Research shows that various stereotypes about science and science learning, such as science being filled with hard and dry content, laboratory experiments, and male-dominated work environments, have resulted in feelings of distance from science in students’ minds. This study explores children’s experiences of science learning and science identity. It asks how children conceive of doing science like scientists and how they develop views of science beyond the stereotypes. This study employs positioning theory to examine how children and their teacher position themselves in science learning contexts and develop science identity through classroom interactions. Fifteen students in grades 4–6 science classrooms in Western Canada participated in this study. Classroom activities and interactions were videotaped, transcribed, and analysed to examine how the teacher and students position each other as scientists in the classroom. A descriptive explanatory case analysis showed how the teacher’s positioning acted to develop students’ science identity with responsibilities of knowledge seeking, perseverance, and excitement about science.

Students’ difficulties in scientific argumentation have been widely reported in the literature. Researchers argue that these difficulties result mainly from students’ lack of understanding of the goals and norms of argumentation. Therefore, designing and implementing appropriate instructional scaffolds to facilitate such essential knowledge of argumentation holds pedagogical significance. In this qualitative case study, two kinds of argument-focused metacognitive scaffolds (AMS) – questioning and prompting, and modelling of thinking – were designed and integrated into an elementary science classroom. One science teacher and her 19 students participated in this case study. To explore the pedagogical contributions of AMS, data were collected from multiple sources including classroom observation, interviews with students, and students’ works. AMS in this study supported students to engage in argumentation reflectively, as these scaffolds facilitated the development of students’ understanding of the goals and evidence-related norms of argumentation and abilities of metacognitive monitoring during argumentation. These influences were also recognised and appreciated by students. When AMS gradually reduced, students’ knowledge of argumentation and abilities of metacognitive monitoring were retained and affected how they performed argumentation in new contexts. Pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed.

Visualisation has been a critical means of scientific reasoning, knowledge development, and communication. In science classrooms, visualisation plays significant roles for teaching and learning. To better understand the landscape of the existing research on visualisation for supporting student science learning in K to 12 classroom contexts, we undertook a systematic review to investigate what research areas and contexts of visualisation have been examined by science educators and researchers. In particular, this review explored the domains of science subject areas, authors, types and purposes of visualisation in science education research published in peer-reviewed journals between 2011 and 2021 and indexed in the ERIC and Academic Search Complete databases. Our systematic search and subsequent screening process yielded 33 studies for analysis. The findings suggest (a) research on visualisation for student science learning spans across the main science domains (i.e. life science, physical science, chemistry, earth and space science), and grade levels (from Grades 1−12); (b) compared with students’ visualisation in social interactive contexts, more studies focused on individual students’ visualisation; and (c) the majority of the research focused on students’ concept learning through visualisation, rather than visualisation for scientific reasoning and communication. Based on these findings, suggestions for further research are discussed.