As the vision in "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) takes hold in schools and classrooms, there is an urgent need for teacher professional development (PD) programs that align with NGSS-designed curriculum materials and address the unique strengths and needs of diverse student…

As an emerging field of theory, research, and practice, STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) has received attention for its efforts to incorporate the arts into the rubric of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) learning. In particular, many informal educators have embraced it as an inclusive and…

Instructional explanations are sometimes viewed as part of a nonconstructivist, solely teacher-centered learning environment, leading to the perception that they are ineffective or inappropriate for teaching science. Consequently, teacher education programmes seldom focus on preparing teachers to explain scientific concepts effectively.…

I advance theoretically and empirically grounded arguments for broadening how we frame and understand situational interests. A situational interest refers to the short-term spike in a person's attention and participation in an activity and it is triggered in the interactions between the person and environment features (e.g., novelty and surprise).…

In this paper, we use the concept of "consequential learning" to frame our exploration of what makes learning and doing science matter for youth from nondominant communities, as well as the barriers these youth must confront in working toward consequential ends. Data are derived from multimodal cases authored by four females from…

This article examines the tensions that arose as teachers, scientists, youth, and community organizers worked to develop a curriculum that was responsive to community concerns and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Within the context of urban heavy metal contamination and building on previous critiques of the standards, we identified…

While current science teacher education frameworks designed to support high-quality teaching have the potential to promote equitable science learning, they do not substantively engage with how racism organizes science teaching and learning. In this critical qualitative inquiry grounded in critical race theory and sociopolitical perspectives on…

This paper explores the relationship between epistemology, sociology, and learning and teaching in physics based on an examination of literature from research in science studies, history and philosophy of science, and physics pedagogic research. It reveals a mismatch between the positivist epistemological foundation which seems to underpin the…

This paper presents an integrative framework for analyzing science meaning-making with representations. It integrates the research on multiple representations and multimodal representations by identifying and leveraging the differences in their units of analysis in two dimensions: timescale and compositional grain size. Timescale considers the…

Representational competence is a primary contributor to student learning in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines and an optimal target for instruction at all educational levels. We describe the design and implementation of a learning activity that uses concrete models to improve students' representational competence and…

This paper describes research on the use of journals in a general education chemistry course for elementary education majors. In the journals, students describe their understanding of a topic, the development of that understanding, and how the topic connects to their lives. In the process, they are able to engage in reflection about several…

Opportunities for the development of science-related pedagogy during training are necessarily limited for the generalist primary (elementary), preservice teacher. While school placement is an important context within which to develop such professional expertise, the role of institution-based learning is less well understood in this regard. This…

In both formal and informal settings, not only science but also views on the nature of science are communicated. Although there probably is no singular nature shared by all fields of science, in the field of science education it is commonly assumed that on a certain level of generality there is a consensus on many features of science. In this…

D. Klahr and M. Nigam (2004) make a case for the superiority of direct instruction over discovery learning in students' mastery of the control-of-variables strategy central to the scientific method. In the present work, we examine acquisition of this strategy among students of the same age as those studied by Klahr and Nigam, as well as follow…

This article explores the relation between how scientific knowledge is created and the reasoning involved in learning content with understanding. Although an asserted parallel between these underpins reform, little is actually known about this relation. This article offers a model of this relation that draws coherent connections between the…