Competencies for designing and evaluating scientific inquiries are a key emphasis in national curriculums worldwide and a focus of international large-scale assessment. Teachers globally are encouraged to provide learning opportunities for their students to explore and practice asking and conducting researchable questions. This study focused on…

Recent school science curriculum developments in many countries emphasise that scientists derive evidence for their claims through different approaches; that such practices are bound up with disciplinary knowledge; and that the quality of data should be appreciated. This position paper presents an understanding of the validity of data as a set of…

This study compares the inquiry competence of the 8th-grade students participating in the science and environmental education program GLOBE in the Czech Republic with a sample of students of the same age not participating in the program from the Slovak and Czech Republics. Inquiry competence is analyzed as a set of variables representing students'…

This mixed-methods investigation compared the relative impacts of instructional approach and context of nature of science instruction on preservice elementary teachers' understandings. The sample consisted of 75 preservice teachers enrolled in four sections of an elementary science methods course. Independent variables included instructional…

This dissertation incorporates three studies that examine how the design of inquiry based science instruction, dynamic visualizations, and guidance for experimentation contribute to physics students' understanding of science. I designed a week-long, technology-enhanced inquiry module on car collisions that logs students' interactions with a…

Part One of this paper summarizes six years of investigations devoted to the study of the influence that a variable called teacher "wait-time" has on development of language and logic in children taking part in elementary science programs. It discusses the relation of wait-time to 10 outcome variables. Wait time at two locations was studied in…