As elementary schools across the U.S. continue to adopt new science education reform, attention is needed to understand how teachers make sense of using engineering design to teach science in their classroom settings. This study examined fourth-grade teachers' sense-making with learning to integrate engineering design-based science instruction and…

Flipped instruction is not new and the literature is extensive with examples of flipped courses. However, there is a lack of studies with a structured, methodical approach to flipped design, implementation, and evaluation of its effectiveness. An upper division geology course was flipped to allow focus on higher-level concepts, especially…

Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL®) as a collaborative inquiry method has been widely used in teaching chemistry to high school and college students. This paper presents the impact of POGIL on 65 middle school students' understanding about nature of matter. It is a quasi-experimental non-equivalent control group design study in which…

Geospatial technologies are increasingly being integrated in science classrooms to foster learning. This study examined whether a Web-enhanced science inquiry curriculum supported by geospatial technologies promoted urban middle school students' understanding of energy concepts. The participants included one science teacher and 108 eighth-grade…

This longitudinal study reports the results of a replication of "Tutorials in Introductory Physics" in high schools of a Latin-American country. The main objective of this study was to examine the suitability of "Tutorials" for local science education reform. Conceptual learning of simple resistive electric circuits was…

This study investigates how the enactment of a climate change curriculum supports students' development of critical science agency, which includes students developing deep understandings of science concepts and the ability to take action at the individual and community levels. We examined the impact of a four to six week urban ecology curriculum…

Today's society is continuously coping with sustainability-related complex issues in the Science-Technology-Environment-Society (STES) interfaces. In those contexts, the need and relevance of the development of students' higher-order cognitive skills (HOCS) such as question-asking, critical-thinking, problem-solving and decision-making…

As research faculty with expertise in the area of host-pathogen interactions (HPI), we used a research group model to effect our professional development as scientific educators. We have established a working hypothesis: The implementation of a curriculum that forms bridges between our seven HPI courses allows our students to achieve deep and…

The significant increase of English Language Learners (ELLs) in the United States raises complex questions about how to provide these students with access to high quality education that can improve both their content knowledge of school subjects and their English proficiency, particularly their academic English proficiency. The development of…

Within primary and secondary school technology education, engineering has been proposed as an avenue to bring about technological literacy. Different initiatives such as curriculum development projects (i.e., Project ProBase and Project Lead The Way) and National Science Foundation funded projects such as the National Center for Engineering and…