Teachers are required to maintain their teaching certificates by participating in professional development activities offered by their school districts. The experiences from professional development opportunities provide teachers with opportunities to grow their practice with meaningful educational experiences for students. The educational…

Despite its significant role in every level of education, the definition of the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics movement, or STEM, has remained elusive, becoming so vaporous as to provide little meaning. As education organizations navigate the STEM institution, they must collectively make sense of its norms, goals, and practices.…

Understanding how indeterminacy is different from uncertainty is crucial to posthumanism and has major implications for reconfiguring curriculum. Uncertainty has to do with "epistemology," about not knowing whether a state of affairs is or is not; for instance, one would not know whether something is here or there, now or then.…

The abrupt closure of schools globally in mid-2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education for 1.5 billion learners, compelling an emergency shift to online teaching (UNESCO, n.d.). While personalized learning initiatives had been gaining traction, the pandemic challenged their continuity, transforming them into crisis management…

This study explored a middle school science teacher's curricular sensemaking in interaction with their use of an educative storyline curriculum, aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards, that was intentionally designed for more opportunities for students' scientific sensemaking. Using a phenomenological case study methodology, we examined…

This essential science methods resource integrates principles of learning and motivation with practical teaching ideas for the elementary and middle school science classroom. It employs project-based learning (PBL) to enable educators to engage their students in meaningful, real-world questioning about the world. It provides concrete strategies…

In this article, the authors unveil the Trade Book Inquiry Design Model (IDM) blueprint. Anchored in a compelling question inspired by a trade book, the new blueprint is broken into two instructional blocks: "Reading and Comprehension" and "Living Social Studies." The inquiry template is designed to be instructionally efficient…

This study examines perspectives and practices regarding multiculturalism among 20 secondary social studies teachers in South Korea. Utilizing semi-structured interviews and critical discourse analysis, the study seeks to capture how teachers' understandings of multiculturalism (Damunhwa in Korean) and its practice are influenced by curriculum…

This dissertation describes the results of an investigation into introductory student understanding of special relativity in the context of the relativity of simultaneity. The research probes the extent to which students are able to use concepts from both Galilean and special relativity to determine, for multiple reference frames, the time…

This study set out to design and implement an approach to Tanakh education that would help students become expert decoders of the Biblical Hebrew text as they became expert interpreters of it. The goal, following existing, research-based best instructional practices from literacy, was to create a curriculum in which language skills and meaning…

Coming some four years after the introduction of the new National Curriculum, this article considers the media storm and debate around the concept of chronology and how it should be taught in schools. Drawing on empirical evidence, the article strongly suggests that young children are capable of grasping complex temporal concepts, specifically…

Shared sense-making is suggested to be key for curriculum reform. "Shared sense-making" entails constructing a collective understanding of the meaning for reform, its significance and its implications for schools, through dialogue and negotiation across the levels of the educational system. This study explored changes in hands-on…

Based on the EU FP 7 project, PROFILES, this article presents our findings from a three-round Delphi study conducted in Sweden that aimed at establishing a consensus on how science education should be developed for citizens to enhance civic scientific literacy. A total of 100 stakeholders (9th graders, school teachers, scientists, and science…

The impetus for this report is new evidence that state department of education work to align instruction with standards may make a difference for teachers' practices and understanding about their state standards. Using data from the RAND American Teacher Panel, the authors found that Louisiana teachers were more likely than other teachers to…

In this thesis, I study some aspects of how students learn to use math to make sense of physical phenomena. Solving physics problems usually requires dealing with algebraic expressions. That can take the form of reading equations you're given, manipulating them, or creating them. It's possible to use equations simply according to formal rules of…