Sensemaking is conceptualized as a trajectory to develop better understanding and is advocated as one of the fundamental practices in science education. However, the field is lacking of a framework to view the prolonged process of sensemaking that starts from a raise of uncertainty of a target phenomenon to a grasping of a better understanding of…

School principals play a pivotal role in directing students' classroom educational experiences. However, in the USA, many elementary principals (serving youth 5-12 years old) have had few formal experiences with professional development or coursework that centers on current standards for quality science instruction as guided by the "Framework…

The purposes of this study were to identify middle school student representations of phase change, explore how they interpret textbook representations, and compare student and textbook representations of phase change. A total of 21 middle school students (12 sixth-graders and nine eighth-graders) voluntarily participated in the study.…

Students' difficulties interpreting diagrams remain a concern in science education. Research about improving diagram comprehension has included few studies of teachers' orchestration of language and gesture in explaining diagrams--and very few in senior high schools. Research with younger students and studies of research scientists' practice…

The purpose of this study was to examine "pre-service science teachers'" (PSTs) development of multiple levels of representation and written arguments using an immersive approach to argument, the "science writing heuristic," in general chemistry laboratory I and II courses. Fifty PSTs participated the study, 20 experiments were…

Poor comprehension of specialised terminology presents a significant obstacle that impedes students' ability to learn science. The present study examined the influences of scientific terminology comprehension on students' cognitive processes during science-text reading. We used eye-tracking tests to examine science-text reading behaviours among…

The modern Einsteinian conception of space, time, matter and radiation represents a radical paradigm shift compared with the traditional Newtonian physics that underpins most primary and secondary school science. It is increasingly recognised that school education should encompass this modern paradigm to allow a seamless progression of learning…

While a vast body of research has identified difficulties in students' understanding about forces and acceleration and their related alternative conceptions, far less research suggests ways to use students' alternative conceptions to enhance conceptual understanding of a specific fundamental concept. This study focused on distinguishing between…

While some students will pursue careers in science, all will engage with multimodal science-based texts. The effective use of language skills is essential to support sense making in science. The purpose of this study was to examine how elementary teachers integrated language within their science instruction, and how their instructional enactments…

Energy is considered both as a disciplinary core idea and as a concept cutting across science disciplines. Most previous approaches studied progressing energy understanding in specific disciplinary contexts, while disregarding the relation of understanding across them. Hence, this study provides a systematic analysis of cross-disciplinary energy…

In this study, secondary school students' (N?=?617; grades 7 to 10) understanding of models and modeling was assessed using tasks which explicitly refer to the scientific disciplines of biology, chemistry, and physics and, as a control, to no scientific discipline. The students' responses are interpreted as their biology-, chemistry-, and…

In this study, we examine how bilingual students in elementary school use their languages and what this means for their meaning-making in science. The class was multilingual with students bilingual in different minority languages and the teacher monolingual in Swedish. The analysis is based on a pragmatic approach and the theory of…

This study aims to characterize a group of students' preliminary oral explanations of a scientific phenomenon produced as part of their learning process. The students were encouraged to use their own wordings to test out their own interpretation of observations when conducting practical activities. They presented their explanations orally in the…

Nowhere is the need for handling complexity more pertinent than in addressing environmental issues. Our study explores students' situated constructs of complexity in unfolding discourses on socio-scientific issues. Students' dialogues in two group-work episodes are analysed in detail, with tools from Systemic Functional Linguistics. We identify…

Energy is considered both a core idea and a crosscutting concept in science education. A thorough understanding of the energy concept is thought to help students learn about other (related) concepts within and across science subjects, thereby fostering scientific literacy. This study investigates students' progression in understanding the energy…