Currently there are no assessment instruments available for upper-division thermal physics, though several introductory assessments are currently available. Notably missing from these introductory assessment are items targeting statistical mechanics. This leaves a gap in the content that can be assessed by upper-division thermal physics faculty.…

Biology is the study of the diversity of life, which includes diversity in sex, gender, and sexual, romantic, and related orientations. However, a small body of literature suggests that undergraduate biology courses focus on only a narrow representation of this diversity (binary sexes, heterosexual orientations, etc.). In this study, we…

Inspired by existing literature indicating that reading literacy is significantly associated with scientific reasoning and chemistry conceptual understanding, this quasi-experimental study explored the effectiveness of reflective reading of scientific articles on student inquiry performance. A total of 134 10th graders from southern Taiwan were…

The differences related to gender are evident in physics education from the early age of the students. Thus, it is important that the teaching strategies that are implemented in mixed-gender physics classrooms are appropriate for both boys and girls. This research examined physics achievement and metacognitive awareness of students in lower…

Worksheets are common in science classrooms with an aim to support pupils' meaning-making, e.g., for guiding them in performing hands-on activities and documenting their experiences of such activities. Yet, there have been few systematic studies of pupils' disciplinary representations in worksheets. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, we…

Social justice has gained momentum over the past decades with a surge of attention since March 2020. Among many seeking social justice, individuals with disabilities often are forgotten or excluded. Students with disabilities consistently scored below students without disabilities, in all age categories, on the 2015 National Assessment of…

One of the most challenging tasks for teachers in projects is to develop creative ideas. Due to the linear system perspective of education, fostering students' creativity is restricted. However, engineering design and scientific process skills that comprise creativity have an iterative structure. An iterative process-oriented education enables…

This paper reports on inservice science teachers' collaborative feedback to each other on videos of their classroom teaching during debrief sessions. We aimed to understand how the teachers' feedback reflected their vision for science education and how they collaboratively identified and discussed the misalignments between their vision and actual…

Connectedness to nature (C2N) shows a positive relationship with many factors supporting children's health, wellbeing, and development. In addition, C2N has been shown to have a positive relationship with learning about and caring for nature. Despite a long history of outdoor education in early childhood settings in Sweden, C2N is not a concept…

"January Undergraduate Move Ahead Program" (JUMP) uses winter break as an opportunity to prepare small groups of scholarship students with high financial need for the second semester of their first-year biology curriculum and a career in life science. A winter intersession program has challenges, but more importantly, benefits that…

Education is an important tool which is very useful in everybody's life. A science curriculum should offer students opportunities that relate to life outside the classroom. It should provide students with situations in which they can frame and solve problems of their own making; and it should be supportive of students. Teaching methods and…

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a reform effort "for states, by states," advances ambitious ideals for elementary science teaching, but the fate of these ideals will depend in part on the engagement of state science coordinators (SSCs). This article explores the responses of SSCs to NGSS in a purposeful sample of 18 US…

Evolution is one of the most controversial scientific issues worldwide, mainly because of the presumed conflict with religion, which also arises in school biology classes. Here, we surveyed biology teachers from different Jewish sectors in Israel about their experiences teaching evolution and their perspective on relating to students' religious…

This study examines how lower secondary school students understand the circulatory system, using the structure-behavior-function (SBF) framework for conceptual representation. It evaluates the progress of students' understanding after interventions with two different teaching approaches, one using a biology textbook supported by augmented reality…

Effective educational tools are needed to facilitate learning of organismal and ecological sciences in the virtual setting. For entomology laboratory classes, physically collecting insects and curating them in formal collections encompass the traditional learning and assessment tools to introduce students to the natural world and increase their…