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We examined curricular orientations that graduate students in science and mathematics fields held as they experienced urban high‐school science and mathematics classrooms. We analyzed how these educators (called Fellows) saw themselves, students, teachers, schools, education, and the sense they made of mathematics and science education in urban, challenging settings in the light of experiences they brought with them into the project and experiences they designed and engaged in as they worked in classrooms for 1 or 2 years. We used Schubert's (Schubert (1997) Curriculum: Perspective, paradigm, and possibility. New Jersey: Prentice‐Hall, Inc.) four curricular orientations—intellectual traditionalism, social behaviorism, experientialism, and critical reconstructionism—to analyze the Fellows' journals, and to explore ways in which the positions they portrayed relative to curriculum, instruction, assessment, social justice, discipline, student involvement, teacher's role, subject‐matter nature, etc., shaped and were shaped by who they were before and during their classroom work. Our qualitative analysis revealed various relationships including: experientialists engaged in more open‐ended projects, relevant to students, with explicit connections to everyday‐life experiences; social behaviorists paid more attention to designing “good” labs and activities that taught students appropriate content, led them through various steps, and modeled good science and mathematics; and critical reconstructionists hyped up student knowledge and awareness of science issues that affect students' lives, such as asthma and HIV epidemic. Categorizing orientations and identifying relationships between experiences, actions, and orientations may help us articulate and explicate goals, priorities, and commitments that we have, or ought to have, when we work in urban classrooms. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 46: 1–26, 2009

Collaborative learning is a subject that has occupied many researchers throughout the world. Many researchers have maintained that when students of all school stages, from kindergarten to higher education work in teams, this leads to high performance (Johnson, Skon, & Johnson, 1980), but also has a positive impact emotionally and psychologically (Schmitz & Winskel, 2008). However, there have been studies claiming that teamwork does not actually result in any substantive improvement in students’ efficiency (Samuelsson, 2010), or that only some students gain from this method of learning (Sears & Reagin, 2013). The present study explores how cognitive development relates to problem solving in pairs or individually, in students of the sixth grade in school using the numerical puzzle Sudoku. More specifically, the study explored four different types of pairs of two, according to the level of cognitive development (high – high, high – low, average – average and low – low) and three different types of units (high, average, low), all taken from sixth graders of a public elementary school. Additionally, the research studied whether solving Sudoku was more effective in pairs rather than individually. The sample of this research included thirteen sixth grade classes from a public elementary school in a city in Cyprus. The city was intentionally selected to facilitate the research. Two hundred twenty students completed the tool of cognitive development Group Assessment of Logical Thinking (GALT). Then, 60 students individually solved the Sudoku puzzle, while 160 students solved the puzzle in pairs. The results of the qualitative study showed that there were differences between the four types of pairs in terms of how they collaborated. Although students showed interest or even enthusiasm in solving the Sudoku puzzle, the majority of them did not work together so as to improve their performance. The results of the quantitative study confirmed that students failed to cooperate. The performance of the Individual Problem Solving Ability was not different among the four types of pairs. The majority of high-level cognitive development pairs started to solve the puzzle competitively. However, in the process they worked together to solve the puzzle correctly. They also behaved in an intensely self-centred way. In non-homogeneous pairs, low-performing students had a passive role in the group. Additionally, it seemed that the level of cooperation was related to high performance. The research demonstrated that students had difficulty in developing combinational thinking. This was the reason they could not solve the puzzle. Pairs did not cooperate, despite the fact that they had clear guidelines to do that. This finding should be a concern for teachers and the educational system of Cyprus, in general. The role of the teacher should be supportive in helping students overcome their difficulties, considering the theory of Vygotsky (2012) on systematic facilitating, development, and the Zone of Proximal Development.

The present study explored the effects of a different type of teaching on epistemic cognition of 6th grade students through an intervention program in the science class. Epistemic cognition concerns how people acquire, understand, justify, change, and use knowledge (Greene, Sandoval, & Bråten, 2016). The study addressed the question of how the type of approach affected the development of epistemic cognition among young children, by extending previous research that examined the relation between epistemic cognition and intervention programmes in adults. Nine 6th grade classes completed paper-and-pencil instruments to measure their epistemic cognition and cognitive ability. Twelve of the students also participated in an individual semi-structured interview. Students’ epistemic cognition was assessed using a short version of Schommer’s questionnaire for students. The students’ cognitive ability was assessed through Raven’s Progressive Matrices (1998). The present study aspired to find which of the main approaches is more effective for the development of students’ epistemic cognition and if cognitive ability can predict epistemic cognition. Three of the classes were randomly put in the Control Group that had courses in science education, three were randomly put in the Experimental Group Α, following the multidimensional approach, and three were randomly put in the Experimental Group Β, following the developmental approach. The nine 6th grade classes completed paper-and-pencil instruments to measure their epistemic cognition and cognitive ability, to examine possible changes in epistemic cognition and a possible relation between epistemic cognition and cognitive ability. Students’ epistemic cognition was assessed using the short version of Schommer’s et al. questionnaire (2000) for young students. Students’ cognitive ability was assessed through the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (Raven, Raven, & Court, 1998). Then, twelve of these students participated in an individual semi-structured interview, where they were asked about the effectiveness of the intervention program. The results showed the effectiveness of multidimensional teaching, which is also confirmed through the analysis of qualitative data, in contrast to the developmental intervention. The analysis of the interviews showed that all students believed that truth can be found through research.  Also, according to the results, the multidimensional teaching approach can predict cognitive ability at the level of epistemic cognition. The present study aims to assist in increasing students’ epistemic cognition which is so important for forming citizens capable of meeting the needs of the 21st century. The benefits that result from the long-term intervention will be communicated to the Ministry of Education and Culture and propose radical changes in the Curriculum in terms practices that could be implemented in the teaching of science that will help in the development of elementary school students΄epistemic cognition

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