In recent years, there has been a strong push to transform STEM education at K-12 and collegiate levels to help students learn to think like scientists. One aspect of this transformation involves redesigning instruction and curricula around fundamental scientific ideas that serve as conceptual scaffolds students can use to build cohesive knowledge…

The teaching of science in K-12 schools has long been criticized as a process that propagates oppression for students who do not conform to entrenched norms of gender, sex, and sexuality. Academic standards, curriculum, and textbooks are rife with rhetoric that reinforces any deviation from cisheterosexuality as aberrant, unusual, or abnormal.…

Science education policies and standards have called for educators to teach students about the Nature of Science (NOS) and engage them in Culturally Relevant Science Teaching (CRST), which requires critical shifts away from traditional science teaching. As such, teachers are being asked to possess or take up conceptions of science that challenge…

Recent calls for reform in K-12 science education and the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century emphasize improving science teaching, students' engagement, and learning. In this study, we designed and implemented a curriculum unit for sixth-grade students (i = 1305). The curriculum unit integrated…

This article reports on a design-based implementation research (DBIR) project that addresses the question: "How can classrooms be supported at scale to achieve the three-dimensional learning goals of the Next Generation Science Standards?" Inherent in this question are three key design challenges: (i) "three-dimensional…

This study reports on an innovative version of adaptive primary literature (APL) that we call Science Behind the Scenes used during a summer professional development (PD) program. Classroom teachers read and discussed papers from the primary literature, and created translations of these papers relevant to their own classroom needs. We randomly…

In this exploratory case study, we sought to understand teacher's integration of multicultural curricula in science curriculum units, and how personal experiences influenced the level of integration in light of Bank's typology of ethnic content integration into school curricula. Five research participants volunteered and were selected so as to be…

As knowledge of and familiarity with science becomes an increasingly important aspect of contemporary life and citizenship, efforts have been made to make the science curriculum a “lived” curriculum (Hurd, 2000), one that reaches out to the lives, communities, and experiences of students. In this research around a high school urban ecology…

The framework developed for the PISA 2006 science survey starts from everyday contexts in which citizens encounter scientific issues and knowledge claims. Recent curriculum changes in England, making possible the introduction of courses for 15- to 16-year olds with an explicit "scientific literacy" emphasis, are based on a very similar…

In 2005 India introduced a new National Curriculum Framework aimed at providing a more constructivist approach to learning for all subjects. Previous research on the impact of curriculum reform in other countries (e.g., United States) concluded that for reform to be successful teachers' orientations toward teaching and learning must be considered…

In order to compete in a global economy, students are going to need resources and curricula focusing on critical thinking and reasoning in science. Despite awareness for the need for complex reasoning, American students perform poorly relative to peers on international standardized tests measuring complex thinking in science. Research focusing on…

This study is a meta-interpretative analysis that focuses on research conducted and published by other researchers. Concepts central to this study include global practical relevance, curriculum design, and formative situation. We analyzed 35 studies selected from 374 published studies in the years 2000 and 2001 in three journals referenced in the…

This article examines the merits of the proposition that design and inquiry are conceptual parallels. It does so by first looking closely at the inquiry-related discourse within science education, then at aspects of the design discourse within engineering, and finally within technology education. Convergences and divergences of these two streams…

Science education research, as well as science curriculum development, has concentrated on the intelligent student, to the unjustifiable neglect of average and below-average ability students. (AL)

Explores the effects of teaching particulate representation of chemistry on the achievement of high school students in terms of gender interaction. Indicates that females who were taught the particulate representation scored as well as males whereas those who were not taught the particulate representation scored significantly lower than males.…