Ninth-grade students with learning difficulties typically underperform those without learning difficulties, particularly in an integrated geoscience course. Despite the growing demand for STEM careers, science remains challenging to understand and inaccessible to many, especially those with learning difficulties (Vavougios et al., 2016).…

Background: Video lectures which include the teachers' presence have become increasingly common. As teacher enthusiasm is a nonverbal cue in video lectures, more and more studies are focusing on this topic. However, little research has been carried out on the interactions between teacher enthusiasm and prior knowledge when learning from video…

Educational standards and instructional frameworks aim to foster students' scientific literacy, especially their conceptual knowledge. Previous research has examined several instructional approaches to foster students' conceptual learning. Reliable and adequate use of technical terms in science instruction is also essential for fostering students'…

This study investigated the effects of teachers' use of "focus questions" on students' knowledge structures and classroom teaching-learning process by re-analyzing selected data from a quasi-experimental pre-post video study (Wadouh, 2007). Focus questions are content-related anchoring questions highlighting the key content taught in…

This study addresses the need for innovative research approaches in science education for understanding better the inter-relationships between emotion and cognition in learning, using a sociological perspective. Our perspective draws upon the concept of emotional energy that is described as an outcome from successful social interactions during…

This study investigates the representations and understandings of electric fields expressed by Chinese high school students 15 to 16 years old who have not received high school level physics instruction. The physics education research literature has reported students' conceptions of electric fields post-instruction as indicated by students'…

This study investigates classroom organisation and interaction focusing on phases of activity. The detailed in-depth case study is based on video recordings of 1 science unit consisting of 11 lessons about biological evolution in a Swedish ninth-grade class (aged 15). The study illuminates the temporality of student participation as a fundamental…

This paper examines the process of high school students' planning investigations in the chemistry laboratory across two consecutive academic years in terms of their actions and their progress. The context is a set of five inquiry-based laboratory tasks in which participants (9th and 10th graders, 14-15 and 15-16 years of age) are required to plan…

In this study, we examined how a teacher may make a difference to the way interest develops in a science classroom, especially for students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. We adopted a methodology based on the concept of "taste for science" drawing on the work of John Dewey and Pierre Bourdieu. We investigated through…

The effectiveness of a refutational text in addressing the alternative conceptions held by secondary school students on the topic of wave propagation in an elastic medium was explored in this study. The refutational text, which was 816 words long and featured the particle-spring model, was found to be more effective in promoting conceptual change…

Enactment of scientific inquiry in classroom has attracted a great attention of science educators around the world. In this study, we examined two competent teachers' (one Grade 9 chemistry teacher and one Grade 4 science teacher) enactment of scientific inquiry in selected teaching units to reveal the characteristics of enacted inquiry at…

Increased attention to the relationships between affect and learning has led to the development of machine-learned models that are able to identify students' affective states in computerized learning environments. Data for these affect detectors have been collected from multiple modalities including physical sensors, dialogue logs, and logs of…

Empirical analysis of secondary biology classrooms revealed that, on average, 68% of teaching time in Germany revolved around processing tasks. Quality of instruction can thus be assessed by analyzing the quality of tasks used in classroom discourse. This quasi-experimental study analyzed how teachers used tasks in 38 videotaped biology lessons…

Science classrooms in the United States have become more diverse with respect to the variety of languages spoken by students. This qualitative study used ethnographic methods to investigate the discourse and practices of two ninth grade science classrooms. Approximately 44% of students included in the study were designated as English learners. The…