An inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities for marginalized students (i.e., opportunity gaps) leads to challenges in identifying effective study behaviors, metacognition, and academic help-seeking in higher education. While students benefit when these skills are taught explicitly through co-curricular workshops and courses, these…

Task orientation is currently a prominent concept under discussion in primary school didactics. It focuses on tasks along which pupils acquire competences on distinct levels of competence. The qualitative empirical study TAPSE (Textbook Analysis in Primary Science Education) pursues the question which conception of task orientation is present in…

This study assessed the (i) ways in which, and extent to which, several aspects of nature of science (NOS) are represented in high school biology and physics textbooks in the United States (U.S.); (ii) extent to which these representations have changed over the course of several decades; and (iii) relative impact of discipline, and textbook…

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…

This study aims to identify students' misconceptions regarding covalent bonds. Seventy-seven graduate students in the middle of Indonesia participated in the study. Data were collected in three stages. First, misconceptions were identified by using the Semi Open Diagnostic Test. Ten students who experienced the worst misconceptions were…

This article presents a study that examined an innovative short-term program (two sessions of 3 hr each) for the professional development of teachers. The program design is based on the technique of probing acceptance, which is aimed at investigating student learning processes. It relies on students' evaluation, paraphrasing, and adaptation of…

Access to science information via communications in the media is rapidly becoming a central means for the public to gain knowledge about scientific advancements. However, little is known about what content knowledge is essential for understanding issues presented in news media. Very few empirical studies attempt to bridge science communication and…

Research experience is increasingly considered an important component of science education at the secondary school and undergraduate levels. This paper presents a case study of students learning in a unique apprenticeship model in which students are engaged in long-term (18 month) open-ended research projects in physics that are done at the…

The fields of science education and science communication share the overarching goal of helping non-experts and non-members of the professional science community develop knowledge of the content and processes of scientific research. However, the specific audiences, methods, and aims employed in the two fields have evolved quite differently and as…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whole classroom discourse during modeling-based learning in science, seeking to describe the discourse's characteristics, its relation to the micro-context in which it took place and to the student-constructed models, and to ascertain when it becomes productive. Additionally, we aimed to describe how…

This is a mix methods follow-up study in which we reconfirm the findings from an earlier study [Vedder-Weiss & Fortus [2011] "Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 48(2)", 199-216]. The findings indicate that adolescents' declining motivation to learn science, which was found in many previous studies [Galton [2009] "Moving to…

The purpose of this pragmatic action research study was to explore our re-conceptualization efforts in preparing pre-service teachers to guide the inquiry process with formative assessment and subsequently use the understandings to improve our teacher preparation program. The process was guided by two questions: to what extent did course…

There exists a general consensus in the science education literature around the goal of enhancing learners' views of nature of science (NOS). An extensive body of research in the field has highlighted the effectiveness of explicit NOS instructional approaches in improving learners' NOS views. Emerging research has suggested that engaging learners…

Interviews with representatives of nine municipal agencies involved in air-quality education were analyzed for concepts and skills perceived as important for citizens in addressing air-quality concerns. Interviewees focused mainly on general air quality-related understandings (60.2%), although cognitive skills (22.0%) and specific concepts (17.8%)…

This study investigated the representations of a select group of scientists (n = 10) in a sample of Canadian high school and college textbooks. Drawing on semiotic and cultural-historical activity theoretical frameworks, we conducted two analyses. A coarse-grained, quantitative analysis of the prevalence and structure of these representations…