This study investigates the challenge faced by eighth-grade students at Southern State Middle School in grasping abstract concepts within the domains of physical science, physics, and chemistry. This difficulty is manifested in their poor performance on summative assessments. A comprehensive analysis of state-provided data, in conjunction with…

We share a case study on our use of three reflective questions to demonstrate ways in which simple questions can be coded to reveal rich evidence of impact and engagement. At the end of a three-hour inclusive teaching practices workshop for 23 faculty and administrators from a single science department, 22 participants completed an anonymous…

Health professions outreach programs are important avenues to increase interest in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). One aspect of many of these programs is anatomy, which can be challenging to teach due to its scope. Creative teaching methods, such as the incorporation of examples from pop culture, can help…

Recent science reform advocates for the inclusion of engineering design to teach science and represents a shift to so-called three-dimensional (3D) learning. This shift often requires science instructors to adapt their current curriculum to integrate 3D learning. To support this shift, the current study illustrates the collaborative development…

This article explores teacher discretion in the context of the English 2014 science curriculum and assessment reforms. The study positions primary and secondary school science teachers as "street-level bureaucrats" in which they are not just mere implementers of policy but instead pivotal actors with much agency. Through the analysis of…

Education 4.0 represents a visionary approach to the future of education, aiming to enhance teaching and learning through advanced technologies. The aim of this research is to determine student attitudes toward the use of Education 4.0 tools in the 7th-grade Science course Electrical Circuits unit. To achieve this, an attitude test was developed…

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift from traditional in-person teaching to remote and online learning, necessitating a more adaptable educational platform to serve the diverse needs of students. Transforming hands-on "wet lab" activities into virtual "dry lab" exercises can promote a more accessible and flexible…

This article addresses physics teachers' views about physics teaching in upper-secondary school. Their views have been investigated nationwide through a web-based questionnaire. The questionnaire has been developed based on several published instruments and is part of an ongoing project on the role of mathematics in physics teaching at…

The first of Ofsted's research reviews focused on science education. It is broad in scope, including content on school systems, the science curriculum, teaching, learning, assessment and materials -- with implications for practice. However, the review's scope does not provide much detail of the research on which it is based. I agree with many of…

Developing students' ability to think about systems, as opposed to isolated facts, is of central importance in much of science teaching. Prior work in this area has focused on students' recognition of the processes occurring within a system. Comparatively, little work has been done on how students organise the objects that are contained within the…

The purpose of this paper is to describe a three-year limited-run offer of an energy science certificate in the University of Hawaii at Hilo campus, along with lessons learned that can be of use to other institutions considering comparable programs. Energy science is a loosely defined discipline that traditionally straddles physics and mechanical,…

This paper presents the design and initial learning research with the MMM modeling platform, seeking to advance middle school students' learning through constructing computational models of complex physical and chemical systems. A complexity-based structure of an MMM interface is introduced. It suggests that a complex system can be described and…

This study details the development of a plant STEAM education program aligned with the Grade 6 elementary school Korean national science curriculum, using a regionally linked curriculum as its design framework. The primary objective was to investigate the plant program's effectiveness in enhancing elementary students' environmental competencies.…

Global efforts are underway to include engineering in pre-college curricula. In the USA, this pursuit led to the inclusion of engineering content in the most recent version of the Next Generation Science Standards that guide K-12 science. As these standards become part of the K-12 curriculum, teachers face the challenge of gaining basic…

In common with many other countries, the Iranian science curriculum does not introduce primary children to atoms and molecules but instead leaves the teaching of these concepts until high school. This paper challenges this practice and describes the changes in elementary Iranian children's understanding of atoms and molecules following a 10-h…