To foster students' meaningful learning of science, we designed and implemented a unit for five third-grade students that allowed them to understand Carbon Footprint (CF) in a public school in North Texas. The unit lasted seven weeks, where students identified the effects of distance traveled and packaging on the CF of certain consumable products.…

An understanding of how sensemaking unfolds when elementary students engage in engineering design tasks is crucial to advancing engineering teaching and learning at K-12 levels. Sensemaking has been widely studied in the context of science as a discipline. In this paper, we seek to contribute to the more nascent efforts to build theory about the…

Science textbooks play an important role in making scientific knowledge and applications available to learners. In most countries, science curriculum expects to cultivate scientifically literate individuals who are able to use science process skills. Critical analysis of textbooks is therefore crucial to determine whether they can facilitate this…

Researchers of child learning and development continue to hone understandings of cultural and social impacts on cognition, development, and education. Concurrently, Indigenous educators call for decolonizing schooling at all levels. Land-based education (LBE), as an instructional approach, responds to calls to decolonize education. The authors use…

This article describes how two teachers implemented a 5E lesson in a third-grade classroom where the students had been working with forces/motion and investigating things that move like pendulums, swing sets, and various toys. The lesson was included as part of a larger unit on motion. The desired outcome for this lesson was for students to…

Recent consensus documents in science education (e.g., the Next Generation Science Standards) emphasize helping students develop facility with constructing and critiquing both claims and the evidence that supports them. While students typically view evidence as necessary for supporting scientific claims, they tend to "objectify"…

In this article, we propose a theory for understanding the processes of adaptation in classroom learning and interaction. Adaptation processes are the emergent, improvisational, and recursive relationships between tensions and how they subsequently reorder learning activities. Through the analysis of a representative example of classroom…

The original project, the foundation for all subsequent work, was set up in 1981 by Michael Shayer, with Philip Adey and Carolyn Yates, and became known as CASE @ KS3 (Adey and Shayer, 1994). CASE stands for Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education. The original CASE project drew on Piaget's work on the stage theory of cognitive…

This book re-examines the dichotomy between the everyday and the disciplinary in mathematics and science education, and explores alternatives to this opposition from points of view grounded in the close examination of complex classroom events. It makes the case that students' everyday experience and knowledge in their entire manifold forms matter…