Science

The MEL project has developed a set of teaching resources to support the teaching of controversial and/or complex Earth and space science topics. Previously developed MEL teaching resources include those for climate change, earthquakes and fracking, wetlands use, and the formation of the moon. Current baMEL resources are under development for extreme weather, fossils and Earth's past, freshwater availability, and origins of the universe.

For students to meaningfully engage in science practices, substantive changes need to occur to deeply entrenched instructional approaches, particularly those related to classroom discourse. Because teachers are critical in establishing how students are permitted to interact in the classroom, it is imperative to examine their role in fostering learning environments in which students carry out science practices. This study explores how teachers describe, or frame, expectations for classroom discussions pertaining to the science practice of argumentation.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012) on which they are based, describe a new vision for science education that includes having students learn science in a way that more closely aligns to how scientists and engineers work and think. Accomplishing this goal will require teacher educators to make important shifts in the ways they prepare future science teachers (NRC, 2012). Many science teaching methods courses are being reformed to better support future science teachers to meet the ambitious goals of the NGSS.

Ensuring that all students, including English language learners (ELLs) who speak English as a second language, succeed in science is more challenging with a shift towards learning through language-intensive science practices suggested by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Interactive visualization technologies have the potential to support science learning for all students, including ELLs, by providing explicit representations of unobservable scientific systems.

The use of external representations has a potential to facilitate inquiry learning, especially in hypothesis generation and scientific reasoning, which are typical difficulties encountered by students. This study proposes and investigates the effects of a three‐dimensional thinking graph (3DTG) that allows learners to combine in a single image, problem information, subject knowledge (key concepts and their relationships), and the hypothesizing and reasoning process involved in exploring a problem, to support inquiry learning.

In A Framework for K-12 Science Education, the National Research Council frames inclusive science instruction as a collection of strategies for teachers to engage students. In this conceptual article, we reframe inclusive science instruction by examining the literature in science and multicultural education and describe five elements to support teachers in realizing inclusive science instruction as a pedagogical shift.

The Next Generation Science Standards call for changes in not only what is taught in elementary science but also how students engage in the learning experience to develop understanding of core disciplinary ideas. In this study we examined 5th-grade teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for 1 particular core idea: the small particle model (SPM) of matter. We assessed teachers’ initial PCK through a lesson plan task, the Content Representation tool, and interviews and then adapted and tested a scoring rubric to facilitate comparison of teachers’ PCK.