Using engineering design to teach science requires teachers to engage in noticing, interpreting, and responding to students’ needs in real-time. While research has begun to focus on how elementary teachers do so, less is known about how teachers instructionally support and optimize students’ ideas through engineering design feedback. In this study we investigate what instructional moves two elementary teachers’ employ to leverage students’ ideas and reasoning and create opportunities for students to exchange design feedback. Data were gathered using classroom observations of teachers’ implementations of a design task focused on sound and energy transformation. Observations were coded for teachers’ use of high-leverage practices, and event maps were created to chronicle teachers’ implementation of the task from start to finish. Event maps were analyzed and compared for discrete instructional activities and modes of classroom organization that supported opportunities for feedback. Findings suggested that while teachers used similar instructional moves, how and when they created opportunities for student design feedback differed, resulting in diverse ways of assessing and supporting students’ understandings. Implications suggest design feedback as both a purposeful and naturally present phenomenon throughout the design process, reflective of the nature of engineering design.

This study aimed to develop a two-tiers diagnostic test to assess the high school, junior high school, and elementary pre-service teachers about the heat and the temperature concepts in a general physics course. There are two tiers in this test: The first tier composed of six items consisting of multiple-choice questions related to the heat and the temperature, including the correct answer. The second tier of each item contains reasons for students choosing their answer to the first tier. The second tier included four or five responses, one of which is a correct conceptual understanding. The wrong answers, also called distractors, were based on students’ misconceptions. To this end, 128 pre-service teachers from Quebec in Canada completed a pencil-paper questionnaire of sixty minutes duration composing of six questions (four open-ended questions and two multiple choice questions with justifications). As illustrations, the following  conceptual understandings have been identified in our qualitative analysis of the data collected: 1. The change of state of the matter does not require a constant temperature; 2.  The temperature is a measure in degrees to indicate the level of heat of an object or person; 3. The mercury contained in a thermometer expands when it is heated so that the particles which constitute it expand; and 4. The sensation of cold (or warm) is related to the difference in temperature.

Online learning platforms and resources created by the Indonesian Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology were a blessing in disguise out of the unprecedented school closure caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. These learning resources are yet to be examined to ensure their usability and their role in improving the quality of learning in science classes. This study analyzed the learning modules and a sample lesson plan from the Teachers Learn Teachers Share platforms based on the three-dimensional learning framework. It examined to what extent is the 3-dimensional learning framework incorporated into the grade 4 learning modules and lesson plan on Energy. The methodology for analyzing the sufficiency of disciplinary crosscutting concepts, scientific practices, and core ideas applied here will enrich the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) based education corpus of knowledge. Findings show that the disciplinary core ideas dimension is the most sufficiently covered of all three dimensions while the practices dimension is only partially covered as some of the points are mostly inferred, and the crosscutting concepts dimension still shows much room for improvement. Primary school teachers and schools’ curriculum development units should enrich the learning modules by expanding the discussions on the module coverage with crosscutting concepts.

Science, magic, and education have always been linked, from science-based magic shows to teachers presenting demonstrations as magic tricks to capture their students’ interest and provide a mnemonic reference for the topics under discussion. Magic as an art form is also often used to convey information or act as an analogy for invisible phenomena. This study examined how the use of a magic effect designed as an analogy for active and passive transport in cells affected student scores and perception of the activity when compared to a standard story analogy in a high school integrated science course. To determine this, students participated in either a magic-based analogy activity (MBAA) or a concrete story-based analogy activity (SBAA), and then data was collected and analysed using a pre-test/post-test for the content and a Likert-scale anonymous survey for the student perception of the activity. The MBAA was shown to be similar to the SBAA in helping students learn but had the added benefit of increasing students’ reported engagement with the activity. This study shows how bringing magic into the science classroom can have a positive impact on student engagement and provides teachers with another option to support student learning.

Research shows that learning enjoyment in specific socio-scientific issues (SSI) plays an important role in predicting grade 10 students’ learning interest and learning enjoyment (i.e., genuine interest) in SSI subjects generally. However, it remains unexplored whether learning enjoyment also mediates a predictive effect of learning interest in a Big Science SSI of pressing contemporary global concern—COVID-19—on grade 12 high school students’ learning interest in SSI generally. The purpose of this study is to investigate how learning enjoyment may mediate the predictive effect of learning interest in the specific Big Science SSI of COVID-19 specifically on students’ learning interest in SSI subjects generally. Latent variable modeling using data collected from grade 12 students (N = 691) showed personal perceptions of learning enjoyment in SSI partially mediated the predictive effect of learning interest in the SSI of COVID-19 on learning interest in other Big Science SSI subjects. Implications for promoting among science educators and policy specialists the active development of students’ individual interests and involvement in other 21st century Big Science SSI challenges are forwarded.