Learning about the Earth through geoscience education is important in order to make informed decisions about the future of the Earth. The aim of this study is to examine students' conceptual development on geoscience subjects based on inquiry-based learning. 7th grade students participated in this study. The researcher prepared lesson plans and…

Mechanistic reasoning, or reasoning systematically through underlying factors and relationships that give rise to phenomena, is a powerful thinking strategy that allows one to explain and make predictions about phenomena. This article synthesizes and builds on existing frameworks to identify essential characteristics of students' mechanistic…

The "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") call for a high level of classroom discourse (Lee, Quinn, and Valdés 2013). To engage all students, including English learners (ELs), in this form of discourse, educators have turned to talk moves (e.g., "Say more about that"), defined as general-purpose tools for…

Focusing on the science knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge that teachers need to realize the vision of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in their classrooms, this article presents findings from efforts to (a) adapt existing criteria and design heuristics for educative features of curriculum materials and apply them in the…

Genetics is a core topic in the biology curriculum of many countries. Learning genetics is difficult for multiple reasons, including the need to reason about complex mechanisms--and to link mechanisms--that occur at different time and space scales. Previous research in genetics education explores students' understandings of inheritance patterns or…

Games have been regarded as a potential vehicle for enhancing student learning. Previous studies mainly focused on learning outcomes; however, the learning processes and dynamic in-game behaviours of students who are immersed in a game context are relatively undiscovered. The purposes of this study were to develop an educational game, "Bio…

Argumentation, and the production of scientific arguments are critical elements of inquiry that are necessary for helping students become scientifically literate through engaging them in constructing and critiquing ideas. This case study employed a mixed methods research design to examine the development in 5th grade students' practices of oral…

Purpose: This paper describes and exemplifies a pedagogical heuristic for promoting critical literacy in science. Design/methodology/approach: One way to support critical literacy in science is through a linguistically informed pedagogical heuristic called 5Es -- Enquire, Engage, Examine, Exercise and Extend. Findings: This paper describes the…

The main aim of this research is to examine the effect of an instructional design based on the Algo-Heuristic Theory of Instruction (AHTI) on students' mathematics performance and logical thinking skills in the subject of 7th grade mathematics. The research is grounded in a mixed method. In the quantitative part of the research, a…

In science and engineering education, the use of heuristics has been introduced as a way of understanding the world, and as a way to approach problem-solving and design. However, important consequences for the use of heuristics are that they do not always guarantee a correct solution. Learning by Design has been identified as a pedagogical…

The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of guided, inquiry-based laboratory activities using the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach and self-evaluation on students' science achievement. The study involved three sixth grade classes studying an electricity unit taught by the same primary school teacher. Before the study began, one…

This study explores one teacher's instructional method for teaching life sciences using argumentation and argumentative writing rather than simple templates for writing claims and evidence. The microethnographic discourse analytic case study reported here included the teacher and 26 "advanced" eighth-grade students in a suburban middle…

This study examined the extent to which fifth-grade students participate in online argumentation and the argument patterns they produced about the inquiry-based investigations completed using the Science Writing Heuristic approach in their science classes. One hundred twenty-nine students from five classes of two teachers in a Midwestern public…

This study investigated the effect of the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach on grade 9 students' understanding of chemical change and mixture concepts. Four intact classes taught by two chemistry teachers from a Turkish public high school were selected for the study; one class was assigned as the treatment group, and the other class was…

The purpose of this study was to reconstruct writers' reasoning process as reflected in their written texts. The codes resulting from the text analysis were related to cognitive operations, ranging from simple to more sophisticated ones. The sequence of the cognitive operations as the text unfolded represents the writer's cognitive pathway at the…