opportunities for students to position themselves as epistemic agents pursuing the goal of making sense of natural phenomena. However, students often struggle in adapting scientific practices to achieve the sense-making goal. In this position paper, we conceptualise students'…

Despite rapid changes in education, science classrooms will remain central forums where fragmented pieces of information are brought together to construct coherent knowledge as concepts and explanatory scientific storylines. There is limited work stressing the importance of the interplay between how content is communicated through pedagogical…

Visualisation has been a critical means of scientific reasoning, knowledge development, and communication. In science classrooms, visualisation plays significant roles for teaching and learning. To better understand the landscape of the existing research on visualisation for supporting student science learning in K to 12 classroom contexts, we…

A widespread call has been made to develop and support more integrated approaches to STEM education. The first law of thermodynamics serves as a guiding principle for the crosscutting concept of energy and matter. A qualitative interview study was undertaken to support integrated approaches to STEM education by exploring how chemistry, physics,…

This study presents a conceptual framework for embedding interdisciplinary learning approaches in a postsecondary science program in order to foster interdisciplinary science habits in students. The framework was developed through the lens of a multi-year interdisciplinary postsecondary science program that encompasses a series of courses in which…

The role of virtual simulations in the evolution of primary school students' mental models about electrostatics is investigated by analysing the answers of two groups of 9-10 years old pupils inside instructional sequences that combine two hands-on activities using balloons and jackets with the same activities using PhET simulations: one group…

Developing students' ability to think about systems, as opposed to isolated facts, is of central importance in much of science teaching. Prior work in this area has focused on students' recognition of the processes occurring within a system. Comparatively, little work has been done on how students organise the objects that are contained within the…

This study investigated the effect of explicit nature of science (NOS) instruction and explicit argumentation instruction in socioscientific and scientific contexts, on students' NOS conceptions and their argumentation skills. Undergraduate students enrolled in two sections of a science content course were assigned into two groups: Socioscientific…

This case study examined teachers' on-the-fly formative assessment conversations, that is, how teachers collect information from students' thinking and use that information to support their learning during teacher-student interactions. Previous studies have typically analysed whole-class discussions on the level of speaking turns, and have…

Context-Based Learning (CBL) and learning through developing and using models are two important teaching approaches for chemistry conceptual understanding. We aimed to examine the influence of a CBL approach on students' understanding of Multiple Models of Knowledge Representations ("MMKRs") and "multiple molecular…

Getting students to understand the particulate nature of matter is a major challenge for chemistry education. In upper secondary school students commonly struggle to distinguish between intra- and intermolecular bonding and analyse chemical bonding in terms of electronegativity. In this study, we explore how creative drama may be used in chemistry…