Purpose: The aim of this study was to shed some light on the extent to which digital literacy, epistemological belief and reading motivation and engagement predict pre-service teachers' capabilities in teaching 21st century skills. Design/methodology/approach: 21st Century Skills Teaching Scale, Internet based Epistemological Beliefs Scale,…

From once being synonymous with reading and writing, literacy, as a concept has expanded in the last three decades to today being associated with multiple meaning making forms and competences. Impactful, in this shift, has been the research orientation of New Literacy Studies. Besides academia, the literacy concept has also had a major influence…

This paper discusses how primary school students, who are writing together in the context of inquiry learning, explicitly orient to knowing of oneself and others within the peer group. Using Conversation Analysis, we disclose the conversational functions of assertions holding 'I know', 'you know' and 'we know'. First, students position themselves…

Background: Further developing students' thinking about knowledge and knowing in science (epistemic beliefs) is considered a normative goal of science education in many countries around the world, even for elementary-school-aged children. Aims: The goal of the present study was to introduce and evaluate a new intervention in science education…

The promotion of an adequate understanding of science is a central goal of science education, even in elementary school. In this study, we analyzed the effects of a recently developed science intervention program aimed at fostering the understanding of science as well as the motivation of elementary school--aged boys and girls. In prior research,…

This article explores children's development of problem-solving practices through multimodal engagements in digital activities. The study is based on analyses of a video recorded peer group activity in which two children, within the context of a project on computational thinking using the software "Scratch," collaboratively work to solve…

Research shows that the beliefs individuals hold about knowledge and knowing (epistemic beliefs) influence learning approaches and outcomes. However, little is known about the nature of children's epistemic beliefs and how best to measure these. In this pilot study, 11 Australian children (in Grade 4 or Grade 6) were asked to "draw, write and…

Despite a seemingly fragmented interactional context, teachers and students in classrooms routinely manage to co-construct coherent, inter-related, and individually adapted learning trajectories distributed over days and weeks. The aim of this article is to explore with what interactional resources progressivity is accomplished in learning…

Scientific reasoning abilities are already developing in elementary-school-aged children and enable them to understand the world around them. The goal of the current study was to develop a new instrument for 8- to 10-year-old children in Grades 3 and 4 to measure their understanding of the steps of the "scientific inquiry cycle" (SIC).…

Do social cognition and epistemological understanding promote elementary school children's experimentation skills? To investigate this question, 402 children (ages 8, 9, and 10) in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades were assessed for their experimentation skills, social cognition (advanced theory of mind [AToM]), epistemological understanding (understanding…

This study aimed to investigate the structure and the validity of the cognitive components of reading in Thai, which is a language with a high degree of grapheme-phoneme correspondence. The participants were 1181 fourth-grade students in 29 schools in Thailand, divided into two subsamples for data analysis. Phoneme isolation, rapid colour naming,…

The article investigates the interplay between the meaning given to certain key expressions and pupils' understanding of science subject matter, in a qualitative study of learning.The intentional-expressive approach to the epistemological role of language use served as a theoretical frame, within the wider context of phenomenographic research on…

This paper posits that Inventing Games (IG), an aspect of the games curriculum based on principles of Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU), opens up important spaces for teaching social and ethical understanding. Games have long been regarded as a site for moral development. For most teachers, however, ethical principles have been seen as…

The current study examines the personal epistemology of fourth-grade elementary school teachers from Germany (n = 10) and the United States (n = 10) to gain a more nuanced understanding of teachers' beliefs about knowledge and knowing through a cross-cultural lens. Analyses of semi-structured interviews reveal similarities and differences in the…

During the past few decades, researchers from a cognitive science tradition and a sociocultural perspective on learning have discussed how to understand students' conceptions of the earth. In this article, some of the questions discussed in this debate are elaborated in relation to meaning making in educational settings. The aim is to illustrate…