In this article, we present a valid and reliable instrument which measures the attitude of in-service and pre-service primary teachers toward teaching science, called the Dimensions of Attitude Toward Science (DAS) Instrument. Attention to the attitudes of primary teachers toward teaching science is of fundamental importance to the…

As each school year starts, teachers are faced with teaching and building relationships with students from diverse backgrounds. To effectively teach students, science teachers (and teachers in general) must develop an understanding of students' culture, background, and language. Knowing these factors, as well as students' learning needs,…

Despite efforts mandated by national legislation, the state of Georgia has made little progress in improving Grade 5 students' standardized test scores in science, spurring the need for social change. The purpose of this quantitative causal-comparative study was to determine whether there was a significant difference in the student achievement in…

The purpose of this study was to identify and describe teaching actions--embedded in the "Science Writing Heuristic approach," a systematic teaching approach that integrates literacy instruction and argument-based inquiry learning of science--supportive of the cross-disciplinary literacy expectations necessary to compete in the 21st…

Elementary teacher education involves learning to teach science. Even in elementary school, teaching science is demanding work--teachers must orchestrate a complex set of teaching practices to support students' science learning. This dissertation examines the application of Grossman and colleagues' (2009) cross-professional learning framework,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whole classroom discourse during modeling-based learning in science, seeking to describe the discourse's characteristics, its relation to the micro-context in which it took place and to the student-constructed models, and to ascertain when it becomes productive. Additionally, we aimed to describe how…

Primary-aged children's decreasing enthusiasm for science is worrying. The author explores why children are often not as excited by science as one would expect. She found that the best way to counter this is to be enthusiastic about the subject herself, have interesting activities for the children to carry out, and give them a choice about what to…

The natural world fascinates young children. Treasured leaves, shells, stones, and twigs always find their way into the kindergarten classroom. A kindergarten study of collections channels and deepens children's innate impulse to explore and collect. It also lays the foundation for understanding how scientists approach the study of objects in…

Many new teacher professional development programs in museums are begun with external funding from government or private foundations. At some point the museum must develop a plan for sustainability when the original grant support is no longer available. Some programs are able to find long term support but many end due to lack of funding,…

This paper describes the expressed models that children aged 7, 11, and 14 years have about micro-organisms and microbial activity. These were elicited using a variety of data collection techniques that complemented each other, resulting in a rich dataset, and provided information about the level of knowledge and progression of ideas across the…

The Association For Science Education's "schoolscience.co.uk Great Bug Hunt 2011," in association with Martin Rapley and Gatekeeper Educational, has been a resounding success--not only because it fits into the science curriculum so neatly, but also because of the passion it evoked in the children who took part. This year's entries were…

Understanding what children know is paramount to planning effective science instruction; however, in any classroom, the students hold a variety of ideas. Representing these differences in ways that also acknowledge the common trends among students might facilitate the process of differentiation. To exemplify one such possible process of…

The introduction of teaching about liquid crystals is discussed from several points of view: the rationale why to teach them, the basics about liquid crystals or what the teacher should teach about them, the fundamental pre-knowledge of students required, the set of experiments accompanying the teaching and the brief report on the already…

In this article we examine teacher instruction on scientific literacy tasks and teacher expression of ultimate and subordinate purposes during one teaching sequence of a science unit. By using a Practical Epistemology Analysis and Systemic Functional Grammar we can provide a view of the direction learning takes and the consequences for student…

The purpose of this study was to investigate in detail the processes involved when the promotion of metaconceptual evaluation facilitates fifth grade students' construction, evaluation, and revision of their explanations for magnetic phenomena. Although much recent research emphasized the importance of student modeling and model construction,…