As scientific literacy plays a contributing role in identifying, analysing, and solving environmental matters that our world is facing, there is growing consensus to mandate environmental matters in science classrooms following five decades of efforts in promoting environmental education. However, much remains unknown about the relationship…

Scientific reasoning helps children understand the world around them. Teaching scientific reasoning can be challenging because not all component scientific reasoning skills develop at the same age and not all children learn these skills at the same pace. Adaptive support thus seems called for. We designed two types of adaptive instruction, based…

Problem Roulette (PR), an online study service at the University of Michigan, offers points-free formative practice to students preparing for examinations in introductory science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses. Using four years of PR data involving millions of problem attempts by thousands of students, we quantify the benefits…

The study addressed the gap in fifth-grade science proficiency between English language learners (ELLs) enrolled in two different science programs in a large school district in the Southeast United States. The Inspire program was implemented in 125 schools, while a combination of Inspire and Promoting Science among English Language Learners…

Though concept maps and graphic organisers are useful tools for bilinguals to organise the information being managed and learned, its systematic use is not widened and decisive in CLIL domains. Apart from helping students to acquire meaningful learning, concept mapping might promote in them word-recognition skills for the identification and…

This dissertation focuses on the development and implementation of an action research study that seeks to determine the impact of integrating literacy strategies in the biology classroom on standardized test scores. The teacher-researcher identified the problem of practice in her classroom after four years of observation of ninth-grade biology…

As widespread as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) initiatives and reforms are today in education, a rudimentary problem with these endeavors is being overlooked. In general, education programs and school districts are failing to ensure that elementary teachers who provide children's early academic experiences have the appropriate…

Our main interest in this article is to explore whether Swedish teachers changed their teaching and assessment practices in relation to the new national tests in science education that were introduced 2009. Data was collected using a web-distributed questionnaire, which was answered by 407 teachers. The concept of teaching traditions is used to…

Peer-led team learning (PLTL) research has expanded from its roots in program evaluation of student success measures in Workshop Chemistry to a spectrum of research questions and qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods study approaches. In order to develop recommendations for PLTL research and propose best practices for faculty who will…

This paper presents gradual implementation of active learning approaches in an organic chemistry classroom based on student feedback and strategies for getting students on-board with this new approach. Active learning techniques discussed include videos, online quizzes, reading assignments, and classroom activities. Preliminary findings indicate a…

The purpose of the transcendental qualitative phenomenological research is to describe the characteristics and strategies of teachers who share the same experiences in teaching science, a non-assessed content, in a high-stakes assessment environment at the third and fourth grade levels. Teacher curriculum choices are dictated by the need to…

Probing university students' understanding of direct-current (DC) resistive circuits is still a field of active physics education research. We report here on a study we conducted of this understanding, where the cohort consisted of students in a large-enrollment first-year physics module. This is a non-calculus based physics module for students in…

The present study was aimed at investigating the effects of a video feedback coaching intervention for upper-grade primary school teachers on students' cognitive gains in scientific knowledge. This teaching intervention was designed with the use of inquiry-based learning principles for teachers, such as the empirical cycle and the posing of…

How can classrooms become communities of inquiry that connect intellectually challenging science content with language-based activities (opportunities to talk, listen, read, and write) especially in settings with diverse populations? This question guided a 3-year mixed-methods research study using the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach in…

Dinosaurs have been a very popular science topic since signs of their presence on earth were first discovered. They have represented so-called "edutainment" for some people. Learning from informal sources and in- an out-of-school environment can be effective and motivating. In this study, 12-year-old pupils (N = 366) visited a dinosaur…