Scientific literacy is still being identified and recognised as one of the main goals of science education. However, this concept has multiple interpretations and its definition changes continuously depending on its social, cultural, and political contexts. In this paper, scientific literacy is conceptualised through "visions I, II and…

The processes of educational planning and program development at the local and national levels differ in centralized and decentralized educational systems. In Türkiye, there is a centralized education system, and curricula are created centrally to include all students. In the United States of America, there is a nationally disseminated curriculum…

Scientific literacy (SL) has been recognized as the main goal of science curricula documents around the world; however, comparative international curriculum research is limited, especially with Western and African countries. To fill this gap, this study aimed to compare the coverage of SL competencies with the components of knowledge, attitudes,…

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) claim to be an evolution of previous work. Yet prominent voices in the science education community argue that they are a revolution. This study sought to examine these competing claims by analyzing an older middle school science curriculum through the lens of the NGSS. This analysis demonstrates that…

There has been a longstanding interest in the kinds of scientific knowledge that primary science learners must know and be able to do, which comprise the intellectual demands in this subject. These prescriptions chiefly take guidance from national curriculum documents, especially in the form of their learning outcomes (LO) or learning standards.…

Turkey's politically induced 'curricular modernization initiative' intended a philosophical change and a system-level transformation from behaviouristic to constructivist-inspired pedagogies in the early 2000s. Science curriculum has been one of the curricula that has taken precedence. It has changed four times since then. The latest science…

While helping students develop informed views about nature of scientific inquiry (VNOSI) has been emphasised in science education, little is known regarding students' current VNOSI at a certain grade level and whether there was evidence of higher attainment of VNOSI in students in higher grades as compared to lower grades? The purpose of this…

The inclusion of engineering in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) as a key component of K-12 science learning has provided both opportunities and challenges for elementary teachers. One challenge is integrating the design thinking processes that undergird engineering with core science concepts and current issues facing scientists and…

This study explored the impact of argumentation-promoting collaborative inquiry and representational work in science on primary students' representational fluency. Two hundred sixty-six year 6 students received instruction on natural disasters with a focus on collaborative inquiry. Students in the Comparison condition received only this…

The Science, Business and Policy Program (SBP) of the University of Groningen has been a work-based learning program for science master students since two decades. This program, a direct consequence of the Bologna declaration of education in Europe, has a distinctive position in European science curricula. Here, we use a web-based survey…

Science curriculum standards were mapped onto various texts (literacy readers, trade books, online articles). Statistical analyses highlighted the inconsistencies among readability formulae for Grades 2-6 levels of the standards. There was a lack of correlation among the readability measures, and also when comparing different text sources. Online…

Over the last fifteen years, engineering has made its way into science curriculum at all levels, elementary, middle, and high school. A need to analyze students' perception the field of engineering is warranted. Previous techniques for studying representations of scientists and build on what researchers in the science field have learned from…

In this research, after extracting the pre-inquiries (student-level question) for which students had curiosity in the elementary science and analyzing their correlation with the elementary science curriculum, highly correlated inquiries (meaningful pre-inquiries) were selected and applied in class. After organizing an experiment group and a…

This article focuses on concerns related to a lack of students' perception of relevance in school science seen as differing from educators' perception of relevance. In order to determine how relevance is portrayed in teaching and learning materials (TLMs), the titles and introductory texts (scenarios) from 77 TLMs, aiming to induce students'…

This paper demonstrates the positive impact of learning through ecological fieldwork upon children's ability to write, and to write about science. Specifically we have carried out a relatively large-scale study (involving 379 children aged 9-11 years from 8 primary schools in North East England) comparing intervention classes (involved in…