Background: An overarching goal of school science education is to prepare young people for a rapidly changing and complex world. Middle school science students need more than a basic understanding of science concepts in preparation for further study. Rather, they need the skills to question and evaluate evidence and make decisions about complex…

Teachers, pre-service teachers and teacher educators in Australia are predominately European Australian with a small minority of First Nations people. Those with limited first-hand understanding of First Nations ways of knowing can find it difficult to embed these knowledges across learning areas. This is particularly complex for pre-service…

In recent years, the science education research community has become increasingly interested in the learning domain of Einsteinian physics (EP). While the literature has provided accounts of how EP education can impact secondary and undergraduate students' attitudes and engagement with physics, we still lack such research with younger students.…

Few studies in science education have examined how place-based experiences influence students' STEM career aspirations. Rural school students' lived experiences of place and non-traditional STEM career aspirations such as farming are scarcely considered in dominant narratives around science aspirations and career pathways. Adopting a critical…

This paper explores how geographies of place and familial relationships influence the formation of 'science capital' and a 'science identity', which are widely considered influential to sustained engagement in the sciences. Drawing on interviews with 45 Year 8 students from two diverse locales in Australia, we analyse science-related forms of…

The purpose of this open letter is to report on an innovative cross-cultural science education program that was introduced to upper primary and lower high schools across New South Wales over a four-year period. Titled 'Sky Stories', the program blends current Western science understandings with Indigenous Australian knowledge of astronomy in order…

Originally called Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education, Thinking Science is a program of 30 lessons, usually delivered in Years 7 and 8, that has been shown to improve learner outcomes in science, maths and English. Over recent years, it has grown in popularity in Australia and was the subject of an ARC-funded research project at the…

This case study of a science lesson, on the topic thermal expansion, examines the language demands on students from an integrated science and language perspective. The data were generated during a sequence of 9 lessons on the topic of "States of Matter" in a Grade 7 classroom (12-13 years old students). We identify the language demands…

In this study, we explored the extent to which Australian, Chinese, and Korean middle school students perceived themselves to have scientific literacy as global citizens and attempted to identify differences and/or commonalities in their perceptions. A total of 655 middle school students (8th and 9th grades; 358 girls and 297 boys) from the three…

The aim of this research was to identify whether students of various academic abilities would achieve positive gains in cognitive ability after completing a modified cognitive acceleration program based on the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) program. This research was quasi-experimental in design, with small samples of…

The "community of inquiry" as formulated by C. S. Peirce is grounded in the notion of communities of discipline-based inquiry engaged in the construction of knowledge. The phrase "transforming the classroom into a community of inquiry" is commonly understood as a pedagogical activity with a philosophical focus to guide…

This study investigated the effect on children's science understanding of Internet-based instruction in which children from around the world in grades 4 to 8 observed the Moon for several weeks and then shared their lunar data internationally to find global patterns in the Moon's behavior. Students in two American and one Australian class took the…

In Australia, there is a crisis in science education with students becoming disengaged with canonical science in the middle years of schooling. One recent initiative that aims to improve student interest and motivation without diminishing conceptual understanding is the context-based approach. Contextual units that connect the canonical science…

Some Indigenous students are at risk of academic failure and science teachers have a role in salvaging these equally able students. This article firstly elucidates the research entailed in Indigenous science education in Australia and beyond. Secondly, it reviews the cultural and language barriers when learning science, faced by middle and senior…

This paper examines the experiences reported by scientists and graduate students regarding the experiences that first engaged them in science. The interviews analysed for this paper come from Project Crossover, a mixed-methods study of the transition from graduate student to PhD scientist in the fields of chemistry and physics. This analysis…