This column includes activities inspired by children's literature. This month's issue shows that allowing students to use both photographs and information presented through technology helps them begin to construct an understanding of landforms and bodies of water and use models to describe these concepts. This months trade books are: (1) "Our…

Elementary teachers in the United States are tasked with teaching all core subject matter and have training that involves many topics, which may limit the depth of their subject matter knowledge. Since they have low content knowledge, they often feel less confident about teaching technical subject matter, such as science (Bleicher "Journal of…

Teaching biology is characterized by a great number of concepts and facts. It is very difficult to concisely represent all important concepts and facts. In order to effectively present important concepts such as pollination and pollinators, concept maps have been applied. In particular, the pedagogical experiment was applied to determine whether…

Terry Russell and Linda McGuigan of the University of Liverpool draw on their classroom research to offer their thoughts on argumentation, an aspect of "working scientifically," with contributions from two recent research collaborators: Janet Hamilton teaching 4-6 year-olds and Joanne Geldard teaching science to 10-11 year-olds. Between…

In an effort to document teachers' enactments of new reform in science teaching, valid and scalable measures of science teaching using engineering design are needed. This study describes the development and testing of an approach for documenting and characterizing elementary science teachers' multiday enactments of engineering design-based science…

The Maker Movement (Dougherty 2012) highlights innovation and creativity through "activities focused on designing, building, modifying, and/or repurposing material objects, for playful or useful ends, oriented toward making a 'product' of some sort that can be used, interacted with, or demonstrated" (Martin 2015, p. 31). When engaged in…

The "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") and the guiding "Framework" invite students to engage in practices of scientific argumentation and modeling through which they can collaborate as young scientists and develop understandings of disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts. This article shares…

Engaging learners in modeling practices can promote substantial science learning, and anchoring science teaching in societal issues can promote student motivation to learn and make learning experiences more meaningful. However, elementary teachers have had few prior experiences with either modeling or socioscientific issues (SSI) and so are…

This study explores how K-8 critically conscious dual-language science teachers (CCDLSTs) working with bilingual learners (BLs) practice their critical consciousness via the four tenets of dual-language education: ideological clarity, pedagogical perspective and clarity, access for all, and equitable spaces (IPAE). This study is informed by the…

This study investigates the use of specific educative features for supporting the teaching of nature of science (NOS) during read-alouds of elementary science trade books. Educative features are components of educative curriculum materials that aim to increase teachers' content knowledge and support effective instructional practices. Understanding…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the level of pre-service primary school teachers' self-efficacy beliefs in science teaching and their level of determining taxonomy, strategy, and teaching methods-techniques for the curriculum's objectives in primary science education. A total of 101 pre-service teachers who were…

This research aims to analyse the process of grasping the Solar System by the students during their learning activities in which we used an animation film and other educational means (geographic globe, schematic drawings, 3D model, etc.), as well as the results obtained. In order to achieve this goal, we organized an action-research within…

Adding pictures to a text is very common in today's education and might be especially beneficial for elementary school children, whose abilities to read and understand pure text have not yet been fully developed. Our study examined whether adding pictures supports learning of a biology text in fourth grade and whether the text modality (spoken or…

In spring 2020, COVID-19 seismically shifted the education landscape as schooling moved online. We report a small-scale mixed-methods study of how that upheaval affected three-dimensional science learning in elementary school classrooms, and how the situation changed when school resumed, in modified form, in fall 2020. Teachers with experience in…

By placing the Focused Assessment approach within the TAPS pyramid framework, schools are beginning to find a number of ways in which learning in science can be enhanced for pupils. The quotations in this article provide examples of the ways in which science subject leaders (SSL) describe the impact of TAPS on their pupils.