This column provides ideas and techniques to enhance your science teaching. This month's issue discusses using the 5E learning cycle to create coherent storylines. The 5E learning cycle provides an important framework to help teachers organize activities. To realize the full potential of the 5E framework for student learning, lessons must also…

This study explored, from the perspective of intellectual passion developed by Michael Polanyi, the unintended learning that occurred in primary practical science lessons. We use the term "unintended" learning to distinguish it from "intended" learning that appears in teachers' learning objectives. Data were collected using…

A distinguishing feature of all the formative assessment probes in the "Uncovering Student Ideas" series is that each probe has two parts: (1) a selected answer choice that usually mirrors the research on commonly held ideas students have about concepts or phenomena; and (2) an explanation that supports their answer choice. It is this…

The purpose of this study was to investigate elementary school pre-service teachers' understanding of photosynthesis and to examine if a refutational text can support understanding of photosynthesis better than a non-refutational text. A total of 91 elementary school pre-service teachers read either a refutational or a non-refutational text…

Explores the idea that retention of particular concepts must occur before a student can transfer his learning to new situations. Investigates retention and transfer of fifth and sixth graders, in which achievement level was assessed on some advanced concepts as a function of performance on related basic concepts. (CS)

Reports on a qualitative study of teaching-learning by analogy that explores whether fifth-grade students' successful use of analogy in learning science was related to their understanding of a specific analogy; their metacognitive awareness of how the analogy was to be used and of the changes produced in their conceptual structures. (57…

People use and extend their knowledge of the physical world constantly. Understanding how this fluency is achieved would be an important milestone in understanding human learning and intelligence, as well as a useful guide for constructing machines that learn. This paper presents a theoretical framework that is being developed in an attempt to…

This book was written for practicing primary (elementary) school teachers and for anyone concerned with inservice or preservice science teacher education. The overall purpose of the book is to identify ways in which ideas about electricity and simple circuits can be taught effectively in primary school classrooms. This book is based on in-depth…