The three articles in this dissertation explore how curriculum, instruction, and assessments should align with the vision for science learning outlined in the Framework for K-12 Science Education. Together, the papers demonstrate how curriculum, instruction, and assessment, when mutually supportive of each other, can foster a learning environment…

The Australian Curriculum Science has "Patterns, Order and Organisation" as one of its six Key Ideas. In the biological sciences, the structural patterns revealed by observing living things are used to order and organise them in a hierarchical system of binomial nomenclature, in which living things have a generic name and a specific…

K-12 education as an enterprise always has two main aims; to teach basic skills and knowledge and to cultivate moral citizenry. There is substantial evidence that empathy can promote morality and character development through education. To shed light on what has been done and to identify the pathways already established, a thematic review of…

The "Evolving 5-19 Biology" report (RSB, 2021) presents eight key recommendations and a framework for the development of biology curricula for ages 5-19. The framework proposes organising the curriculum in 23 coherent themes that form learning progression pathways. These pathways build answers to seven 'big questions' related to big…

This paper, the third in a series on Earth System Science Education, describes various pedagogical ways forward when science teachers are addressing the curriculum implications of the recent interdisciplinary field of Earth System Science (ESS). Parts I and II introduced the key ideas of ESS and the implications for the Australian Curriculum:…

This study explores the form of curriculum documents and its implications for the enacted curriculum. In this study, the narrative voices that appear in the Scottish Broad General Education phase and the Swedish Compulsory phase of the curriculum are scrutinized in relation to the most likely reader of these documents--the teacher. The study…

Global efforts are underway to include engineering in pre-college curricula. In the USA, this pursuit led to the inclusion of engineering content in the most recent version of the Next Generation Science Standards that guide K-12 science. As these standards become part of the K-12 curriculum, teachers face the challenge of gaining basic…

Scientific Practices play a central role in the Next Generation Science Standards, influencing the standards of more than 70% of students in the United States. Therefore, a view of what has been studied about Scientific Practices in Science Education, globally in the past decade is relevant. Thus, 44 articles from international journals in Science…

Strengthening Learning Progression (LP) for students' reasoning abilities is important, especially learning about diseases in Indonesia. This study aimed to map the learning progression of disease in Indonesia, compare and analyze its similarities and differences with the LP designed by National Research Council (NRC). This qualitative research to…

This report presents a literature review that was conducted to answer the question -- what can be learned from high performing jurisdictions with respect to scientific literacy? The review intends to build a picture of the education systems, specifically science education, in the five jurisdictions which performed the best in the scientific…

In order to design professional learning that supports rural science teachers to effectively implement standards-based "five-dimensional" (5D) instructional and assessment practices, a critical first step is to elicit their perspectives, prior experiences, concerns, and interests. Based on survey data from 87 rural science teachers in…

If students are to acquire deep learning in science, they need to know about the nature of science (NOS), particularly not only the cognitive-epistemic but also the social-institutional aspects of NOS. In this paper, we investigate the content of the Norwegian science curriculum in order to establish how NOS is represented, in particular to the…

The purpose of this study was to conduct a critical text analysis of Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) policy documents and the resources teachers have access to help them implement these standards into their classroom. NGSS outlines the skills and content needed for students to become proficient in STEM fields. These standards increase the…

The world is confronted with wicked environmental problems that cannot be well understood or acted upon without addressing their ethical dimensions. Research shows that official science curricula on environmental science and ecology topics are shaped by the scientific discourse and environmental discourses of "ecological modernization"…

America's most popular science curriculum, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), fails students. This report details how the popular curriculum omits basic tenets of science, including the scientific method, and provides recommendations to correct deficiencies in the NGSS.