Technology can be both a blessing and a curse in the classroom. Although technology can provide greater access to information and increase student engagement, if screen time replaces time spent outside, then students stand to lose awareness and connectivity to the surrounding natural environment. This article describes how Google Earth can foster…

Engaging children in authentic investigation opens the doors for them to gain deep conceptual understanding in science. As students engage in investigation, they experience the practices employed by scientists and engineers, as highlighted in the Next Generation Science Standards (Achieve Inc. 2013). They also begin to understand the nature of…

Demonstrating is a traditional method in teaching science that can raise interest and encourage pupils to think about a topic. While demonstrating, the teacher can focus the pupils' attention on the relevant facts and introduce scientific principles and concepts. Through discussion and actively making observations and inferences, rather than…

It is all too common, given the considerable day-to-day challenges facing those involved in education, to focus on the here and now rather than look further afield. The authors of this article have been fortunate enough to see "primary science" in a wide range of international settings, from Nigeria to Chile, North America and Canada,…

One challenge of teaching science is getting students to communicate as scientists do. Scientists employ many different forms of communication as they develop and pass on information to others. Unfortunately, in many classrooms, student communication about science concepts is limited to filling in information on worksheets, finishing…

Creating shared representations can foster knowledge acquisition by elementary school students by promoting active integration and translation of new information. In this study, we investigate to what extent awareness support and scripting facilitate knowledge construction and discourse quality of elementary school students (n?=?94) in a…

This qualitative, sociocultural study examines how teacher preparation programs may have deliberate impact on science reform by unearthing the complex layers of diversity inherent in the contextual reality of education. This study was conducted in one of the largest school districts in the Southeastern United States, serving a predominately…

Helping students develop a sound understanding of scientific concepts can be a major challenge. Lately, learning progressions have received increasing attention as a means to support students in developing understanding of core scientific concepts. At the center of a learning progression is a sequence of developmental levels reflecting an…

Previous research indicates children reason in different ways about horizontal motion and motion in fall. At the same time, their understanding of motion down inclines appears to result from an interaction between horizontal and vertical motion understanding. However, this interaction is still poorly understood. Understanding of speed change may…

Attention to inquiry-based teaching practices has surfaced as one vehicle for supporting the development of critical thinking skills in science classrooms (Achieve Inc., 2013). Despite the endless dialogue, professional development, and standards to support the teaching approach, in practice, inquiry presents teachers with a great challenge. In…

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the roles that perceived teacher affective support (PTAS), perceived teacher mastery goal orientation (PTMGO), academic emotions, self-efficacy and behavioural engagement play on students' science achievement in elementary school science classrooms. The potential relations of different levels of…

There are many transition points in the school life of a child, but the move from primary to secondary school is a particularly significant one. How can both the social and academic threads remain intact? In this article, Kristen Mould discusses the main issues relating to transition from primary to secondary science. She cites the primary factors…

Several studies found that direct instruction and task structuring can effectively promote children's ability to design unconfounded experiments. The present study examined whether the impact of these interventions extends to other scientific reasoning skills by comparing the inquiry activities of 55 fifth-graders randomly assigned to one of…

Much research has been conducted in educational robotics, a new instructional technology, for K-12 education. However, there are arguments on the effect of robotics and limited empirical evidence to investigate the impact of robotics in science learning. Also most robotics studies were carried in an informal educational setting. This study…

This study is a four-week section of ongoing attempts that aim to improve 6th grade students' understandings of the nature of science. The study was carried out in a sixth grade science and technology class at a rural middle school with 15 students on the basis of action research methodology. During the study, four different stories based on the…