Professional development providers often struggle with how some teachers take up and internalise new instructional practices while others have difficulty implementing new ideas and strategies. Teacher personal characteristics account for only part of this differentiation in learning, and there are unanswered questions regarding how organisational…

This research aims to design and apply a lesson plan to satisfy 3rd-grade inclusive education students' individual learning needs on the subject of plant life cycle, and to develop three instruction materials based on this lesson plan. In the first stage of this three-staged research, visually impaired students' individual learning needs were…

Teacher noticing scholars are just beginning to explore how to support noticing that is responsive to students' cultural resources. The theoretical basis of the teacher noticing literature affords scholars a range of paths for understanding student resources, only some of which are described in the literature. In this article, we offer a…

We investigated the effectiveness of a sustained and spiraled content literacy intervention that emphasizes building domain and topic knowledge schemas and vocabulary for elementary-grade students. The Model of Reading Engagement (MORE) intervention underscores thematic lessons that provide an intellectual structure for helping students connect…

Current U.S. science education reform efforts call for engineering to be included as part of science instruction at all grade levels. As students experience engineering instruction alongside science, an important question is how students conceptualize the nature of those two fields, and especially the extent to which they differentiate science and…

This study expands and complicates ideas about what makes text complex in picturebooks. The study involved multimodal analysis of one visually and scientifically complex picturebook, "Gravity," by Jason Chin. The authors also analyzed a transcript of three third graders discussing the text. This analysis illuminated how student talk…

Promoting relevant, meaningful, and equitable science teaching learning environments for both teachers and students has become a critical objective for science education. To achieve this goal, fostering students' sensemaking experiences in science becomes critical. Working towards such a committed, and equitable sensemaking environment is closely…

Learning progressions have been demarcated by some for science education, or only concerned with levels of sophistication in student thinking as determined by logical analyses of the discipline. We take the stance that learning progressions can be leveraged in mathematics education as a form of curriculum research that advances a linked…

This study investigates the impact of an elementary engineering education teacher professional development program on student learning. The results show a significant increase in students' knowledge in science from pre- to post-test as well as in engineering design from grade two to grade four. Further, the study uses multilevel modeling to…

English learners (ELs) benefit from inquiry-based science instruction that includes explicit attention to language learning goals. The purpose of this article is to share a third-grade unit on forces and motion which integrates science inquiry and writing in science notebooks with the goal of developing ELs' engagement in science, conceptual…

Against a backdrop of advocacy for interdisciplinary STEM curricula, this paper explores the design principles underpinning a three-year longitudinal research project that develops and evaluates interdisciplinary mathematics and science learning sequences involving multiple teachers and student cohorts across the primary school years. The research…

Relative to their middle and high school teacher counterparts, elementary science teachers are both uniquely situated and uniquely challenged for excellent science instruction. More than 90 percent of elementary teachers work in self-contained classrooms, meaning they have opportunities to connect their science instruction with English language…

Inquiry-based science interventions aim to improve students' science proficiency by helping them understand scientific processes. In these interventions, students conduct hands-on investigations of science concepts and everyday phenomena, construct explanations for what they observe, consider alternative explanations, and communicate and justify…

With the increasing emphasis on integrating engineering into K-12 classrooms to help meet the needs of our complex and multidisciplinary society, there is an urgent need to investigate teachers' engineering-focused professional development experiences as they relate to teacher learning, implementation, and student achievement. This study…

Informal science opportunities provide authentic experiences to stimulate students' interests in science and engineering and foster their curiosity through problem-based investigations. STEMulate Engineering Academy was designed to provide children (Grades 3-5) engineering opportunities and offer teachers a unique professional development…