This article evaluates a validity argument for the degree to which assessment tasks are able to provide evidence about knowledge that fuses information from a progression of core disciplinary ideas in ecology and a progression for the scientific practice of developing evidence-based explanations. The article describes the interpretive framework…

Contextualizing science instruction involves utilizing students' prior knowledge and everyday experiences as a catalyst for understanding challenging science concepts. This study of two middle school science classrooms examined how students utilized the contextualizing aspects of project-based instruction and its relationship to their science…

What teaching practices foster inquiry and promote students to learn challenging subject matter in urban schools? Inquiry-based instruction and successful inquiry learning and teaching in project-based science (PBS) were described in previous studies (Brown & Campione, [1990]; Crawford, [1999]; Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, Bass, & Fredricks,…