With the critical nature of socio-ecological challenges, the need to empower young people to generatively grapple with these science-related issues is crucial for developing their agentic citizenship. This paper reports on a primary science project that adopted a Socratic Seminar pedagogical strategy to enable student voice and collaborative…

Preparing students for their future is a clear and concise goal of education. STEM education is no different and is often considered a key way to increase students' 21st century skills or prepare students for a future career (Bybee 2010). We also believe that education should engage students as empathetic problem solvers (as described in Bush and…

Inquiry-based teaching has been emphasized to enhance students' knowledge and skills and create a culture of science in science classrooms. Many teachers understand inquiry as hands-on activities, and under the pressure of content-based curriculum, they plan hands-on activities to develop students' science content knowledge described in the…

Inquiry learning pedagogies have not only been proposed as a successful teaching methodology to draw students into science, they are also rich with possibilities for creativity. The particular focus on investigations and problem-solving provides opportunity for educators to embrace this. The primary curriculum explicitly values creativity in this…

This article describes a lesson rooted in "tinkering," an approach to learning that encourages the use of authentic, hands-on experience to develop an understanding of content and physical materials. There were several desired outcomes for this lesson. First, the authors felt that tinkering was an appropriate approach to investigating…

The Next Generation Science Standards states that "science begins with a question." (NGSS Lead States [2013] "Next generation science standards: For states, by states". Washington, DC: National Academies Press). Yet scientific inquiry among students and scientists alike often begins without a clear question. In this article, we…

Computational thinking (CT) is increasingly acknowledged as an essential skill to solve problems interdisciplinary. This paper describes the development and validation of the unplugged activity of CT in science (ACTS) module, which is specifically designed to integrate CT. The present study was conducted in five phases: Phase I was composed of…

Makerspaces provide a viable option for constructing and sharing knowledge in schools. Inherent in the designing, tinkering, and playing that learners engage in through making are competencies, such as the ability to create, problem solve, and innovate, decreed as critical by education policymakers. This paper summarizes results from a study in a…

Facilitating students' deep-strategy behaviors and positive learning performances of science inquiry is an important and challenging educational issue. In this study, a contextual science inquiry approach is proposed for developing a 3D experiential game to cope with this problem. To evaluate the impacts of the game on students' science learning…

This study explored the use of wikis in a science inquiry-based project conducted with Primary 6 students (aged 11-12). It used an online wiki-based platform called PBworks and addressed the following research questions: (1) What are students' attitudes toward learning with wikis? (2) What are students' interactions in online group collaboration…

In this review, we explore the notion of teaching science to English language learners (ELLs) as a balancing act between simultaneously focusing on language and content development, on the one hand, and between structuring instruction and focusing on student learning processes, on the other hand. This exploration is conducted through the lens of a…

This study investigate the effectiveness of adding an "explicit general problem solving teaching strategy" (EGPS) to guided inquiry (GI) on pre-service elementary school teachers' ability to solve heat transfer problems. The pre-service elementary teachers in this study were enrolled in two sections of a chemistry course for pre-service…

Designing opportunities for students to discover core science concepts can be challenging, however, with a good understanding of their interests, proper planning, and the use of technology and the outdoors, students can become engaged in a way that can leave a legacy for future students. Last fall, this author designed a nine-session unit for a…

This article describes the steps incorporated to teach an engineering design process in a fifth-grade science classroom. The engineering design-based activity was an existing scientific inquiry activity using UV light--detecting beads and purposefully creating a series of engineering design-based challenges around the investigation. The…

Teaching students to use and interpret representations in science is critically important if they are to become scientifically literate and learn how to communicate their understandings and learning in science. This study involved 248 students (119 boys and 129 girls) from 26 grade 6 teachers' classes in nine primary schools in Brisbane,…