This article provides an overview of the instructional activity implemented to introduce the authors' first-grade students to the concept of measuring, collecting, and recording temperature data as part of a unit on weather. The activities introduced involved approximately one week of instructional time. However, the application of the skill…

This study aimed to develop, introduce, and conduct an inquiry-driven creative drama activity. The activity, for elementary students, related to the transmission of light and full shadow. In the activity, which consisted of a warm-up, dramatization, and evaluation stages, two inquiry-based experiments were added to the dramatization stage. Thus,…

Creating a culturally responsive (Ladson-Billings 1995) or culturally sustaining (Paris 2012) learning environment requires teachers making connections to students' experiences outside of school, allowing them to draw on what González, Moll, and Amanti (2006) refer to as students' "funds of knowledge," or the values, interests, and…

The population of emergent bilingual students (EBs, or English Language Learners, ELLs) is growing steadily in the United States. One common approach to language instruction for EBs is to expose students to a lesson's content vocabulary before teaching the lesson to build students' word banks and background knowledge. An example of this is the…

The present investigation aims to analyze the knowledge levels and chemical representation levels of pre-service primary school teachers (PPSTs) on the experiment of distillation. For this purpose, the cross-sectional survey technique, one of the quantitative research designs was employed. The study was carried out at a Faculty of Education in the…

Large numbers of U.S. students lack proficiency in science, and students from different racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups show disparities in science achievement. Science knowledge and skills are important for both academic and workplace success, and a variety of interventions have been developed to improve student achievement in science.…

The study presented here is an action research that was conducted in a science and technology teaching course in a pre-service elementary teaching program at a private university in Turkey aiming at improving the pre-service elementary teachers' understanding of science and teaching science. In order to achieve this aim, an innovative approach,…

Discussions about power have only recently begun to appear in the learning sciences literature. Most of this important work takes a critical perspective; the present work complements these efforts by examining power sharing as a catalyst for empowerment in teacher-researcher co-design. Even though teacher-researcher collaborations are discussed in…

Scientific reasoning helps children understand the world around them. Teaching scientific reasoning can be challenging because not all component scientific reasoning skills develop at the same age and not all children learn these skills at the same pace. Adaptive support thus seems called for. We designed two types of adaptive instruction, based…

This study explores boundary-crossing interaction between two grade 5/6 science classrooms that operated as knowledge building communities. The two classrooms studied human body systems with the support of the Knowledge Forum over a ten-week period. The knowledge building practice integrated student-driven inquiry and discourse within each…

In scientific inquiry learning, manipulatives have been widely utilized as learning resources. Studies have explored the advantages of virtual manipulative (VM) for conceptual understanding and knowledge construction in science education. However, research on the mental engagement and perception of students during collaborative learning under…

This article presents a way to integrate storytelling with the teaching of science: by making graphic novels. It describes how gifted 9- and 10-year-old students at the author's school researched the elements found in the human body and then created illustrated poems tracing the entire 'history' of individual atoms. The article explores the ways…

Watson and McMahon's (2005) work identified a need for research to examine the what and how of children's career development learning; this research is a start to answering that call, specifically focusing on STEM career interest as a precursor to development due to the current needs nationally for an increase in the STEM pipeline. This study…

The science achievement of primary students, both in Australia and abroad, has been the subject of intensive research in recent decades. Consequently, much research has been conducted to investigate primary science education. Within this literature, there is a striking juxtaposition between tertiary science teaching preparation programs and the…

Literacy instruction in science and math in elementary education lays a critical foundation for later content literacy development and the learning of content subjects in middle and high school. However, limited research has investigated the theoretical basis of instructional practices for science and math literacy instruction at the elementary…