Professional development has long been viewed as crucial to sustained improvement in the quality of primary science education. This paper considers professional development beyond the context of a specific program by examining how the science teaching efficacy beliefs and practices vary between teachers who both have and have not engaged with…

This study explored elementary students' reasoning about the life cycles of various organisms, including insects and amphibians. The study took place in a private school in Lebanon with 24 fifth-grade students. Students participated in a life cycle unit with pre and post-written assessments about what they learned and interviews to help determine…

This study developed a local climate change curriculum that incorporates generative learning strategies and emphasizes the creation of visually engaging educational content. The curriculum's impact was assessed by examining generative learning through recall and knowledge transfer, as well as declarative knowledge across elementary students with…

Becoming proficient in scientific discourse such as argumentation or developing explanations can be challenging for students, including neurodivergent students (e.g., autistic students, students with learning disabilities, students with ADHD). Students need to practice developing arguments and explanations as well as sharing their conclusions with…

As a hallmark of authentic science practices, students need to enact epistemic agency to shape/reshape the key aspects of their inquiry work as a collaborative community. This study elaborates an emergent temporal mechanism for engaging students' epistemic agency: "reflective structuration" by which members of a classroom community…

This study aims to evaluate the impact of STEM education on the creative design skills of trainee teachers. The sample for the study was made up of third-year prospective teachers studying at the Department of Science Education and Department of Elementary Mathematics Education in the 2020-2021 school year. Embedded mixed design, which is a type…

As content literacy intervention is expanded in schools, data-based decision-making practices need to also advance, especially in the areas of science. Vocabulary-matching curriculum-based measures (VM-CBM) may allow educators to identify students needing additional support in science vocabulary to assist with using and comprehending disciplinary…

The complexity of science visual literacy education calls for a better understanding of elementary teacher visual literacy practices. Teachers play a key role in developing students' visual fluency through the visual literacy skills they develop in their pedagogical practices. Addressing these gaps in the research, this dissertation focused on the…

Background: In science education asynchronous online interactions have increased dramatically during the recent pandemic and some of these practices will stay. One of the characteristics in asynchronous exchanges is the spacing and sequencing of online interaction. It means that dialogue partners do not necessarily receive immediate feedback as is…

In-service professional development is important for improving teaching. However, little research has examined how the roles, beliefs, and backgrounds of the individuals providing professional development can best be leveraged to create effective professional development programmes. A particularly understudied group are community-based On-Site…

This study aims to develop a science, environment, technology, and society (SETS)-based learning module to enhance critical thinking skills among elementary school students. Employing a research and development (R&D) approach adapting the Borg and Gall model, this module is designed to enrich the learning process of natural and social sciences…

This research investigated the impact of a professional development program on enhancing fifth-grade environmental science teacher efficacy through place-based education (PBE) practices--the Meaningful Watershed Educational Experiences (MWEE) Professional Development Training aimed to promote teacher engagement and increase pedagogical content…

This paper argues that meaning-making with multimodal representations in science learning is always contextualized within a genre and, conversely, what constitutes an ongoing genre also depends on a multimodal coordination of speech, gesture, diagrams, symbols, and material objects. In social semiotics, a genre is a culturally evolved way of doing…

Computational models are increasingly being used in K-12 science classrooms to engage students in developing and testing explanations of phenomena. However, research has only begun to consider whether integrating computational models into science instruction could be particularly beneficial to students from diverse backgrounds, including a…

To stimulate the intellectual curiosity of elementary school students, we conducted a workshop in distance education aimed at exploring the microscopic world inside a cell. In this workshop, elementary school students motivated to learn more on the subject of science analyzed movies of the Brownian motion of micrometer-sized particles suspended in…