In the past decade, reform efforts in science education have increasingly attended to engaging students in scientific practices such as scientific modeling. Engaging students in scientific modeling can help them develop their epistemologies by allowing them to attend to the roles of mechanism and empirical evidence when constructing and revising…

Many current Web-based learning environments facilitate the theoretical teaching of a subject but this may not be sufficient for those disciplines that require a significant use of graphic mechanisms to resolve problems. This research study looks at the use of an environment that can help students learn engineering drawing with Web-based CAD…

Materials science, which entails the practices of selecting, testing, and characterizing materials, is an important discipline within the study of matter. This paper examines how third grade students' materials science performance changes over the course of instruction based on an engineering design challenge. We conducted a case study of nine…