In recent years, more science classrooms include inquiry-based approaches to learning in response to advances in education theory and science curriculum reform efforts. Yet, extant research indicates there are hurdles to fully actualizing those benefits: learners' regulation of cognitive, social, and motivational processes can be challenging. To…

Clearly defining and clarifying crosscutting concepts (CCCs) helps students to apply them as thinking tools or lenses to understand disciplinary core ideas and science and engineering practices. This study identified three characteristics of the sub-concepts of CCCs: conceptual, superordinate, and common across disciplines, and explored a way…

The current research implemented the Predict Observe and Explain (POE) instructional approach in mathematics and examined its efficacy in enhancing students' understanding of functions in terms of their ability to connect algebraic and graphical representations in optimization problems. Two grade 11 classes (40 students in total) and two grade 10…

Peer ideas can be valuable contributions to scientific inquiry. Divergent peer ideas can enrich students' thinking and encourage curiosity. Meanwhile, similar peer ideas can promote convergent thinking that can reinforce understanding. However, students need guidance in critically evaluating peer ideas in relation to their own, and in recognizing…

Promotion of students' scientific literacy has long been and continues to be a central goal for reform efforts in science education. Although there is a great number of research conducted to evaluate student's scientific literacy, less is known about how we can improve students' scientific literacy through variety of scientific practices. In this…

Inquiry includes a broad spectrum of approaches, depending on students' responsibility over the process and the extent of the teacher's guidance. While numerous studies have examined students' achievements and engagement across different types of inquiry-based environments, analyses of teachers' guidance during the process are lacking. Therefore,…

Enhancing students' conceptual understanding and improving their inquiry skills and motivation for learning science are the goals of science instruction in learning environments. The current study investigated how different inquiry-based learning environments (regular classroom and computer-based environments) affect middle school students'…

Educative curricula support teacher learning as well as the learning of students. High quality educative curricula contain features that help teachers customize learning opportunities and environments in ways that meet the needs of their learners. Designing these features requires expertise related to subject matter content, pedagogy, teacher and…

Hypothesis-based reasoning with conditionals is a skill that is required for engaging in integral activities of modern elementary school science-curricula. The teaching of this skill at this early stage of education, however, is demanding, particularly in whole school classes in which it is difficult to adapt teaching to children's individual…

Higher-order thinking is crucial to inquiry learning. It is important to investigate how students think in inquiry contexts. Given the tacit nature of higher-order thinking, cognitive maps (e.g., concept maps, reasoning maps) have been used to externalize thinking and have shown promising effects in terms of improving inquiry task performance.…

We compared performances on a learning task in which students (N = 81) viewed a pedagogical multimedia document without (control group) or with a readymade graphic organizer (readymade group) with performances on an active learning task where students self-generated a graphic organizer either totally (total self-generated group) or partially…

This two-year qualitative study explored the learning process alongside students' perceived outcomes within an interdisciplinary project-based learning (PjBL) task. Students from three different undergraduate courses were assigned a project that spanned across all three classes and placed student teams in the roles of client and contractor.…

Professional development on inquiry-based learning (IBL) generally draws heavily on the principle of providing instruction in line with what teachers are expected to do in their classroom. So far, however, relatively little is known about how this impacts teachers' educational beliefs, even though these beliefs ultimately determine their classroom…

Guiding inquiry learning has been shown to increase knowledge gains. Yet, little is known about the effect of guidance on attitudes and behaviours, its interaction with student attributes, and transfer of impact once guidance is removed. We address these gaps in the context of an interactive Physics simulation on electric circuits…

A common approach for introducing students to a new science concept is to present them with multiple cases of the phenomenon and ask them to explore. The expectation is that students will naturally take advantage of the multiple cases to support their learning and seek an underlying principle for the phenomenon. However, the success of such tasks…