Despite recommendations from science educational standards which claim that science teaching should engage students in scientific investigations the same way scientists practice their profession to discover the unknown, thereby allowing students to actively construct their own knowledge, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that this may…

The purpose of the study was to examine how integrated science and disciplinary literacy instruction influenced the quality of science informational text produced by first-grade students and student perceptions these young children held about scientists. The disciplinary literacy instruction took place over the course of 8 weeks (three 20-30-min…

One of the challenges for analysing science classroom discourse is a better understanding of intercontextual relationships in the learning process. In this paper, we used orientations from ethnography in education to organise and propose an analytical metaphor called the hourglass approach. It involves three phases of analysis that correspond to…

The Next-Generation Science Standards (NGSS) challenge primary teachers and students to work and think like scientists and engineers as they strive to understand complex concepts. Teachers and teacher educators can leverage what is already known about inquiry teaching as they plan instruction to help students meet the new standards. This…

Difficulties in students' understanding of the spherical model of the Earth have been shown in previous studies. One of the reasons for these difficulties lies in beliefs and preliminary knowledge that hinder the interpretation of the scientific knowledge, the other reason may lie in the low level of verbal and visuo-spatial abilities. The study…