Learning in a virtual environment has been found to foster students' affective responses, indicating the importance of exploring the factors which affect students' learning when engaged in a virtual game. This study aimed to explore the relationships among students' epistemic curiosity, situational interest, and learning engagement in an…

A STEM education program entitled "Come rain or shine" implemented in a primary rural school in southern Greece as part of the "Diffusion of STEM (DI-STEM)" project and the results of its implementation are presented in this paper. The educational program deepened in weather education and intended to develop eight scientific…

The frequentist and classical models of probability provide students with different lenses through which they can view probability. Prior research showed that students may bridge these two lenses through instructional designs that begin with a clear connection between the two, such as coin tossing. Considering that this connection is not always…

"Human Impacts on Our Climate" outlines a journey that will steer your students toward authentic problem solving while grounding them in integrated STEM disciplines. Like the other volumes in the series, this book is designed to meet the growing need to infuse real-world learning into K-12 classrooms. This interdisciplinary, three-lesson…

Children's connection to nature increasingly is of interest in education, psychology, urban planning, and other related fields. Research findings emphasize the central importance of early connections due to resulting benefits for environmental awareness, knowledge, social-emotional learning, health, and wellbeing. To more clearly conceptualize the…

Oceans play an important role in weather and climate through transfers of heat and moisture to the atmosphere, and by moving heat and climate-relevant molecules like carbon dioxide around the globe. Energy also transfers from the atmosphere to the surface of the ocean, traveling down through the water column creating ocean currents that transport…

This article describes an 8-10 week problem-based learning unit for fifth graders that introduced them to the facts underlying global climate change. This unit was inspired by the lack of awareness in our national population around this clear threat to our global ecosystem and takes on this goal: to provide students (our future advocates and…

The purpose of this research was to explore children's understandings of everyday, synthetic and scientific concepts to enable a description of how abstract, verbally taught material relates to previous experience-based knowledge and the consistency of understanding about cloud formation. This study examined the conceptual understandings of cloud…

This study explored the effect of arts integration into science during an instructional unit on force and motion and one addressing natural weather disasters. Seventy-eight elementary students in four classrooms (grade 5, grade 4, and two at grade 3) participated in the study. This study assessed content retention, student-made products…

As the COVID-19 pandemic upended the 2019-2020 school year, education systems scrambled to meet the needs of students and families with little available data on how school closures may impact learning. In this study, we produced a series of projections of COVID-19-related learning loss based on (a) estimates from absenteeism literature and (b)…

To show students how engineering design practices reduce the impacts of a natural hazard, the authors--two science educators and an elementary teacher--taught a three-day 5E lesson that focused on hurricanes. They specifically focused on hurricanes because their students are located near a coastal area and are familiar with the effects of this…

To an outside observer, there is nothing really novel about whiteboarding. An observer passing a classroom would see students using dry-erase markers to write and sketch their ideas on large, dry-erase-type boards. However, like so many things in education, the subtleties that an outside observer might not notice are the precise things that make…

This column focuses on promoting learning through assessment. The formative assessment probe in this month's issue can be used as an initial elicitation before students are introduced to the formal concepts of weathering and erosion.

Introducing concepts through an integrated science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) approach can promote interest and motivation (Bennett, Lubben and Hogarth, 2007; Bybee, 2010). However, implementing such an approach effectively in a classroom setting, with relevant links, is a challenging task. Some concepts lend themselves more…

As teachers we are encouraged to contextualize the mathematics that we teach. In this article, Belinda Beaman explains how she used the weather as a context for developing decimal understanding. We particularly enjoyed reading how the students were involved in estimating.