Background: Elementary Science Education is struggling with multiple challenges. National and State test results confirm the need for deeper understanding in elementary science education. Moreover, national policy statements and researchers call for increased exposure to engineering and technology in elementary science education. The basic…

The purposes of this study were to (a) develop and validate instruments to assess elementary students' scientific creativity and science inquiry, (b) investigate the relationship between the two competencies, and (c) compare the two competencies among different grade level students. The scientific creativity test was composed of 7 open-ended items…

Many young people today are enacting rich literacies in their lives through the use of digital technologies. While this may be so, there is a narrowing of literacy instruction under neoliberal reforms at a time of increasing informational and digital technologies. In this article, the author draws on an ethnographic study of high school multimedia…

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of an activity set developed according to the inquiry-based learning (IBL) approach in the unit "Particulate Structure of Matter" on students' critical-thinking skills in science and technology courses. The study was conducted with 90 students from the 6th grade attending four, 6th…

To fully consider the potential of informational texts to serve as mentor texts in the elementary classroom, the authors propose an inquiry about the intersections among the author's intentions, instructional contexts, a teacher's approaches, and students' responses to informational texts when contemplating the roles these texts might serve. In…

A fifth grade life science lesson was implemented through a lesson study approach in two fifth grade classrooms. The research lesson was designed by a team of four elementary school teachers with the goal of emphasizing engineering practices consistent with the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS) (Achieve Inc. 2013). The fifth…

The notion that teacher education should emphasize high-leverage practice, which is research based, represents the complexity of the subject matter, bolsters teachers' understanding of student learning, is adaptable to different curricular circumstances, and can be mastered with regular use, has traction in scholarship. Nevertheless, how teacher…

This article focuses on the impact of a professional play that we developed in order to introduce elementary learners of an urban school to the research of a scientist working at a local university. The play was written in a way that might increase student understandings of the nature of science, scientific inquiry, the identity of scientists, and…

Research on scientific reasoning plays an essential role at the intersection of cognitive development and science education. As only few paper-pencil-tests exist to assess scientific reasoning abilities of elementary school children, the goal of the current study was the development of a new reliable and valid instrument. We focused on the…

With only 34% of 8th grade students earning a rating of proficient or higher in science education (from the 2011 National Assessment of Education Progress data), much work is needed in our classrooms to achieve the new more rigorous performance expectations found in the "Next Generation Science Standards." For decades, researchers have…

The inquiry-based approach to learning has proven to be quite effective, since Socrates, but it is difficult to found good questions to induce reasoning. Many sources explain wrongly some experimental results, which can be used as discrepant events. Some use the breaking of a ruler with a newspaper to "show" that the atmospheric pressure…

Scientific inquiry is one of the science curriculum content, "Scientific inquiry" - Pedagogical Content Knowledge is the face of scientific inquiry and teachers - of course pedagogical content knowledge and scientific inquiry a teaching practice with more direct expertise. Pre-service teacher training phase of acquisition of knowledge is…

Children with autism may seem to not care about things or have the same range of emotions as those of us who see them and care for them. But they do have empathy and they can be taught how to communicate it, says the author, a teacher of children with autism. We simply need to listen to them, watch them, and be with them in their moment.

P. R. Halmos recalled a conversation with R. L. Moore where Moore quoted a Chinese proverb. That proverb provides a summation of the justification of the methods employed in teaching students to do mathematics with a modified Moore method (MMM). It states, "I see, I forget; I hear, I remember; I do, I understand." In this paper we build…

Designed to foster "inquiry-mindedness," this book prepares graduate students to develop a conceptual framework and conduct inquiry projects that are linked to ongoing conversations in a field. The authors examine different ways of knowing and show how to identify a research question; build arguments and support them with evidence; make informed…