Uncertainties are inherent in education as learners encounter gaps in their awareness of topics, receive new information that potentially conflicts with prior understandings, and grapple with known unknowns in order to construct new knowledge. While researchers have shown that students productively struggling with problematized and uncertain…

School pedagogies that expand opportunities for learners to build and use knowledge for meaningful purposes are resources for hope. Internationally, standards-based reforms in science education position schooling as a context for building and using disciplinary knowledge to explain phenomena and solve problems. There is also growing research…

Inquiry-based teaching has been emphasized to enhance students' knowledge and skills and create a culture of science in science classrooms. Many teachers understand inquiry as hands-on activities, and under the pressure of content-based curriculum, they plan hands-on activities to develop students' science content knowledge described in the…

Inquiry learning pedagogies have not only been proposed as a successful teaching methodology to draw students into science, they are also rich with possibilities for creativity. The particular focus on investigations and problem-solving provides opportunity for educators to embrace this. The primary curriculum explicitly values creativity in this…

The Australian Science Teachers Association offers an innovative international professional development program for science teachers called the Science Teachers Exchange -- Japan. The program offers Australian and Japanese teachers an opportunity to travel to the corresponding country, allowing the teachers to grow in their knowledge of the…

Because students have often been conditioned as passive learners and receivers of knowledge, it can be difficult for them to persevere in solving authentic problems. Nevertheless, teachers must persist in preparing students as problem solvers and critical thinkers. In an urban inner-city neighborhood school in the southeast, students embarked on a…

The main focus here is to examine the benefits of defining and developing an engineering curriculum for elementary schools. Like many other international educational systems, Australian educational settings have been seeking to effectively implement science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. However, current assumptions…

As science teachers, we often show animations and videos in class but there is the potential for students to create their own animations to represent science concepts and thus make their conceptions visible for critique and refinement. This encourages students to be active in their own learning, creating animations rather than just viewing them.…

Everyone has problems, from the smallest ant competing for a food source to the largest elephant needing to cool down. Fortunately, organisms have structures that function to help them solve these problems. So when a group of fourth-grade students look for solutions to their problems, who do they turn to? A biological champion, of course! Plants…

This study aims to develop a semiotic declarative knowledge model, which is a positive constructive behavior model that systematically facilitates understanding in order to ensure that learners think accurately and ask the right questions about a topic. The data used to develop the experimental model were obtained using four measurement tools…

After completing a science unit on transfer of energy, including how chemical energy from a battery is converted to electrical energy; electrical circuits; and transformation of energy into sound, light, or heat; the students in Mrs. Finlay's fourth-grade science class were challenged to use what they learned to solve a problem. The students…

Structural engineering can be a rich and exciting context for exploring and learning about the properties of materials. Even a structure as commonplace as a house requires careful consideration of important properties such as strength, stability, and insulation. As a former engineer and current elementary science teacher educator, the author has…

Individuals benefit from science process skills while trying to solve problems through research (Bagci-Kiliç, 2003). To solve these problems individuals must acquire sufficient science process skills. Teachers must be able to understand these skills so that students can obtain the required proficiency (Mutisya, Rotich & Rotich, 2013). This…

How can a science concept be taught in a way that generates interest, gives students the opportunity to consider other possibilities, does not lock them into one way of doing or seeing things, and gives them some ownership of their learning? These authors searched high and low for the perfect activity to illustrate a key concept for their partner…

In this study, an instrument, Using Mathematics in Science Self-efficacy Scale (UMSSS), was developed in order to determine preservice science teachers' self-efficacy toward the use of mathematics in their lessons. Data gathered from 250 preservice science teachers were used for Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis…