High school biology students are provided few classroom opportunities to learn natural history or to see themselves as scientists. This poses a risk to their gaining the basic knowledge needed to play a positive role in the biodiversity crisis. However, science-as-practice in the classroom introduces the opportunity to equip students with…

This article describes the design and implementation of a sensors-based entrepreneurial-minded learning (EML) module in a large (>150 students) first-year General Chemistry II course. Students worked in groups create a novel sensor that solves an existing scientific problem or improves upon an existing sensor. Students proposed and explained…

Representation in science is anything that stands for something else--drawings, pictures, graphs, or other representational forms (Danish et al. 2020). Representations serve as public displays of phenomena that make aspects of those phenomena explicit (Gilbert 2008). They can serve to make the invisible visible, communicate ideas, display…

This practical resource takes educators through a planning process--from selecting standards to designing learning activities--that weaves together language, literacy, and science in ways that are responsive to emergent bilinguals. Drawing on extensive and current research, the authors show how secondary educators can use students' own language…

Our 4th grade year has become known as "the field trip year", with over 10 trips carefully aligned with learning units across the year. This article describes the first trip of the year, which in many ways sets the stage for students' effective use of field trips as engaging extensions and applications of classroom learning. The Pike's…

This research investigated how collaborative e-learning strategies affected the understanding of DNA Replication among the 9th-grade Biology CC class. The study involved 24 diverse students (ages 15-17), including regular education students, English Language Learners (ELLs), and students with IEPs selected through proportional stratified random…

Integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is becoming increasingly common in K-12 classrooms, and small group activities are ubiquitous to STEM instruction. This article includes both theoretical and practical descriptions of a microethnographic approach to critical multimodal discourse analysis that we used to…

This study used a design research framework to teach secondary high school science students about environmental sustainability. A high school teacher and researcher collaborated to design a two week environmental science unit to help students make sense of complex environmental sustainability issues. This dissertation study sought to answer the…

Waves and sound are rooted in children's everyday experiences. This topic naturally extends to other topics, such as instruments and music, which children find very interesting. As children often see science as separate from their daily lives, it is important to help them make real-life connections. The unit begins with children's observations,…

Dramatic inquiry is a teaching approach where students explore science through differentiated learning experiences, so that students can engage in learning in multiple ways (e.g., through gesture, song, written and spoken language). It positions students as competent problem solvers and draws upon students' strengths through collaborative learning…

The connections the "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") creates between science content and practices to literacy and mathematics are especially beneficial at the elementary level. In this article, the authors present a series of lessons a second-grade teacher taught within a thematic unit that integrated standards…

This article traces the interaction of multimodal semiotic resources within and across tasks constituting a science unit on surface tension in an eighth-grade sheltered science classroom. Two discourses, operating simultaneously, realized differently motivated signs. This article follows the contribution of linguistic and extralinguistic modes…

Turning lectures into interactive, student-led question and answer sessions is known to increase learning, but enabling interaction in a large class seems an insurmountable task. This can discourage adoption of this new approach -- who has time to individualize responses, address questions from over 200 students and encourage active participation…

Augmented reality (AR) technologies are identified as one of key emerging technologies for education in the next 5 years. AR takes advantage of virtual objects or information overlaying physical objects or environments, resulting in a mixed reality in which virtual objects and real environments coexist in a meaningful way to augment learning…

The aim of this study is examining the effect of the using scientific literacy development activities on students' achievement. The study was carried out in a primary school in Buca Izmir for 2010-2011 academic years. System of our body was chosen as a study topic in our search which took 6 weeks. Pre-post test semi experimental control model was…