Throughout students' careers in physics, there are some topics that they learn multiple times and in multiple ways, and other topics that are briefly, if at all, discussed. I wanted to have the students think about all of the different physics topics they had learned in, most likely, a new way. Games have been used as a way to learn new physics…

Incorporating research activities at the secondary-school level is an effective method to teach science; however, students and teachers may feel intimidated when trying to identify a suitable research topic. Ideas may be obtained from short articles in periodicals or newspapers to allow students to design their own experiments and interpret data.…

This study designs and implements interdisciplinary STEM instruction by adopting modelling-based physics programming, and explores its effectiveness on learning. A quasi-experimental study was conducted. The experimental group wrote programs to solve physics problems by following the modelling process, while the control group solved general…

In tabletop games involving dice, it is important to ensure randomness of the dice rolls and to protect other gaming elements from being scattered by rolling dice. One way of ensuring random rolls and protecting gaming elements is to drop dice into a dice-rolling tower ("dice tower"). A dice tower is usually small (20 cm by 20 cm) and…

This systematic review of 46 published articles investigates the constructs employed and the meanings assigned to writing in writing-to-learn assignments given to students in science courses. Using components of assignments associated with the greatest learning gains--meaning making, clear expectations, interactive writing processes, and…

This study concerns the investigation of pre-service teachers' competencies in lesson planning from different perspectives. In this respect, it is intended to develop a roadmap to figure out the pre-service teachers' competency levels in lesson planning pertaining to a four-year- education program. The study was designed as a quantitative study…

Orchestrating opportunities for students to engage in scientific talk in the classroom is challenging for most teachers and even more so for novice teaching assistants (TAs) who typically instruct introductory science laboratories at the postsecondary level. This study was designed to understand how TA moves are related to instances of scientific…

Despite the prevalent use of observational measures in teacher evaluation systems, research has only recently begun to take into account how aspects of the instructional environment and lesson sampling design may interact with teachers' scores on these measures. Instead, one assumption guiding current evaluation systems is that the variation in…

The physical and chemical properties of Milk of Magnesia provide examples of chemical concepts and opportunities for investigative practical work for secondary chemistry students of all ages. Basing the lesson on the contents of that familiar blue bottle, which is probably lurking somewhere in a cupboard in most households, also showcases the role…

This article describes how a homework task on climate change is being developed as part of a larger project on sustainability issues -- Urban Science. The ultimate aim of this European project is to improve the teaching of scientific enquiry so that students develop the competences to actively contribute to creating sustainable cities, to…

Teaching children scientific vocabulary is an important part of science education and should be carefully considered when planning units of work so that children can understand new words and apply them to their learning (Sewell, 2018). This view is echoed in the aims of the National Curriculum in England, which states that pupils should be able to…

This is the third special issue of "Primary Science," and it is one that offers primary school teachers an insight into an initiative that does wonders for primary science leadership, learning, and teaching -- the Primary Science Quality Mark (PSQM). In this article, Clare Warren, PSQM senior hub leader, explains why PSQM included…

In this paper, we present and discuss a teaching strategy for the concept of energy at high school based on history and philosophy of science (HPS) and dealing with Joule's experiment (Joule J. Philos Mag 3(31):173-176, 1847a) and Rankine's definition (Rankine W. Edinburgh New Philos J 3:121-141, 1855). This sequence has been developed and…

In this article we present and discuss some theoretical and methodological elements of a wider research that analyzes the teaching practice of two teachers novice and expert from a semiotic theoretical approach. The conceptual framework of this work allows for addressing the epistemological and didactic dimensions of the teaching practice. Three…

The aim of research was to verify the effectiveness of implementing the inquiry-based teaching (IBT) into the teaching process of chemistry in secondary school in the phase of revising and deepening the previous-year learning content. The results of the research confirmed a significant difference on the level of knowledge and skills between the…