Louca, Loucas T.

We investigate how a teacher's personal reflection shapes her decision-making process in classroom management. Following open coding, we analyze the teachers' reflections seeking to identify her rationale in the decision-making process during the language arts lessons. Our findings indicated that her thinking was based on the student's behavior, the student's personality, the educational context, her own emotional perspective and condition, her pedagogical knowledge, and her reflective experience. We discuss the theoretical and methodological implications.

This is a case study describing the ways I engaged a group of 20 5-6,5-year-old children in an afternoon, distance, science education unit investigating snails. The study took place during the Covid-19 quarantine time in Spring 2020. The paper demonstrates the transferability of pedagogical ideas usually implemented in the face-to-face classroom. It also illustrates pedagogical ideas that were more productive to use during the online unit. Lastly, it describes the development of an online learning community that included children and parents.

Despite its proven added value, Modeling-based Learning (MbL) in science is not commonly incorporated into early grades. My purpose in this study was to provide detailed descriptions of the implementation of MbL with a group of 18 pre-K children, engaged in the study of solution of substances in water. The findings suggest that participants could successfully engage in authentic MbL activities, being able to develop a number of different models using prior knowledge and experiences, as well as a variety of features of both analogical and mechanistic reasoning. © 2020 International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS).

The purpose of this descriptive case study was to better understand the characteristics of Teacher Professional Learning Communities(TPLCs) of pre-service teachers(PsTs). Data were derived from 2 TPLCs in which 15 PsTs volunteered to participate, within the context of a pre-school Science Education course they were enrolled in. We analyzed transcripts of videotaped TPLC meetings following the thematic analysis approach. Our findings provide insights about how this group of PsTs utilized opportunities for professional growth.

Despite its proven added value, Modeling-based Learning(MbL) in science is not commonly incorporated into early grades science education. Following a growing body of research on using MbL in early grades, this multi-case study seeks to provide detailed descriptions of the implementation of MbL with 3 groups of pre-K children engaged in the study of three different phenomena, taught by 3 different teachers participating in a professional development program of pre-school science education. Findings across the different cases suggest that participating pre-school children were successfully engaged in authentic MbL activities and developed several different types of models using knowledge and experiences, as well as a variety of features of both analogical and mechanistic reasoning. I use this evidence to argue that (a)different MbL tools may afford different learning opportunities; (b)pre-school children have modeling resources that can use to utilize different tools using MbL in natural ways of young children learning (e.g.,playing).

Despite its proven added value, modeling-based learning (MbL) in science is not commonly incorporated into the early grades. Our purpose in this descriptive case study was to enrich our understanding of how kindergarten children enact MbL by examining these children's constructed models and their accompanying oral descriptions of their models. For this purpose, we adopted a drawing-based modeling approach in which children used annotated drawings to represent their models. The participants consisted of four groups of 5- to 6-year-olds (68 children total) who studied the solution of substances in water. We analyzed child-developed models (artifact analysis) and their oral presentations (discourse analysis), seeking to provide rich, detailed descriptions of the characteristics of these models. Our findings suggest that children in the study developed five different types of models using three different depiction strategies. Our findings also suggest that when developing and presenting their models of a physical phenomenon, our kindergarten children tended to rely on analogical reasoning to identify similar, known situations corresponding to the phenomenon under study. They then invoked mechanistic reasoning to develop representations of the phenomenon under study based on the analogy they used. The spectrum of mechanistic reasoning used by the children, and the analysis of the structure and components of their constructed models serve as evidence suggesting that despite their limited experiences with formal science education, as well as with MbL in science, participating children could successfully engage in authentic MbL activities. We contend that this is aligned with the idea of modeling resources, suggesting that it is more productive to help children to develop more reliable access to modeling resources they already have, even though they are usually not aware of their connection to MbL, such as prior scientific knowledge, experience, and MbL skills. © 2023 The Authors. Journal of Research in Science Teaching published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of National Association for Research in Science Teaching.