At the 2015 "NARST: A Worldwide Organization for Improving Science Teaching and Learning Through Research" Annual International Conference, a group of scholars held an extended pre-conference workshop to discuss key challenges and future directions faced by argumentation researchers around the world. This wide-ranging group of…

Constructing explanations of complex phenomena is an important part of doing science and it is also an important component of learning science. Students need opportunities to make claims based on available evidence and then use science concepts to justify why evidence supports the claim. But what happens when "new" evidence emerges for…

Although research and policy suggest science and mathematics teachers should attend to their student's thinking during instruction, our field has inadequately defined what that means in relation to our ultimate goals for the practice. Here I present a theoretical argument that, in making their definitions, researchers should leverage the ways…

This study aims to identify students' misconceptions regarding covalent bonds. Seventy-seven graduate students in the middle of Indonesia participated in the study. Data were collected in three stages. First, misconceptions were identified by using the Semi Open Diagnostic Test. Ten students who experienced the worst misconceptions were…

In this work we use research from science education on teacher framing and work from mathematics education on teacher noticing to develop new approaches to modeling teacher cognition. The framing literature proposes a dynamic cognitive model of teaching in which teacher epistemological framing, or moment-to-moment understanding of what is going on…

While research has shown that elementary (K-5) students are capable of engaging in the scientific practice of explanation construction, commonly-used elementary science curriculum materials may not always afford them opportunities to do so. As a result, elementary teachers must often adapt their science curriculum materials to better support…

This study examines how a first-year biology teacher facilitates a series of whole-class discussions about evolution during the implementation of a problem-based unit. A communicative theoretical perspective is adopted wherein evolution discussions are viewed as social events that the teacher can frame intellectually (i.e., present or organize as…

This mixed-methods investigation compared the relative impacts of instructional approach and context of nature of science instruction on preservice elementary teachers' understandings. The sample consisted of 75 preservice teachers enrolled in four sections of an elementary science methods course. Independent variables included instructional…

This study investigated the conceptual pathways of 19 Grade 11 introductory chemistry students (age 16-17) as they participated in a multirepresentational instruction on the particulate nature of matter (PNM). This study was grounded in contemporary conceptual change theory, in particular, research on students' conceptual pathways that focuses on…

Most people visit a science center in order to satisfy specific leisure-related needs; needs which may or may not actually include science learning. Falk proposed that an individual's identity-related motivations provide a useful lens through which to understand adult free-choice science learning in leisure settings. Over a 3-year period the…

This study assessed the influence of a 3-year professional development program on elementary teachers' views of nature of science (NOS), instructional practice to promote students' appropriate NOS views, and the influence of participants' instruction on elementary student NOS views. Using the VNOS-B and associated interviews the researchers…