The lichen is an ideal subject for student study because it is omnipresent in school yards, easily collected and observed year-round, a pioneer of evolution on land, and a bioindicator of air pollution. After doing fieldwork on this unusual composite organism as an apprentice with a team of lichenologists, Sarah Thorne developed Learning Lichens.…

Changes in society can, on occasion, lead to new demands on schooling, and on science education in particular. A major such demand in the 1960s led to a conceptual form of science that has dominated school science education ever since. Subsequent major societal demands have usually not been nearly as successful in redefining school science…

Students make and test a seemingly impossible material made from ice and sawdust that had been developed for possible emergency use during the Second World War. It was open to the students to be creative with their methods of testing the viability of such a material. The thought of making a battleship from ice that would gradually melt seems…

When Dan Damelin was a high school chemistry teacher, he always asked for the lower-level science classes with a high portion of students on individualized education plans (IEPs). He felt these students could do as well as everyone else with the right approach and technological supports, and wanted to explore how an inquiry approach using…

Within the science education community, it is widely accepted that quality science instruction is focused on knowledge construction and inquiry. The Ghanaian education system has many hallmark issues that inhibit such instruction, however, including a pervasive teacher-centred pedagogy, lack of laboratory materials, and minimal support systems for…

One of the basic science process skills, number and space relation, is used to transform a twodimensional object into a three-dimensional shape or express symmetry axis of the objects. The aim of this research was to determine the number and space relation skills of pre-service science teachers in order to train more qualified science teachers…

Past studies have suggested that young people lack knowledge regarding food safety, and that food safety education is appropriate for integration into science education since it often involves science knowledge. Thus, this study combined the methods of inquiry-based and game-based learning to develop a computer detective game, called the Poison…

The aim of this case study was to investigate what happens in science classrooms when teaching is almost entirely based on the use of digital technology. Two secondary school science teachers participated, together with their seventh grade classes. Data were collected through eight observation sessions (altogether about 9.5 h) and 9 h of…

"Standards for Technological and Engineering Literacy" ("STEL") promotes science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, where technology and engineering play a critical role as subject integrators. Integration of STEM in project-based learning is an ideal approach, with benefits of enhancing student…

The debate on the use of pesticides is very current in the public media when it comes to topics such as organic farming, bee mortality, and the use of glyphosate. The broad range of pesticide applications and their potential environmental impact makes pesticides an interesting topic for science education in general and for chemistry teaching in…

Nanoscience and nanotechnology are two key areas in the development of new technologies. However, scientific advances in these fields are still far removed from the contents taught in schools. But what if basic concepts within these areas were introduced in secondary schools? We believe science is an essential facet of culture and the most recent…

The aim of this study was to explore the teaching of senior phase of Natural Sciences with a focus on the Planet Earth and beyond knowledge strand. A qualitative case study design was used. Semi-structured interviews and observations were employed to collect data from two purposefully chosen teachers. The results of the study showed that some…

In light of extensive research demonstrating widespread misconceptions about electricity, this paper describes a learning study that targeted the most likely source of difficulty--failure of middle school pupils to develop a mental model that serves as a bridge between static and current electricity. During the intervention, pupils first envision…

Constructing scientific explanations of natural phenomena is an important aim of science education. Explanation oriented science teaching approaches encourage learners to engage in sense-making discussions and construct the causal accounts of the phenomena under study. This article demonstrates a lesson-design model that guides biology teachers on…

In this article, we turn our attention to context-based approaches to science instruction. We studied the effects of changes to a set of secondary science teacher education programs, all of which were redesigned with attention to the Secondary Science Teaching with English Language and Literacy Acquisition (SSTELLA) instructional framework, a…