Students' difficulties interpreting diagrams remain a concern in science education. Research about improving diagram comprehension has included few studies of teachers' orchestration of language and gesture in explaining diagrams--and very few in senior high schools. Research with younger students and studies of research scientists' practice…

Although visual aids are widely considered a valuable source of scaffolding, the nature and active utilization of these aids in current science classrooms are not well understood. This qualitative study explores interaction in the teaching of concepts related to evolution, with a specific focus on a teacher's use of different visual support…

Chemical kinetics is an important topic that is reinforced across the undergraduate chemistry curriculum, but previous research indicates students tend to have difficulty developing a sophisticated understanding of reaction rate. In this qualitative case study, we characterized how two students conceptualized reaction rate in the context of…

Background: Although the reading of science texts has been reported for high school learners, there is not much research on how younger learners engage with expository texts and how they develop academic language skills. In the instance of this study, the topic came from the curriculum content about animal reproduction. Aim: The study from which…

Emoji are commonly used in social media to convey attitudes and emotions. While popular, their use in educational contexts has been sparsely studied. This paper reports on the students' use of emoji in an online course forum in which students annotate and discuss course material in the margins of the online textbook. For this study, instructors…

Helping preservice teachers use hybrid language representations in science is important if they are to become scientifically literate and able to engage in the discourse for understanding scientifiyc issues. Using hybrid language representations based on the framework of computer-supported collaborative learning, the teacher educator applied the…

In the telling case presented here, the instructional practices an exemplary teacher used to scaffold fourth-grade emergent bilinguals' comprehension of a challenging informational science text are identified, analyzed, and discussed. Data sources included observation field notes, video and audio recording of 11 hours of instruction, the teacher's…

This paper provides a brief introduction to teaching strategies that can be used to support English as Additional Language (EAL) students in learning biology terminology. The paper begins with an overview of EAL students and considers the difficulties that they may face in the classroom along with the challenges that mainstream teachers may have…

The scientific process is nonlinear, unpredictable, and ongoing. Assessing the nature of science is difficult with methods that rely on Likert-scale or multiple-choice questions. This study evaluated conceptions about the scientific process using student-created visual representations that we term "flowcharts." The methodology,…

This volume in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English Language Learners series was designed to deepen teacher's knowledge and provides instructional approaches and practices for supporting grades 6-12 ELLs as they meet the ambitious expectations of the CCSS for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. This…