School closures because of natural phenomena, such as COVID-19, underscore long-standing gaps in access to science education in the United States of America, particularly for young students. When educators have to pivot to deliver virtual instruction, it is important to identify feasible remote learning strategies for science content across formal…

In a 2012 blog post, John Maeda discusses the idea that while science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education plays an important role in innovation, limitations exist when we focus exclusively on STEM. Maeda advocates for the addition of the "A" for Art to the acronym, insisting that the arts promote the creativity and…

STEM family e-learning involves increasing the engagement in STEM home learning activities. STEM home learning activities range from exploring subjects such as science technology, engineering, and maths through a fun play based K-6 STEM curriculum. The family are trained to act as teachers, mentors, and coaches to the K-6 members. Families from…

"Energy" is a term often used in everyday language. Even young children associate energy with the food they eat, feeling tired after playing soccer, or when asked to turn the lights off to save light energy. However, they may not have the scientific conceptual understanding of energy at this age. Teaching energy and matter could be…

Background and purpose: Research in formative assessment often pays close attention to the strategies which can be used by teachers. However, less emphasis in the literature seems to have been paid to study the application of formative assessment designs in practice. In this paper, we argue that a formative assessment design that we call…

As education researchers who have studied the feedback patterns of teachers using an argument-based inquiry approach, the authors have found a simple way to do this: Talk less but offer better feedback. In this article, the authors discuss the use of teacher redirects as a way of improving the quality of their feedback so that students can engage…

Discover discovery bottles! These wide-mouth plastic containers of any size filled with objects of different kinds can be terrific tools for science explorations and a great way to cultivate science minds in a K-2 science classroom. In addition, the author has found them to be a useful, inexpensive, and engaging way to help students develop skills…

Research Findings: This article describes major theories and research on math cognition across the fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and education and connects these literatures to intervention practices. Commercially available math intervention programs were identified and evaluated using the following questions: (a) Did neuroscience…

In this commentary, the authors bring insights from their work on science-literacy integration at the elementary level to bear on the ongoing conversation about disciplinary literacy at the middle and secondary levels. In particular, the authors discuss what they have learned about inquiry, disciplinary reading strategies, and the role of text in…

Insects are fascinating creatures--especially when you and your students get up close and personal with them! To that end, the authors facilitated an inquiry-based investigation with an emphasis on identification of the different types of insects found in the school yard, their characteristics, their habitat, and what they eat, while engaging the…

We focused on young, low-income, African American children in first- to third-grade classrooms where they experienced varied forms of interactive, participatory, and dialogic pedagogy in the context of yearlong, integrated science-literacy instruction. Using conversations that started around children's own science journals, which were an important…

This study explores young children's images of science and scientists, their sources for scientific knowledge, and the nature of their science-related experiences. A cross-sectional design was used to study how students' ideas differ over the first three years of elementary school. A modified version of the Draw-a-Scientist Test (DAST) and a…

This article shows how various dialogic discourse strategies were used in read-alouds of English science information books in a 2nd-grade bilingual classroom. Using a variety of discursive strategies, Ibett encouraged her Spanish-speaking students to provide explanations and reasoning related to science ideas. Similarly, she used intertextual…

This study explored the nature of science (NOS) assessments K-4 classroom teachers developed for measuring students' understandings of NOS elements. We used the Views of Nature of Science Questionnaire-Form VNOS-D2 (Views of Nature of Science Elementary School Version 2) and interviews to verify that teachers' conceptions of NOS were sufficient to…

Acrostic poems make use of a keyword written vertically, where each line of the poem begins with a letter of the keyword. The structure of this formula poem combined with teacher modeling provides a scaffold for students, showing them how to think flexibly and develop ideas and choose interesting words. Moreover, encoding information in poetic…