The notion of family resemblance has recently emerged as a promising and fruitful approach to characterising the nature of science (NOS) in science education research, offering solutions to some perplexing challenges such as capturing both the domain-general and domain-specific features of science with a single framework. At the same time,…

While a mutually agreed-upon definition of STEM education remains elusive, there is no doubt that instructional models and ideas put forward with the STEM label have had a tremendous impact on thinking, debate, and practice in schools worldwide. At issue is the degree to which some or all the STEM disciplines must be taught in a concurrent or…

The Integrated Concentration in Science (iCons) 4-year program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was designed to promote interdisciplinary STEM collaboration in the solution of real-world problems and encourage student independence and interdependence through a student-centered teaching approach that structures all projects as group…

Research in the United States show that professional learning (PL) can improve classroom instruction. However, teachers, especially educators in the content areas, receive insufficient training specific to meeting the language and academic needs of English learners (ELs). The purpose of the current randomized controlled trial (RCT) study was to…

As federal legislation requires that English language proficiency (ELP) standards are aligned with content standards, this article addresses issues and concerns in aligning ELP standards with content standards in English language arts, mathematics, and science. It starts with a brief description of federal legislation for alignment between ELP…