The COVID-19 health crisis brought about transformations in education systems. In Chile, the ministerial authorities prioritized the school curriculum, stressing certain learning objectives over others. This paper seeks to uncover the social functions underlying curriculum prioritization for the subject of natural sciences. To do this, the…

Astronomy has great potential to attract children toward science and improve their scientific literacy. However, it has a relatively small presence within the school curricula worldwide. In Chile, home of the world's largest telescopes, astronomy is even more relevant in science education, but the presence of astronomical content within the…

Constructing explanations of scientific phenomena is a high-leverage practice that promotes student understanding. In the context of this study, we acknowledge that children are used to receiving explanations from teachers. However, they are rarely encouraged to construct explanations about the causes and consequences of phenomena. We modified a…

The Hybrid Text Comprehension cloze (HyTeC-cloze) (Kleijn et al. Lang Test 36:553--572, 2019) is a procedure developed for the Dutch language that has been proved to be a valid and reliable measure of text comprehension beyond the sentence level. Given its advantages, including its relatively rapid construction and scoring and performance compared…

Background: There is a growing view that 'Big Ideas of science education' are useful for teaching science but there is not much knowledge of how teachers work with them. Purpose: This study explores the conceptualisation and practice of the use of Big Ideas of science education by primary and secondary teachers in Chile. Sample: A total of 63…

The discovery or re-construction of scientific explanations and understanding based on experience is a complex process, for which school learning often uses shortcuts. On the basis of the example of analyzing real seismic measurements, we propose a computer-facilitated collaborative learning scenario which meets many of the requirements for…

In "Hands-On Science Mysteries for Grades 3-6," the authors connect science to real-world situations by investigating actual mysteries and phenomena, such as the strange heads on Easter Island, the ghost ship "Mary Celeste," and the "Dancing Stones" of Death Valley. The labs are designed to encourage the development…