UNESCO has identified education for sustainable development (ESD) as a key factor in the achievement of sustainable development goals (SDGs). Education is important in developing awareness of how to preserve natural ecosystems and promote the uptake of renewable energy sources. Ecology education in primary school aims to give students a scientific…

Physical and virtual labs have unique capabilities that can influence how students learn from them. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of physical and virtual manipulatives on students' learning of heat and temperature and to examine the influence of various combinations of physical and virtual manipulatives. A total of 205…

Teachers' subject matter knowledge is a substantive component of the teaching-learning process. For a teacher to be able to transform and integrate into the classroom all the knowledge and experience they have acquired in the course of the professional activity, it is first necessary to acquire a deep and solid knowledge of the matter. The aim of…

This study describes the design and implementation of a science outreach program (elementary; 2nd-5th) and its associated student outcomes. Key features of the program include: (a) phenomenon-based, NGSS-aligned curriculum designed by science education experts and influenced by educational, sociocultural, and cognitive science theories, (b) active…

The present investigation aims to analyze the knowledge levels and chemical representation levels of pre-service primary school teachers (PPSTs) on the experiment of distillation. For this purpose, the cross-sectional survey technique, one of the quantitative research designs was employed. The study was carried out at a Faculty of Education in the…

This study investigated third graders' use and variation of linguistic resources when writing a science explanation. Using systemic functional linguistics as a framework, we purposefully selected and analyzed writing samples of students with high and low scores to explore how the students' use of language features (i.e., lexicogrammatical…

The purpose of this research was to compare the effect of conceptual change texts enriched with metaconceptual processes with the effect of refutational and expository texts on pre-service science teachers' conceptual understanding of heat and temperature. The durability of the effect of the texts on pre-service science teachers' conceptual…

The purpose of this study is to determine the mental models of elementary school students on seasons and to analyze how these models change in terms of grade levels. The study was conducted with 294 students (5th, 6th, 7th and 8th graders) studying in an elementary school of Turkey's Black Sea Region. Qualitative and quantitative data collection…

Many young children come to school with prior experiences planting seeds in a garden or in a pot, watering them, and seeing them grow. These early scientific investigations are designed to help children understand that seeds need water, something to grow in (such as soil), and the right temperature to sprout--if these conditions are met, a seed…

For some time a central issue has occupied early science education discussions--primary student classroom experiences and the resulting attitudes towards science. This has in part been linked to generalist teachers' own knowledge of science topics and pedagogical confidence. Recent research in cognitive development has examined the role of…

A rich science learning experience not only captures students' attention but also motivates them to investigate and solve problems and investigate how scientists carry out their work. This article describes how secondary science coordinator Patrick Brown's found success teaching students the nature of science by engaging them in…

This qualitative video study explores how two elementary school teachers taught for conceptual understanding throughout different phases of science inquiry. The teachers implemented teaching materials with a focus on learning science key concepts through the development of word knowledge. A framework for word knowledge was applied to examine the…

Experimentation skills are a central component of scientific thinking, and many studies have investigated whether and when primary-school children develop adequate experimentation strategies. However, the answers to these questions vary substantially depending on the type of task that is used: while discovery tasks, which require children to…

This study is a four-week section of ongoing attempts that aim to improve 6th grade students' understandings of the nature of science. The study was carried out in a sixth grade science and technology class at a rural middle school with 15 students on the basis of action research methodology. During the study, four different stories based on the…

Students need to be aware of plants in order to learn about, appreciate, care for, and protect them. However, research has found that many children are not aware of the plants in their environment. A way to address this issue might be integration of plants with various disciplines. I investigated the effectiveness of an instructional approach…