Science education researchers and curriculum documents have advocated scientific inquiry for more than six decades; however, inconsistent findings concerning its effects on students' learning outcomes have been revealed in recent analyses of large-scale international assessment data (e.g., the Programme for International Student Assessment…

Thermal cameras have shown to have utility in secondary school classrooms and undergraduate courses. In this paper, the author argues for their potential in the primary school classroom and presents a range of activities that can be undertaken with thermal cameras (or supplied images). With limited access in mind, the activities in this paper have…

Internationally, there are calls for students to be able to use their scientific understandings to make informed decisions about the world in which they live. Using a mixed methods case study design, this study investigated the impact of behaviours and strategies used by two early career science teachers who taught argumentation about a…

Embedding learning abroad as part of the curriculum has become popular in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the US and European countries. In Australia, the government has actively promoted and committed to funding students' learning abroad in the Indo-Pacific region which is considered to be strategic to the nation's prosperity and public…

Developing students' creativity is an important educational goal in many countries. The Australian Curriculum Authority has mandated that all teachers teach creative thinking across all subjects and grades. However, after more than 10 years working within this mandate, how do science teachers see their role in promoting creativity in the…

Disagreement exists about how to best spark young children's motivation to learn natural science. Both curiosity and wonder are considered important motivational factors for learning during early childhood (0-8 years). This systematic literature review explores research about scientific curiosity and wonder in early childhood education and care…

Immersive Virtual Reality (iVR) can help students visualise and explore complex chemical concepts, such as protein enzyme structures and interactions. We designed a set of collaborative iVR-based learning tasks on the interaction between a protein enzyme and its substrate. We investigated how 18 pairs (36 students) in undergraduate chemistry…

The Australian Curriculum Science has "Patterns, Order and Organisation" as one of its six Key Ideas. In the biological sciences, the structural patterns revealed by observing living things are used to order and organise them in a hierarchical system of binomial nomenclature, in which living things have a generic name and a specific…

Three decades of international recommendations have highlighted the importance of advancing gender equality in achieving the aims of Education for Sustainability (EfS) at all levels of education. However, there has been a persistent disconnect between considerations of gender and sustainability in early childhood education (ECE). This article…

Calls to bring more equity into science education research (McWayne and Melzi, 2023) are most notable for early childhood. We know very little about the teaching of science to infants and toddlers, yet this is where science education begins. To address the dearth in research, we undertook an in-depth intervention study in an Australian early…

This study provides a "narrative synthesis" of the findings published in journal articles from a broad range of scientific fields about the impact of extracurricular activities (ECAs) on the academic success and employability of university students. The analysis included 39 articles from the Scopus and Web of Science databases, published…

Background: In learning astronomy, students need to shift between 3D and 2D representations involving complex interactions between the body and material environment. Little attention has been paid to the iconic nature of this astronomical diagramming. Purpose: This research explored the value for students of diagramming to reveal the structural…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of missing data imputation methods, namely regression imputation (RI), multiple imputation (MI) and k-nearest neighbor (kNN) on differential item functioning (DIF). In this regard, the datasets used in the research were created by deleting some of the data via the missing completely at random…

This paper analyses Australian secondary science teachers' perceptions of their pedagogy and students' classroom engagement based on the Science Capital Teaching Approach (SCTA). Previous research studies related to the idea of teaching to enhance the science capital of secondary students mainly employed qualitative methods to collect data from…

The gender gap in physics in Australian secondary schools remains a significant issue. This study aims to address this problem by examining how physics teachers perceive girls' participation in physics, and how these perceptions influence their approach to gender issues and their potential impact on girls' physics identity. The study uses a…