In an effort to promote integrated STEM education, the Malaysian government has integrated STEM teaching framework within the science and mathematics curriculum specifications to guide the science and mathematics teachers to design and implement interdisciplinary teaching while teaching science and/or mathematics concepts. Some of the factors that…

Triadic dialogue, the Initiation, Response, Evaluation sequence typical of teacher /student interactions in classrooms, has long been identified as a barrier to students' access to learning, including science learning. A large body of research on the subject has over the years led to projects and policies aimed at increasing opportunities for…

Climate change generally and global warming specifically have become a common feature of the daily news. Due to widespread recognition of the adverse consequences of climate change on human lives, concerted societal effort has been taken to address it (e.g. by means of the science curriculum). This study was designed to test the effect that…

Lecturing is an important aspect of the culture of science education. Perhaps because of the negative associations constructivist educators make with lecturing, little research has been done concerning the generally invisible aspects of the (embodied, lived) "work" that is required. Traditional research on science lectures focuses on…

Every day, climate change due to greenhouse emissions, pollution and other environmental degradation appears to make the news. Rather than doing something about the environment, namely in the developing countries where populations frequently are less educated about the long-term impact of human actions, they tend to disregard these problems. There…

The purpose of this article is to describe a best practice: an approach to teaching chemistry that our quantitative research has shown to produce large differences between experimental and control groups in terms of achievement, pro-environmental attitudes, values, and motivation. Our interest in teaching chemistry by focusing on sustainable…

Even if national and international assessments are designed to be comparable, subsequent psychometric analyses often reveal differential item functioning (DIF). Central to achieving comparability is to examine the presence of DIF, and if DIF is found, to investigate its sources to ensure differentially functioning items that do not lead to bias.…

Teachers often have difficulty implementing inquiry-based activities, leading to the arousal of negative emotions. In this multicase study of beginning physics teachers in Australia, we were interested in the extent to which their expectations were realized and how their classroom experiences while implementing extended experimental investigations…

Science educators are confronted with the challenge to accommodate in their classes an increasing cultural and linguistic diversity that results from globalization. Challenged by the call to work towards valuing and keeping this diversity in the face of the canonical nature of school science discourse, we propose a new way of thinking about and…

Cultural-historical activity theory, an outcrop of socio-psychological approaches toward human development, has enjoyed tremendous growth over the past two decades but has yet to be appropriated into science education to any large extent. In part, the difficulties Western scholars have had in adopting this framework arise from its ontology, which…

Studied analogy generation and development and analogical reasoning with 25 German tenth graders in a physics class. Results show the advantages and disadvantages of using analogies in promoting conceptual change and as a teaching technique. (SLD)

Photographs are a major aspect of high school science textbooks, which dominate classroom approaches to teaching and learning. It is thus surprising that the function of photographs and their relation to captions and texts have not been the topic of analysis. The purpose of this study was to investigate the prevalence, function, and structure of…

Describes one teacher's first attempt to understand the role of students' self-evaluations of their process and products in a science unit centered upon open-ended projects. Describes the social structure in student group self-evaluation, and explains the important role students' self-evaluations can play as part of an open-ended project learning…

One important challenge for researchers is to understand what happens inside classrooms that make the environment available for children's learning. This study develops the margin|centre dialectic as a general framework for describing participation of very young children in science-related activities. It employs a cultural-historical approach that…