Individual interest in school science lessons can be defined as a relatively stable and enduring personal emotion comprising affective and behavioural reactions to events in the regular science lessons at school. Little research has compared the importance of different factors affecting students' individual interest in school science lessons. The…

This paper presents the findings of a two-phase mixed methods research study that explores the link between experiences of school science of post-16 students and their decisions to take up science for their higher studies. In the first phase, students aged 16-17 (n = 569) reflected on the past five years of their school science experience in a…

Systems' thinking has become increasingly relevant not only in education for sustainable development but also in everyday life. Even if teachers know the dynamics and complexity of living systems in biology and geography, they might not be able to effectively explain it to students. Teachers need an understanding of systems and their behaviour…

This study explores the effects of metacognitive and cognitive prompting on the scientific inquiry practices of students with various levels of initial metacognition. Two junior high school classes participated in this study. One class, the experimental group (n?=?26), which received an inquiry-based curriculum with a combination of cognitive and…

Far too few high-school students choose subjects from the natural sciences (NaSc) for their majors in many countries. Even fewer study biology, chemistry or physics at university. Those, that do, often lack training to present and discuss scientific results and ideas in texts. To meet these challenges the center for didactics of biology of Graz…

Comics are popular with adolescents because of their features of humor, narrative, and visual imagery. The purposes of this study were to examine the learning outcomes and emotional perceptions of reading a science comic book and a science text booklet for students of different levels of achievement, and to explore the main factors of the two…

'Literacy in the Science Classroom Project" was a three-year professional development (PD) program supporting minority-language secondary teachers' use of effective language-based instructional strategies for teaching science. Our primary objective was to determine how teacher beliefs and practices changed over time and how these were enacted…

Nowadays, early science education is well-accepted by researchers, education professionals and policy makers. Overall, teachers' attitudes and conceptions toward the science subject domain and science education influence their ways of teaching and engagement. However, there is a lack of research regarding factors that affect this engagement in…

The purpose of the study was two-fold: to (a) investigate the influence of explicit nature of science (NOS) and explicit argumentation instruction in the context of a socioscientific issue on the argumentation skills and NOS understandings of students, and (b) explore the transfer of students' NOS understandings and argumentation skills learned in…

This study is part of a first study of collaborative socio-environmental projects that engage Jewish and Arab students in Israel in learning about their local environment and about each other through outdoor learning and environmental action. We used ideas of social learning and environmental citizenship to frame our research. We investigated…

This study investigated a professional development model designed to improve teachers' inquiry teaching efficacy as well as the quality of their inquiry instruction through engaging teachers in practice-teaching and reflection sessions. The programme began with a two-week summer Institute focused on both inquiry pedagogy and science content and…

This paper investigates the characteristics of 15-year-old girls who express an intention to study physics post-16. This paper unpacks issues around within-girl group differences and similarities between boys and girls in survey responses about physics. The analysis is based on the year 10 (age 15 years) responses of 5,034 students from 137 UK…

Recent research reveals that students' interest in school science begins to decline at an early age. As this lack of interest could result in fewer individuals qualified for scientific careers and a population unprepared to engage with scientific societal issues, it is imperative to investigate ways in which interest in school science can be…

One of the solutions implemented by schools for conducting value-based environmental education (EE) is outsourcing: allocating external environmental organizations that develop and conduct EE programmes. This study addressed such a programme--the Green Council Programme (GCP)--developed and implemented in schools by the Israeli Society for…