An invitation to be part of a small research project with science teacher educators focusing on the Australian Curriculum--Science as a Human Endeavour strand provided an opportunity for professional learning in science for an early career teacher working with Year 1-2 students. This article explores how the use of students' photography of local…

Inquiry-based science education (IBSE) has been promoted as an inspiring way of learning science by engaging pupils in designing and conducting their own scientific investigations. For primary school teachers, the open nature of IBSE poses challenges as they often lack experience in supporting their pupils during the different phases of an open…

Providing students with inquiry-oriented learning environments is a major concern in science education. Argumentation discourse can enhance the effectiveness of inquiry-oriented learning environments. This study seeks the trace of argumentation in Turkish Elementary and Secondary Science Curriculum developed by the Turkish Ministry of Education…

Special education teachers provide critical science instruction to students. However, little research investigates special education teacher beliefs and practices around science in general or the nature of science and inquiry in particular. This investigation is a cross-case analysis of four elementary special education teachers' initial…

Life in the 21st century is increasingly complex, paradoxical, and ambiguous, bringing into question the ways that graduate adult education programs function. In this article, we describe an action research study involving the method of collaborative developmental action inquiry conducted with key stakeholders of a program in adult education at a…

While democratic nations like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany have elected women to the preeminent position in their governments, there has never been a woman president in the United States. The upcoming presidential election provides an excellent opportunity to have students consider why the United States has yet to elect a woman…

In this article, the authors suggest a project that social studies teachers can do with students, using the location of the school as a starting point to address the inquiry question: "Whose place is this space?" They provide resources, such as a sample case study and worksheets, to conduct a field-based exercise so that students can…

The purpose of this paper is to explain how to use the scientific method as the framework to introduce mathematical model. Two interdisciplinary activities, targeted for students in grade 6 or grade 7, are explained to show the application of the scientific method while building a mathematical model to investigate the relationship between the…

This study investigated a group of six junior primary school teachers' learning as they collaboratively inquired into teaching practice they observed together. The focus of the study was on understanding how teachers collaborated around observed teaching practice to improve their pedagogy. The design involved four iterative stages of co-planning,…

Offering expertise in the teaching of writing (Kim Jaxon) and the teaching of science (Leslie Atkins Elliott and Irene Salter), this book will help instructors create classrooms in which students use writing to learn and think scientifically. The authors provide concrete approaches for engaging students in practices that mirror the work that…

Disciplinary Literacy is about to go from theory to game plan--taking students from superficial understanding to deep content expertise. And guess what? ReLeah Lent's big secret lies in highlighting each content area's "differences"--advancing a discipline-specific model in which literacy is used as a tool for strategic thinking,…

Through participatory action research with a university researcher, middle school science educators engaged in capacity building training to learn techniques for aesthetically teaching science through drawing as way of effecting meaning-making with and for their struggling readers. As a result, teachers deepened their pedagogical content knowledge…

Informal learning is an important venue for educating the general public about complex socio- scientific issues: intersections of scientific understanding and society. My dissertation is a multi-tiered analysis of how informal education, and particularly informal educators, can leverage learning to respond to one particular socio-scientific issue:…

Developing activities which are effective in assessing what counts in social studies and showing progress is challenging for social-studies teachers. In this article, we explore the three dimensions of the social studies learning area which were identified in the Nature of Social Studies (NSS) scale developed by the National Monitoring Study of…

This study focuses on structured and guided inquiry instruction regarding question asking behaviors and curiosity of elementary students in Turkey. 177 sixth graders in 8 science courses were randomly assigned to treatment groups. Analysis of the data revealed that students in the guided inquiry groups asked higher-cognitive level questions and…