Do teachers’ emotions about climate change affect their approach to instruction? Researchers examined the relationships among teachers’ emotions about climate change, their perceptions of the plausibility of the findings of climate science, and their understanding of climate science. The findings paint a complicated picture of the potential effect of emotions on instructional practice.
This paper focuses on the ways students can construct scientific explanations and arguments as part of scientific inquiry. Berland and Reiser synthesize understandings from philosophy, science, and logic in order to interpret students’ arguments during a unit on invasive species in the Great Lakes.
Students with special educational needs score significantly below their peers across several measures of science achievement. However, educational approaches that provide appropriate scaffolding and support, such as the inquiry-based science writing heuristic described in this paper, can benefit special educational needs students and ensure an equitable experience for all.
Research has intimated that engineering design activities can enhance students’ understanding of engineering and technology and can increase their interest in science. Few studies, however, have defined or measured this interest empirically. Dohn examined the effect of an eight-week engineering design competition on 46 sixth-grade students. His findings suggest that design tasks can indeed stimulate interest. He found four main sources of interest: designing inventions, trial-and-error experimentation, making the inventions work, and collaboration.
This study helps us understand how children and adolescents perceive science and scientists, and it suggests some factors that influence those images. Researchers collected drawings from Catalan students ages 6 to 17 and analyzed them using the Draw-A-Scientist Test (Chambers, 1983). Findings show that, in general, Catalan students, and particularly boys over 12, retained classic stereotypes of scientists.
Researchers asked 5,000 Norwegian college-level students of STEM about the sources of inspiration for their educational choices. The most influential people were teachers and parents—the people who knew the young people best. The findings suggest that the most effective STEM role models are individuals who have a personal connection with the young person making education and career choices.
In this paper, Anderman and colleagues examine the skills adolescents need in order to learn science effectively. They note that many negative experiences associated with science learning could be avoided if educators were more aware of the abilities of adolescents and the types of environments that foster particular abilities. They offer seven recommendations to practitioners.
In this comparative case study, Enright explores whether the very act of labeling students contributes to continued differences in educational opportunity for students labeled “mainstream” and “non-mainstream.”
This paper’s findings illustrate the claim that young people’s prior knowledge cannot be separated from the cultural context in which it is situated. Using examples from a longitudinal ethnographic study of 13 children, the authors Bricker and Reeve argue that, in order to understand young people’s thinking and practice, we need to understand the social and cultural systems in which their thinking is embedded.
This article provides firm evidence, for formal and informal educators alike, that shared learning can be powerful and meaningful, if carefully considered. Findings from a study conducted in a summer middle school mathematics class suggest that when students are able to ask legitimate, authentic questions and share understanding about a common problem, their learning becomes truly “distributed by design.”
When engaging in inquiry, learners find it difficult to control variables, design appropriate experiments, and maintain continuity across inquiry sessions. To support learners, researchers developed an inquiry task that promoted record keeping. The aim was to highlight the role that record keeping can play in metacognition and, ultimately, in successful inquiry.
This article makes a case for providing multiple types of hands-on resources to support learner inquiry. More specifically, a computer simulation of an electric circuit complemented work with a real circuit to support learners’ conceptual development. When learners had the opportunity to use both simulated and real circuits, less structured guidance seemed to benefit the inquiry process.