In South Africa, there is a strong curriculum imperative for South African school science teachers to not only involve learners in practical inquiry activities but also to support students in making a connection between the construction of substantive scientific knowledge to these activities. The research reported in this article investigated the…

While many innovative teaching strategies exist, integration into undergraduate science teaching has been frustratingly slow. This study aims to understand the low uptake of research-based instructional innovations by studying 21 successful implementations of the Student Centered Active Learning with Upside-down Pedagogies (SCALE-UP) instructional…

Functions provide powerful tools for describing change, but research has shown that students find difficulty in using functions to create and interpret models of changing phenomena. In this study, we drew on a models and modeling perspective to design an instructional approach to develop students' abilities to describe and interpret rates of…

We examine how extended engagement in argumentation with peers leads to enhanced metalevel understanding of argumentive discourse. Following such engagement, young adolescents demonstrated enhanced understanding of counterargument and use of evidence as objectives of skilled argumentation, relative to a nonparticipating comparison group. Among the…

Research indicates that increasing teacher-directed opportunities to respond (TD-OTR) positively impacts student outcomes. Prior reviews of the empirical literature focused on outcomes for students with emotional behavioral disorders or on TD-OTRs as one of many classroom-management practices; however, prior reviews did not examine effects of…

Differentiated instruction is a way of teaching, which gives students multiple choices to learn information. Fourth grade teachers at one elementary school were not implementing the differentiated instructional techniques that would help them address the learning needs of their students. The purpose of this project study was to create a teacher…

In this study, we analyzed the quality of students' written scientific explanations found in notebooks and explored the link between the quality of the explanations and students' learning. We propose an approach to systematically analyzing and scoring the quality of students' explanations based on three components: claim, evidence to support it,…