Call for Chapters: The Science of Teaching Science: What Works, What Lasts, What Matters

Introduction

Science education worldwide is at a crossroads with little detectable change or declines in international assessment scores (TIMSS, PISA, and NAEP) in a decade. At the same time classrooms are saturated with both opportunities and disruptions: mobile devices, generative AI, shifting community contexts, and widening inequities. Against this backdrop, the central focus to be investigated in this RISE volume is: What science teaching practices demonstrably foster deeper cognitive engagement, sustained conceptual learning, and equitable participation in today’s rapidly shifting classroom contexts?

The need for developing students’ higher order thinking abilities has increased due to the growing complexity of the world we live in, the contents and procedures people process, and the problems they have to solve in everyday lives. During the last few decades some prominent researchers and educators have published recommendations for effective science teaching practices. Often, researchers’ recommendations have been based on studies performed in the education and cognition domains. Many studies have occurred in laboratory conditions away from the real educational field, and bear the characteristic of general advice. The sounder recommendations were based on common practices observed with effective K-12 classroom teachers, (e.g., studying in small groups, enhancing students’ engagement in learning discourse, or performing scientific inquiry). However, studies also showed that frequently teachers employed these practices in their classrooms in a superficial manner that did not affect learning (e.g., a small group setting in which students worked alone, or a meaningless discourse of questions-answers focused on science vocabulary regarding detailed information).

It is time for researchers-practitioners to examine cases of science teaching-learning showing clear evidence of specific teachers’ practices that enact knowledge and high cognitive engagement, promote cognitive flexibility and high abilities of information processing and thinking, problem solving, and critiquing. Such examination should be performed in real classrooms and reveal clear evidence of students’ enhanced learning and deep understanding of the content studied as well as its meaning, influences and consequences within the larger society. Specific science teaching-learning should be investigated for revealing evidence-based explicit or implicit links between teachers’ adaptive expertise and level of effectiveness and students’ learning operations and advancement. Evidence of “negative links (cases)” between practices that do not foster learning and understanding in specific contexts or foster the learning and understanding of students of certain characteristics only (e.g., excellent students, low achievers) may contribute to our understanding of effective science teaching just as “positive links” do. The illumination of such links in the specific contexts in which they are formed (e.g., the learner, the curriculum content, task, goals, and the environment) may enable further improvement of science teaching practices.

The RISE volume provides a venue for such studies, presenting original classroom cases of evidence-based links between effective teaching and students’ learning advancement.

List of topic areas

Chapter proposals in this RISE volume should interrogate and advance the focus of K-12 science teaching practice in the face of urgent global challenges. Drawing on the conception of adaptive expertise; the balance between efficiency and innovation (Schwartz, Bransford, & Sears, 2005) we have framed the focus as: “Directing effort toward evidence-informed science teaching practices while adapting them flexibly to learners and learning contexts.”

This volume addresses key questions on these topics such as;

• Evidence-informed and adaptive science teaching practices advancing student learning outcomes.
• Data-informed decision-making in science teaching, including formative assessment, analytics, or AI-mediated supports.
• Cognitive engagement strategies aligned with national science standards, such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and inquiry-based learning that go beyond content delivery, challenging another’s assumptions, making reasoned arguments, and learning to think.
• Teacher informal professional networks and classroom dynamics amplifying or constraining the impact of effective classroom science teaching practices.
• Tensions and innovations with emerging technologies, from mobile phones to AI, that can both deepen and detract from student science learning.

This call seeks original, rigorous, creative, and practice-relevant scholarship leading the field toward teaching science that not only responds to current challenges but also transforms them into opportunities for lasting scientific literacy.

Submission information

Interested authors should first email a chapter pre-proposal of not more than 3-4 pages for acceptance review to Dennis Sunal by June 1, 2026. List all authors and their affiliation. A Call for Author submission of pre-proposals will be broadly distributed for RISE Volume 10 during Winter-Spring 2026. To be eligible for the selection process for acceptance of a full chapter manuscript review, pre-proposal abstracts must:

1. Address the volume theme relating to significance to teachers, students, policy makers, and/or other stakeholders.
2. Include a brief review of research addressing the chapter’s focus as a part of the main theme of the chapter.
3. Support the chapter’s focus by describing a brief report of the author’s own related original or ongoing research study to be fully included in the chapter as a contribution relative to existing research.

Full manuscripts will be subject to a blinded peer review process to evaluate them for inclusion in RISE. Following acceptance subject to peer-review of the book proposal, the book will be included in the Research in Science Education book series by Emerald Publishing.

Key deadlines

Abstract Submission Deadline: August 30, 2026
Notice of Invite to Submit: September 25, 2026
Chapter Manuscript Submission Deadline: February 15, 2027
Submission of RISE Volume 10 manuscript to Emerald: April 30, 2027