With a focus on within-person effects, this study investigated mutualism among academic skills (reading, math, science) and between those skills and verbal working memory in a general population sample and groups with high or low skills from Grades 2 to 5 (2010-2016, N = 859-9040, age 6.27-13.13 years, 49% female, ethnically diverse). Mutualism…

This study explores the importance of scientific observation in primary education, highlighting how the use of observation sheets can facilitate the acquisition of knowledge and the development of students' observation skills. In the research, 153 second-grade students were divided into three experimental groups, each group observing a woody plant…

This study examines how gifted primary school students define observation, whether they know the purposes of observation and how they manage to perform it. A qualitative study was designed to thoroughly examine the observation process of 16 gifted students and determine the factors affecting the process. The focus group meetings were analyzed with…

Model Eliciting Activities (MEAs) are pedagogical approaches that allow teachers to integrate multiple subjects into creative multi-day learning experiences that captivate students' curiosity and engage them in real-life problem solving. MEAs are known in the fields of mathematics and engineering (Gilat and Amit 2014), but despite their ability to…

The aim of the study was to examine the improvement of basic science process skills among second graders in science learning through an inquiry-based approach. The participants were 23 students from a second graders class. Participants were with the age around seven years old. The 5E model of inquiry-based approach was used to teach science. Mixed…

We investigated second and third graders' capacity to understand microevolution, given a learning progression leveraging intuitions to build more adequate explanations, problematizing core ideas within scientific practices, and in-depth study of a single domain (botany or animal behavior). The intervention was implemented in both researcher-taught…

Technology has greatly shaped pedagogical practices over time. However scholars posit that the developing technology-aided, -based, and -oriented instructional practices still need scholarly and systematic studies to prove their effectiveness. An emerging teaching strategy that highlights technology tools and programs is Flipped Learning: a…

Do social cognition and epistemological understanding promote elementary school children's experimentation skills? To investigate this question, 402 children (ages 8, 9, and 10) in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades were assessed for their experimentation skills, social cognition (advanced theory of mind [AToM]), epistemological understanding (understanding…

Understanding complex systems requires reasoning about causal relationships that behave or appear to behave probabilistically. Features such as distributed agency, large spatial scales, and time delays obscure co-variation relationships and complex interactions can result in non-deterministic relationships between causes and effects that are best…

Research on young children's reasoning show the complex relationships of knowledge, theories, and evidence in their decision-making and problem solving. Most of the research on children's reasoning skills has been done in individualized and formal research settings, not collective classroom environments where children often engage in learning and…

The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011), is collecting information about the early educational experiences of a nationally representative sample of children who were in kindergarten or who were of kindergarten age in ungraded classrooms or schools in the 2010-11 school year. The data collection began in…

Spatial discontinuity between causes and effects is a feature of many scientific concepts, particularly those in the environmental and ecological sciences. Causes can be spatially separated from their effects by great distances. Action at a distance, the idea that causes and effects can be separated in physical space, is a well-studied concept in…

Argumentation as a form of introducing children to science has received increasing attention over the past decade. Argumentation tends to be studied and theorized through the lens of individual speakers, who contribute to a conversation by means of opposing statements. M.M. Bakhtin and L.S. Vygotsky independently proposed a very different approach…

When studying informal science programs, researchers often overlook the opportunities enabled and constrained in each program and the practices reinforced for participants. In this case study, I examined the normative scientific practices reinforced in one-week-long "Herpetology" (the study of reptiles and amphibians) program for…

This paper reports on the results of several geotechnical engineering-related science activities conducted with elementary-school students. Activities presented include soil permeability, contact stress, soil stratigraphy, shallow and deep foundations, and erosion in rivers. The permeability activity employed the LEGO NXT platform for data…