Background: The question of the efficiency of withholding answers and the physical manipulation of material in science education has become the target of a large number of researchers (proponents of the Cognitive Load Theory) in recent years. However, no research has been found examining the contribution of these elements of teaching to the…

This research aims to support the "teaching of concepts" in the 3rd grade Life Science Course with activities. A quasi-experimental design (selective) with a pre-test and post-test control group, one of the quantitative research designs, was used in the research. Using songs, poems, rhymes, acrostics, stories, fairy tales,…

A set of core ideas in the life sciences revolve around genetics, variation, and inheritance. While the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS; NGSS Lead States 2013) emphasize teaching and learning about these concepts across K-12 grades, it is critical for early learners to begin to develop understanding of them. By the end of fifth…

Martin Wagenschein's ideas of prioritising phenomena in making sense of science processes have influenced the German "Lehrkunstdidaktik" (art of teaching) approach. This article sketches a "Lehrkunstdidaktik" teaching unit inspired by Michael Faraday's "Chemical History of a Candle." It shows how primary and lower…

This article describes a self-guided, story-like game with creative drawing for grades 3-5 that teaches the evolution concepts of adaptation, natural selection, ecosystem dynamics, inheritance, and mutation following the "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS"). Drawing reinforces concepts through emphasis on students'…

Seagrass ecosystems are widespread, valuable, and threatened. We have used this system as a model to teach 3rd-7th grade students about food webs, the interconnectedness of ecosystems, ecosystem services, and the effects of human activity on coastal systems. Our objective was to increase student understanding of seagrass ecosystems and other key…

This paper gives an example of how to address the challenge of designing a learning progression that describes student thinking, with the necessary specificity to align instructional opportunities and assessment tools. We describe the Conceptual Underpinnings of Evolution project and the iterative process of developing a novel learning progression…

The spread of COVID-19 has caused a high demand for online learning or self-learning at home. We focus on evaluating which media is most suitable for self-learning for the third graders. For effective assessment of children's learning, the study adopted AEIOU: Awareness; Enjoyment; Interest; Opinion formation; and Understanding as the evaluation…

This naturalistic observational study examined teacher-child interactions in a third-grade science classroom. Of interest was the extent to which the quality of teacher-child relationships was associated with various categories of interaction, and students' understanding of science concepts. Teacher-child relationships of an intact class of 17…

Background: The coherence of learners' pre-instruction conceptions has been debated for some time. Studies on conceptions of force, specifically, have produced very different results in different contexts around the world. In this study, an integrative theoretical framework linking semantic differences across languages to concept learning in…

Evolution by natural selection is key to understanding life and of considerable practical importance in public health, medicine, biotechnology, and agriculture. "The Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS) include natural selection among several evolutionary concepts that all third-graders should know. This article explores a novel…

Representation in science is anything that stands for something else--drawings, pictures, graphs, or other representational forms (Danish et al. 2020). Representations serve as public displays of phenomena that make aspects of those phenomena explicit (Gilbert 2008). They can serve to make the invisible visible, communicate ideas, display…

Learning about heredity is important across the K-12 continuum. However, these ideas may be challenging for students. We examined third-grade students' ideas about heredity in the context of a new, six-week, model-based science unit that uses corn as a model organism to support students' ideas about heredity. We analyzed data collected during…

In this study, we explore how cross-linguistic differences can contribute to children's scientific thinking. We compared first and third grade Chinese students' pre-instructional ideas of the earth expressed in clinical interviews with that of their English-speaking and Greek-speaking counterparts (as recorded in the literature). Inspired by a…

This study investigated third graders' use and variation of linguistic resources when writing a science explanation. Using systemic functional linguistics as a framework, we purposefully selected and analyzed writing samples of students with high and low scores to explore how the students' use of language features (i.e., lexicogrammatical…