Both professional and classroom-based scientific communities develop and test explanatory models of the natural world. For students to take up models as tools for sensemaking, practice must be agentive (where students use and revise models "for" specific purposes) and conceptually productive (where students make progress on their ideas).…

Contemporary conceptions of content learning that emphasize disciplinary practices offer opportunities to see and hear multilingual learners' (MLs') participation in new ways. However, research on disciplinary practices with MLs has primarily targeted those practices traditionally considered language intensive, such as explanation and…

Every educator knows the sinking feeling of a lesson gone wrong. As teachers look around the room and realize that many of their students are just not getting it, they often feel like failures. However, the struggle students experience as they persevere through high-quality challenging tasks is not a sign of failure, but rather a key aspect of…

As computational models are becoming more widely used with the release of "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" (NRC 2012) and the "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS"; NGSS Lead States 2013), these models are reshaping the way science is practiced in increasingly diverse classrooms. For students classified…

In this article, the authors present a 5E learning cycle for fifth grade that focuses on using a model of matter to explain the properties they observe, and how those properties can help identify whether two objects are made of the same type of matter. That model also helps explain phenomena such as why a specific material floats, no matter how…

The number line and the neutralization model have been used very extensively in teaching integer additions and subtractions for decades. Despite their advantages, issues concerning subtractions on these models are still debatable. Therefore, the neutralization on an empty number line (NNL) model is proposed in this research to help students better…

When teachers first wrap their heads around scientific modeling, it can be a bit tricky to distinguish scientific models from diagrams and three-dimensional models. If a fifth grader draws and labels a food web, it's a model. Right? Not necessarily. When creating a model, students should be representing a system inspired by an inquiry or…

This study aims to find out the effect of activities and practices on concept education to help carry out activities to teach these concepts more effectively and permanently, and determine student preconceptions about the concepts related to the landforms in the 5th-grade social studies curriculum in the learning subdomain called "People,…

Examples and explanations are inherent elements of mathematics learning and teaching. This study explores the relationship between examples and explanations given for the same concept. Results indicated that for the concept of parity, fifth grade students offer different explanations for different examples. However, for the concept of equivalent…

As teachers seek activities to assist students in understanding division as more than just the algorithm, they find many examples of division as fair sharing. However, teachers have few activities to engage students in a quotative (measurement) model of division. Efraim Fischbein and his colleagues (1985) defined two types of whole-number…

Students' development of conceptual understandings is a central goal of mathematics education (CCSS-Mathematics, 2010). Such a challenging, yet ambiguous, goal cannot be achieved without empowering teachers with the knowledge and tools critical for their ability to adequately convey the content, and assess and interpret students' performance. This…

Student construction of models is a strong focus of current research and practice in science education. In order to study in detail the interactions between students' model generation and evaluation and their development of explanatory ideas to account for magnetic phenomena, a multi-session teaching experiment was conducted with a small number of…

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effects on 558 grades five and six students of three different teaching conditions: the "classical" model of conceptual change (for which cognitive conflict is considered as a precondition to the transformation of knowledge), the "prevalence" model of conceptual change (in which…

In the past decade, reform efforts in science education have increasingly attended to engaging students in scientific practices such as scientific modeling. Engaging students in scientific modeling can help them develop their epistemologies by allowing them to attend to the roles of mechanism and empirical evidence when constructing and revising…

The purpose of this study was to explore how examples used in teaching may influence elementary school students' conceptions of evaporation and boiling. To this end, the examples traditionally used to explain evaporation and boiling in Korean 4th grade science textbooks were analyzed. The functions of these published examples were explanation…