Teacher professional development (PD) is essential to continuously improve teaching skills, to adapt to diverse student needs, and to promote equity and inclusion. Only a few studies to date have synthesized how PD programs improve teachers' content knowledge and instructional quality, as well as students' academic performance. In this…

Exploring how science teacher education programs can prepare science teachers to support gender and sexually diverse students remains an important area for research. A 5-week intervention was designed for pre-service science teachers' (PSSTs), addressing gender and sexual diversity (GSD). The effects of the intervention on PSSTs' attitudes and…

This study used a cluster randomized controlled trial to investigate the effectiveness of two approaches to increasing middle school students' science learning when using an inquiry-based science curriculum. Eighty-nine schools, with 253 teachers and 20,591 students, were randomly assigned into one of three conditions: (a) a treatment condition in…

Knowledge of science content and the ability to translate knowledge into effective teaching is known as teachers' "content knowledge for teaching" (CKT). Teachers with developed CKT are able to more effectively determine instructional and assessment activities that will deepen K-12 students' scientific literacy. However, preservice…

As professional science becomes increasingly computational, researchers and educators are advocating for the integration of computational thinking (CT) into science education. Researchers and policymakers have argued that CT learning opportunities should begin in elementary school and span across the K-12 grades. While researchers and policymakers…

In the United States, the Next Generation Science Standards advocate for the integration of computational thinking (CT) as a science and engineering practice. Additionally, there is agreement among some educational researchers that increasing opportunities for engaging in computational thinking can lend authenticity to classroom activities. This…

Reforms such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for substantial change in teacher practice such as instruction that is more phenomenon-based, three-dimensional, supportive of student epistemic agency, and coherent from the student perspective. Such change requires ongoing support in the form of aligned curricular materials and…

The Framework for K-12 Science Education set an ambitious goal of broadening participation in science learning for all students. Meeting this vision will involve supporting teachers in making meaningful connections with the cultural and linguistic resources their students bring to school; in essence, developing pedagogies that frame these…

Explicitly attending to justice in science teaching and learning is long overdue. Here, we examined the professional teacher identity development of 13 science teachers as they collaborated in networked professional learning communities (PLCs) to implement and revise a culture-setting unit focused on the science of COVID and engaging in…

Advances in online geospatial technologies (GST) have expanded access to K-12 classrooms which has implications for the support teachers require to effectively integrate GSTs to promote learning. Previous studies have shown the impact of GST-integrated lessons on student engagement, spatial thinking skills, and/or content knowledge; however, most…

In teacher professional development (PD), grouping teachers with varying levels of experience can be a productive and empowering way to stimulate the exchange and co-generation of content and pedagogical knowledge. However, less experienced teachers can face socio-emotional risks when engaging in collaborative science content reasoning tasks with…

The implementation of science reform must be viewed as a systems-level problem and not just focus on resources for teachers and students. High-capacity instructional leadership is essential for supporting classroom science instruction. Recent reform efforts include a shift from learning about science facts to figuring out scientific phenomena in…

There is strong agreement in science teacher education of the importance of teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT), which includes their subject matter knowledge and their pedagogical content knowledge. However, there are limited instruments that can be easily administered and scored on a large scale to assess and study elementary science…

This design-based research project reports on three multilevel networks that were focused on implementing the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Given the recent attention to understanding infrastructure to craft coherence in NGSS implementation, this research investigated how these networks iteratively re-designed infrastructure as they…

Around the world, there have been curricula reforms involving the incorporation of the inquiry-based teaching and learning strategy in secondary school science education in general and in practical work in particular. Research in inquiry-based practical work (IBPW) has focused, for example, on aspects of the strategy itself, on teacher…