"Research Findings:" Early science skills predict later science achievement, and persistent achievement gaps in science appear as early as preschool. The current study compared the effectiveness of different instructional approaches for teaching preschoolers about sinking and floating and examined individual differences in learning.…

Climate change caused predominately by carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuel use is a critical issue for our future. It is incumbent on science educators to learn about it and teach it in ways that illustrate the power of science to understand climatic changes and model past, present, and possible climate futures. It is equally important for…

The utilization of computer simulators in university education is progressively being embraced to offer students a practical exposure to industrial bioprocesses. Bioreactor computer simulators hold various advantages over conventional laboratory experiments, such as cost-effectiveness and enhanced safety. The research objective is to assess the…

Science teaching and learning is facing a new dilemma. It has to move from its old perception of science as a purely positivistic and value-free enterprise into regarding it as what it really is: a value-laden human endeavour characterised by historical, cultural, social and political parameters. Science teachers now have to deal with ethical, and…

This multiple case study describes error-reaction patterns (ERPs) in middle school science lessons. Twenty-seven science teachers' reactions to student errors were explored in terms of four aspects of classroom discourse: talk move, discursive purpose, communicative approach, and patterns of interaction. Two hundred ninety-six error-reaction…

Since the development of the notion of the teacher-researcher, a range of published action research studies have focused on school-based pedagogy. Scholars agree that action research is an essential tool for teachers to improve their practice, but there is little known about the process underpinning teachers' choice of particular action research…

Background: Inquiry-based instruction is a prominent teaching strategy in science education that is assumed to be an effective means to foster not only students' understanding of science content but also their procedural and epistemic knowledge concerning inquiry processes. Empirical studies have repeatedly shown that inquiry-related activities…

Bacteria form an intense portion of reading and learning for students enrolled in microbiology education. As a part of the foundational course outline of bacteriology, bacterial classification is a significant topic of discussion. The purpose of our study was to analyze whether bacterial classification can be taught with a phylogenetic tree…

Science education researchers and curriculum documents have advocated scientific inquiry for more than six decades; however, inconsistent findings concerning its effects on students' learning outcomes have been revealed in recent analyses of large-scale international assessment data (e.g., the Programme for International Student Assessment…

Lesson planning is a core part of teachers' professional competence. Written lesson plans play a significant role in science teacher education as a preparation for demonstration lessons during the final teacher certification exam. However, the few existing scoring rubrics on lesson plans are not particularly theoretically sound and are barely…

We use the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long (STPFaSL-Long), a research-based survey instrument with 78 items at the level of introductory physics, to investigate introductory and advanced students' difficulties with entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. We present an analysis of data from 12 different…

Critiquing arguments is important for K-12 science students to learn but not emphasized by the predominant claim-evidence-reasoning (CER) argumentation model. Drawing on the work of Yu and Zenker (2020), and Dove and Nussbaum (2018), we developed a tool for supplementing CER with critical questions (CQs) from philosophy that cover most, if not…

Research carried out through the last 20 years gave us undeniable evidence that to learn anything we need to be active participants, not passive observers. One of the important aspects of learning physics is constructing explanations of physical phenomena. To support and guide students toward constructing their explanations, teachers need to be…

The assessment of test anxiety has received increasing attention in educational research due to the potential negative effects of anxiety on student performance. Traditionally, test anxiety scales have been developed for mathematics, but few studies have focused on physics. In this study, we validated two test anxiety scales for undergraduate…

Plastination, a permanent preservation method for human tissues and organs, is increasingly being used in anatomy education. However, there is a paucity of systematic reviews and meta-analyses summarizing the educational efficacy of plastinated specimens. This meta-analysis compared the assessment scores of students exposed to plastinated…