Quality Teaching in Primary Science Education

'The chapters (of this book) address issues of contemporary relevance and theoretical significance: embodiment, discursive moves, the social unit of learning and instruction, inquiry, and reasoning through representations. Through all of these, the EQUALPRIME team manages to connect the multiple cultural perspectives that characterise this research study. The 'meta-reflection' chapters offer a different form of connection, linking cultural and theoretical perspectives on reasoning, quality teaching and video-based research methodologies. The final two chapters offer connective links to implications for practice in teacher education and in cross-cultural comparative research into teaching and learning. These multiple and extensive connections constitute one of the books most significant accomplishments.
The EQUALPRIME project, as reported in this book, provides an important empirical base that must be considered by any system seeking to promote sophisticated science learning and instructional practices in primary school classrooms. By exploring the classroom realisation of aspirational science pedagogies, the EQUALPRIME project also speaks to those involved in teacher education and to teachers. I commend this book to the reader. It offers important insights, together with a model of effective, collegial, collaborative inter-cultural research. It will help us to move forward in important ways'.

Professor David Clarke, Melbourne University

Dr Jörg Ramseger is Professor of Primary Education and Head of the Center for Research in Primary Education (Arbeitsstelle Bildungsforschung Primarstufe) at the Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.

Dr Hsiao-Lan Sharon Chen is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction in the Department of Education at the National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan.