Grappling with uncertainty is an essential element of students' science learning and sense-making processes, yet literature is limited regarding how teachers can facilitate and use student scientific uncertainty as a pedagogical resource in their classrooms. Furthermore, progress on pedagogical practice depends on both the ability to notice one's…

Although promoting student interest is a pivotal educational goal, student interest in science, and particularly in physics, declines substantially during secondary school. This study focused on the long-term development of interest in physics at the lower secondary level (grades 5-7) and examined the role of teaching and teaching quality on the…

Our epistemic cognition informs what scientific claims we choose to endorse over others, how we come to know in science, and our assumptions about the construction of scientific knowledge. The topic of climate change provides context for how we come to know about our surrounding environment. The development of climate literacy in young learners…

Present and future social and ecological challenges are complex both to understand and to attempt to solve. To comprehend the complex systems underlying these issues, students need systems thinking skills. However, in science education, a uniform delineation of systems thinking across contexts has yet to be established. While there seems to be…

This paper builds on the current literature base about learning progressions in science to address the question, "What is the nature of the learning progression in the content domain of the structure of matter?" We introduce a learning progression in response to that question and illustrate a methodology, the Construct Modeling (Wilson,…

This study reports on our steps toward achieving a conceptually coherent and empirically validated learning progression for carbon cycling in socio-ecological systems. It describes an iterative process of designing and analyzing assessment and interview data from students in upper elementary through high school. The product of our development…