Situated in the context of the Scottish Religious and Moral Education (RME) curriculum, this article considers the practice of Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CoPI) and how it supports the RME curriculum. Sharing extracts from children's CoPI sessions, the article reflects on the ways in which ten and eleven year-old children discuss religious…

Integrated STEM education within North America has become a popular pedagogy; however, teachers identify challenges that arise when planning for and implementing integrated STEM education. These challenges may threaten STEM teachers' capacity to balance disciplinary and integrated learning, a core feature of effective STEM education. The purpose…

Insights and methods from the chemical sciences are directly relevant to global challenges such as climate change, renewable energy generation and storage, water purification, and food production. However, these connections are often opaque to students in general chemistry courses, who may get lost in the weeds of stoichiometry, VSEPR, and gas…

The development and implementation of a trial Religious Education (RE) curriculum within a Catholic diocese of Australia was characterized by the scriptural metaphor "into the deep." Commentary (5300 words) from teacher developers (n = 40) and implementers (n = 85) were analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Findings…

In the context of China's social transformation and educational reform, addressing the problems of fragmented and ineffective learning in traditional teaching modes and enhancing students' academic levels and developing their comprehensive abilities through structured classroom learning have become critical issues in educational reform. The…

The research aim was to identify the effect of revising the thematic unit "Changes in Chemical Reactions" using IBSE (based on confirmation inquiry) in the 8th grade of secondary school. This thematic unit is taught in chemistry lessons in the 2nd term of the 7th grade. A set of activities verified by a piece of pilot research was used…

The prominence afforded to literacy in the Irish Primary School Curriculum has received considerable attention in recent years, spurred by Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings, governmental priorities, public commentary and academic debate. At times, this discourse has presented literacy as a separate and distinct entity…

Many science educators know of the pedagogical benefits of inquiry- and research-based labs, yet numerous barriers to implementation exist. In this article we describe a faculty development workshop that explored interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations as potential mechanisms for overcoming barriers to curricular innovation.

Using socio-ecological theory, this study explores best practice (educational practices correlated with higher student performance) in middle-school science. Seven schools with consistently higher student performance were compared with three demographically similar, average-performing schools. Best practice included instructional approaches…

Educational institutions change slowly, and sometimes superficially at best. Large public (and sometimes smaller private) systems can be highly resistant to deep change. Schools are notorious for rearranging the desk chairs for a while, then reverting back to something very close to the original design. Even the most well-intentioned of…

We determined short- and long-term correlates of a revised introductory biology curriculum on understanding of biology as a process of inquiry and learning of content. In the original curriculum students completed two traditional lecture-based introductory courses. In the revised curriculum students completed two new learner-centered,…

This comprehensive social studies curriculum unit for fifth grade has three areas of concentration: (1) the history of the newspaper industry, including historical dates and figures and analysis of how the newspaper industry has influenced and shaped the history of the United States; (2) the functions and responsibilities of the departments and…

Background: Existing research suggests that one of the challenges for teachers in persisting with innovative inquiry curricula is their difficulty scaffolding students' transitions into technology-supported and open-ended activities. The question of whether students can effectively scaffold one another's transitions has not been previously…

Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences has provided educators with a new view of intelligence. It emphasizes that science, math and language are not the only ways to exhibit intelligence. People exhibit intelligence in many different ways. Each type of intelligence is as valuable as the others. Gardner classifies these intelligences…

This article presents the results of a study examining the impact of curriculum integration on prospective teachers. Utilizing a qualitative and phenomenological approach, the study follows a group of secondary education students through an entire semester course that employs curriculum integration. Intensive focus group transcripts and student…