The pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 has highlighted an urgent need for infectious disease education for K-12 students. To gather a better understanding of what educational interventions have been conducted and to what effect, we performed a scoping review. We identified and examined 23 empirical researcher- and teacher-designed studies conducted in…

Game-based learning (GBL) may address the unique characteristics of a single subject such as chemistry. Previous systematic reviews on the effects of GBL have yielded contradictory results concerning cognitive and motivational outcomes. This meta-analysis aims to: (a) estimate the overall effect size of GBL in chemistry education on cognitive,…

Practices of generating, analyzing, and using evidence play a central role in the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the NGSS. However, the construct of evidence remains largely underspecified in these documents, providing insufficient guidance on how to engage students with the broad and complex nature of evidentiary reasoning. This creates…

Prior research shows that undergraduates tend to identify more strongly with the field of science after participating in scientific research. However, mediators that might account for this association are not well understood. In the current study, we propose that science self-efficacy may serve this mediational function. Specifically, data from a…

Preparing students to achieve the lofty goal of functional scientific literacy entails addressing the normative and non-normative facets of socioscientific issues (SSI) such as scientific processes, the nature of science (NOS) and diverse sociocultural perspectives. SSI instructional approaches have demonstrated some efficacy for promoting…

Science education frameworks in the United States have moved strongly in recent years to incorporate more dimensions of learning, including measuring student use of scientific practices employed during scientific inquiry. For instance, the Next Generation Science Standards and related multidimensional frameworks adopted or adapted recently by more…

In the current debate on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), the term is used to refer to the context-specific knowledge that teachers activate when reflecting on practice. Against the background of this debate, we conducted an empirical study and sought to answer the question of which knowledge experts and novices activated in assessing a…

Recent calls for reform in education recommend science curricula to be based on central ideas instead of a larger number of topics and for alignment between current scientific research and curricula. Because alignment is rarely studied, especially for central ideas, we developed a methodology to discover the extent of alignment between primary…

A large body of research has examined students' conceptions of evolution and their relationships to acceptance of evolution. Proficiency in statistical and probabilistic reasoning has long been considered to be an essential feature of evolutionary reasoning, yet almost no empirical work has explored these putative connections. The RaPro…

Instructional tasks are key features of classroom practice, but little is known about how different components of tasks--such as selecting or designing tasks for a lesson, launching, and implementing them with students--shape the conditions for students' intellectual engagement in science classrooms. Employing a qualitative multiple case study…

This paper focuses on the trade-offs that lie at the intersection of methodological requirements for causal effect studies and policies that affect how and to what extent schools engage in such studies. More specifically, current federal funding priorities encourage large-scale randomized studies of interventions in authentic settings. At the same…

This article develops an argument that the type of intervention research most useful for improving science teaching and learning and leading to scalable interventions includes both research to develop and gather evidence of the efficacy of innovations and a different kind of research, "design-based implementation research" (DBIR). DBIR…

The first three years of science teachers' careers is an especially formative period, yet there remains only a limited literature base to support teacher educators who work with this population. Teachers in the induction phase benefit from professional development experiences that support them as they continue to learn about teaching by analyzing…

Graphing is a fundamental part of the scientific process. Scales are key but little-studied components of graphs. Adopting a resources-based framework of cognitive structure, we identify the potential intuitive resources that six undergraduates of diverse majors and years at a public US research university activated when constructing scales, and…

The purpose of this study was to identify evidence in student work of teachers' uptake of educative features in educative curriculum materials. These are features in curriculum materials designed with the specific intent of supporting teacher learning and enactment. This study was prompted by previous work on educative curriculum materials and the…