Ensuring all students have opportunities to engage in scientific argumentation is a key goal for K-12 students. While research has shown that teachers' beliefs about argumentation can impact their classroom instruction and that students in low socioeconomic status (SES) schools are less likely to experience challenging science learning, there is…

There is international concern over persistent low rates of participation in postcompulsory science--especially the physical sciences--within which there is a notable underrepresentation of girls/women. This paper draws on data collected from a survey of more than 9,000 10/11-year-old pupils and 170 interviews (with 92 children and 78 parents)…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how situational interest of high school students was triggered during a field trip to an aquarium. Although the role of museums in stimulating interest among students has been acknowledged for some time, empirical evidence about how the specific variable of a museum setting might trigger situational…

In this paper, we examine the interactional ways that families make meaning from biological exhibits during a visit to an interactive science center. To understand the museum visits from the perspectives of the families, we use ethnographic and discourse analytic methods, including pre- and postvisit interviews, videotaped observations of the…

This research examined 9- to 15-year-old children's understandings about basic genetics concepts and how they integrated those understandings with their broader theories of biology. A cross-sectional case study method was used to explore the students' (n = 90) understandings of basic inheritance and molecular genetics concepts such as gene and…