Many K-16 educators agree that active learning is a key component for student success in life sciences. At the same time, some instructors are frustrated by inconsistent student participation in these activities and may revert to traditional teaching strategies. Horse caregivers face a similar frustration when they lead a horse to water and it…

Visual data--or visual sources of information--are a crucial part of helping students understand STEM concepts, improve their reading skills, and engage in science and engineering practices (Finson and Pedersen 2011). Indeed, many science and engineering practices require students to make meaning from visual data. When students are developing and…

This study provides an opportunity for young children to express their thoughts about all matters affecting them based on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Accordingly, 20 five-year-old children attending a preschool in Korea participated in this study, reading picture books, including animal matters. I recorded and…

Whereas previous studies show that children are able to make meaning about evolutionary concepts within read-aloud contexts, little is known about how semiotic resources and interaction influence children's meaning making about evolution. This study investigates children's meaning making about evolutionary concepts during a modelling activity…

Adequate mental representations of animals are important for children's personal development, because they result in their appropriate treatment of such animals, which would not, for example, compromise either animals' or children's safety. By using a convenient sample of 101 six- to seven-year old children, this research examined these…

The Institution for Special Education at the Faculty of Pedagogic of the University of Kaposvár has been engaged in animal assisted activities for about three years. Our most recent research program was conducted for over two month in the Spring of 2014 with the involvement of 66 children--all kindergarten and elementary school age--11 special…

Young children engage in essentialist reasoning about natural kinds, believing that many traits are innately determined. This study investigated whether personal experience with second language acquisition could alter children's essentialist biases. In a switched-at-birth paradigm, 5- and 6-year-old monolingual and simultaneous bilingual…

This article reports on a study in which activity theory was used to design, implement, and analyze a 10-week curriculum unit about how honeybees collect nectar with a particular focus on complex systems concepts. Students (n = 42) in a multi-year kindergarten and 1st-grade classroom participated in this study as part of their 10 regular classroom…

Dinosaurs are one of those science topics that draw children in and teach them about concepts like measuring and using descriptive language. Learning about dinosaurs, although not hands-on like observing and recording caterpillar growth, develops critical thinking and introduces animal diversity and the relations between body form and function.…

This study examined the relationship between moderate-level prenatal alcohol exposure, prenatal stress, and postnatal response to a challenging event in 6-month-old rhesus monkeys. Forty-one rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) infants were exposed prenatally to moderate level alcohol, maternal stress, or both. Offspring plasma cortisol and…