This article discusses a partnership with two different civic education organizations to study three different student-centered discussion designs. In one study, the authors worked with the Close Up Foundation. Close Up is a non-profit that annually brings 20,000 high school and middle school students from all 50 states and U.S. territories to…

Teaching students to make an effective claim is a critical step in establishing a culture of inquiry in the social studies education. After the "College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards" was published in 2013, Ryan Lewis was interested on the phrase "compelling question" and reorganize…

The article describes a science activity designed to increase students' knowledge and awareness of the spread of COVID-19. It helps students achieve scientific literacy through improving their views about the nature of science and their argumentation skills. It also promotes students' engagement in scientific practices such as modelling,…

The monologues presented in this article represent a particular Bakhtinian analysis of a transcript of a passionate, dramatic, and conflictual General Assembly meeting held in the first democratic school in Norway, the Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO), only two months after the school was opened, on November 2nd, 1967. In the meeting, they…

As a high school AP Physics 1 and 2 teacher, Sean Crumley wanted to create a curricular unit that would authentically connect literacy, opportunities for writing, and science standards while engaging a 21st-century student. This article provides an example of how Crumley incorporated writing into one of his AP physics units, and it could serve as…

Arguing from evidence is one of eight key science practices in which students should engage. It is an essential component of science, yet students have difficulties with this practice. We describe a scaffolded claims-evidence-reasoning (CER) argumentation framework that is embedded within a new eight-week, freely available curriculum unit…

DNA extraction from strawberries is a well-known procedure that allows students to visualize DNA and to recognize that living things contain DNA (NHGRI 2018, Science Buddies 2013). In this article, the authors describe a modification to the traditional DNA extraction protocol that promotes student agency in experimental design and also emphasizes…

Constructing scientific arguments is an important skill, and is specifically addressed by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) science and engineering practice of Engaging in Arguments From Evidence. To ensure that students understand the significance of a scientific argument, they need experiences that will help them understand, use, and…

In this article, we draw on the work of Michel Foucault to analyze one student's subject development in an expository writing classroom. James, the participant, was embarking on the project of becoming a good student, as he understood it, after struggling and leaving school previously. Drawing on interviews, classroom observations and written…

Fall 2020 presented myriad challenges for teachers trying to plan curricula to meet students' social-emotional and learning needs following an unprecedented spring and summer of isolation and loss due to the pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 (Rivera and Wallace 2020). The result of creative planning and adjusting of curricula for remote instruction…

Helping students understand that the scientific community's claims change through time, sometimes radically, allows them to develop a well-grounded sense of the "nature of science." Learning to reason about how scientific claims come to be accepted, and later refuted, is important for understanding the tentative nature of scientific…

Problem-based learning (PBL) fosters both content knowledge and content understanding, improves critical and process thinking skills, and promotes peer-to-peer learning, leadership, and teamwork (Hmelo-Silver 2004). Instructors support the PBL process by guiding students through activities that challenge their current knowledge and understanding…

Classroom discussions and deliberations on public issues stand at the core of civic education. Recent research has made a strong case for the potency of these approaches in teaching social studies. Students benefit by learning about argumentation and evidence use, examining their own thinking about an issue, listening to others, and developing…

Flourishing in today's global society requires citizens that are both intelligent consumers and producers of scientific understanding. Indeed, the modern world is facing ever-more complex problems that require innovative ways of thinking about, around, and with science. As numerous educational stakeholders have suggested, such skills and abilities…

On a February morning, Ms. Nelson (all names pseudonyms) was preparing her eleventh-grade class for a new unit with the goal of crafting arguments about the people and issues present in the classic novel "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe. As, teacher educators Eileen Shanahan and Min-Young Kim were observing in the classroom, it was…