The role of creativity has been well recognized in wholesome development of children's personality and attitude. Among various approaches to foster creativity in children, design thinking (DT) has emerged as a significant approach. The study presented in this paper explores the implementation of DT into maker education to help K-12 students…

Most primary school students, although they grasp the scientific concepts of heat convection at the macroscopic level, commonly fail to visualize those concepts. Therefore, our research aims to enact a constructivist teaching sequence (CTS) to restructure students' visualization changes, ultimately enabling them to synergize macroscopic and…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how upper elementary and middle school teachers describe their preparation experiences and instructional practices in teaching STEM to ELLs. This study was guided by literature and Geneva Gay's (2021) Culturally Responsive Teaching Practices conceptual framework. The research…

Game-based learning (GBL) is increasingly recognized as an effective tool for teaching diverse skills, particularly in science education, due to its interactive, engaging, and motivational qualities, along with timely assessments and intelligent feedback. However, more empirical studies are needed to facilitate its wider application in school…

Facilitating Computer Science Unplugged (CS-unplugged) activities with reflective thinking activities lead students to in-depth reviews of their decisions and think of ways to solve the CS-unplugged problems. This study aims to evaluate the instruction enriched with reflective thinking activities to develop computational thinking skills. The study…

Programmed control systems are ubiquitous in the present-day world. In current educational practice, however, these systems are hardly being addressed, and little is known about children's spontaneous understandings about such systems. Therefore, we explored pupils' understandings prior to instruction in three concrete settings: a car park, an…

This study aims to better understand Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) in middle school science teaching by revealing the perceptions of sixth-grade students in a public school in Turkey about POGIL. In the research conducted as a case study, the data were collected through interviews with 12 students who were taught the Particle…

Elasticity, the capacity for students to explore or investigate their own questions of interest during or after teacher-directed events in the classroom, is highly beneficial for students in terms of their retention and deeper understanding of the content. An elastic environment is child-centered and inquiry-based. An inelastic environment…

This study examines the effects of plugged and unplugged programming tools used in algorithm teaching at the K-12 level on student computational thinking skills and to determine whether gender is a factor in this process. The study group was designed with a control group pre-test--post-test; quasi-experimental model, that consisted of 109 students…

This article provides an analysis of a data set coming from a two-phase qualitative study that focused on fostering primary students' abstraction of interrelations among quadrilaterals (squares, rectangles, parallelograms, rhombuses, trapezoids). The pilot study consisted of work with eight primary students operating at van Hiele level 2 (e.g.,…

The aim of this study is to design various instructional materials to teach biological systems in a 'Systems in Our Body' unit to 6th grade students with visual impairment (SVI) and to evaluate the effectiveness of these materials. In the study, a design-based research model was used. In the first stage, individual learning needs of SVI and their…

The paper addresses the potential relationships between shared authority in mathematics classrooms and students' mathematical reasoning. Even though tensions and challenges related to shared authority are explicated in the literature, there are few examples of how these issues play out in mathematics teaching. We investigate the case of a…

Up until third grade, reading instruction is focused on learning to read, while in fourth grade and up, students begin reading to learn (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2024; Grunke et al., 2013). This reading with purpose includes increasing critical thinking skills and using newfound reading skills to understand complex subjects such as math and…

This study aims to develop a knowledge test to assess secondary school students' awareness of scientists. After determining the topics that the questions in the test would measure, 50 multiple-choice questions were prepared and presented to six experts in the field. Following the experts' feedback, the number of questions in the test was reduced…

A research project on using comics for teaching mathematics was initiated in one Singapore primary school. One class of Grade 5 (students of age 11-12) students was exposed to comics for mathematics instruction. This paper reports a case study of seven students' perception of the features of the comics instructional package and how these features…