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…

Science curriculum and pedagogy offer ideal avenues for teaching young people the critical thinking skills they need to live in a post-truth world. Drawing on the theory of epistemic cognition, we present a selection of research-based pedagogies that have been shown to be effective in developing school students' understanding of knowledge and how…

Effective learning in chemistry education requires students to understand visual representations across multiple conceptual levels. Essential to this process are visuospatial skills which enable students to interpret and manipulate these representations effectively. These abilities allow students to construct mental models that support problem…

This paper, presented in three parts, overviews the current understandings of the Earth System and the relatively recent interdisciplinary field of Earth System Science (ESS) from a school education perspective. The representation of ESS in the Australian Curriculum is explored through the Cross Curriculum Priority area of Sustainability and the…

As we move further into the digital age, the acquisition of digital literacy (DL) and computational thinking (CT) skills is emerging internationally as an essential goal for students in contemporary school curricula. As the world becomes more uncertain and volatile due to impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), international unrest, climate…

Contemporary curricula are increasingly focused on broader framings of student outcomes such as 'competencies', 'capabilities' and '21st century skills', as we realise that declarative disciplinary knowledge no longer, on its own, confers the capacity to deal with the complex and fast-changing world that students are now entering. In mathematics,…

Australian science teachers are asked to involve their students in the scientific processes of inquiry and investigation. The abilities needed for scientific problem-solving ("doing") and the capacity to reflect on the process of problem-solving at a meta level ("understanding") are defined as scientific reasoning competencies…

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…

Learning objectives outline the knowledge and skills to be taught in a subject, thus signaling what is worth learning and what type of thinking is valued. The aim of this syllabus analysis is to determine the cognitive demand of learning objectives in the recently reformed Queensland physics, chemistry and biology syllabus and to analyse whether…

This practitioner reflection explores our integration of the Relational Employability Framework within the Health Research Project capstone unit of a Bachelor of Health Science degree. To address the historically low quality of student reflections, we incorporated image-based reflective activities to improve engagement and depth. These activities…

In a modern and increasingly complex society, students are expected to acquire skills and knowledge to deal with societal challenges, for example, climate change. These include scientific reasoning competencies (SRC), which describe abilities to solve scientific problems by applying scientific skills and knowledge and thus play a crucial role in…

Scientific reasoning competencies are highlighted in science education policy papers and standard documents in various countries around the world and pre-service science teachers are asked to develop them during teacher training as part of their professional competencies. In order to monitor the development of pre-service science teachers'…

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) education has been actively implemented around the world recently. ICT curriculum in schools is intended to improve students' programming-oriented thinking rather than to train them as programmers. The core of ICT education is 'computational thinking'. Computational thinking is taking an approach to…

Australia has a National Numeracy Learning Progression (NNLP) that is strongly aligned with the Australian Curriculum: Mathematics. This article examines how a sub-element within this progression could be impacting students' learning of Science. This sub-element is firmly based on Mathematics education research as to how students build their…

Scientific reasoning competencies are relevant science competencies and therefore the development of assessment instruments for scientific reasoning competencies has become an integral part of science education research. However, some authors have questioned the validity of the instruments available so far, since their psychometric quality has not…