A key goal of recent reforms in science education has been to support students' collective sensemaking, in which they work together to understand a natural phenomenon. This work is often done during class discussions, but facilitating those discussions is challenging. In this study, we used a framework of three discussion types to investigate how…

Children draw on diverse sensemaking repertoires that are inclusive of their cultural and community knowledge to make sense of science in the world around them. However, preservice teachers often do not notice the science embedded in children's explanations of phenomena. Discourses that frame children, particularly those from minoritized…

Equity-focused calls for elementary education reform recognize the importance of student and teacher translanguaging, yet nuances of how this process unfolds in early childhood science is an underexplored area. This study examines young plurilingual children's participation in science investigations, with a view toward understanding how open-ended…

Teleology has been described as an intuitive cognitive bias and as a major type of student conception. There is controversy regarding whether teleological explanations are a central obstacle to, are legitimate in, or are even supportive of science learning. However, interaction in science classrooms has not yet been investigated with regard to…

Teacher-led whole class discussions are essential when it comes to guiding students' construction of knowledge, and recent studies on teaching and learning emphasize the need for more student-centered teaching methods. In previous studies, the extent to which different types of communication take place in the classroom have been extensively…

Orchestrating inquiry-based science learning in the classroom is a complex undertaking. It requires fitting the culture of the classroom with the teacher's teaching and inquiry practices. To understand the interactions between these variables in relation to student learning, we conducted an investigation in two different classroom settings to…

This article reports the results of an ethnographic research about the multimodal science discourse in a sixth-grade sheltered classroom involving English Language Learners (ELLs) only. Drawing from the perspective of multimodality, this study examines how science learning is constructed in science lectures through multiple semiotic resources,…

In the present study, I analyze ethnographic data from a year-long study of two Advanced Placement (AP) Biology classes that enrolled students with diverse racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds. Specifically, I consider participation, positioning, and learning of newcomer Korean students in the focal classes. Building on the notion of figured…

Laughter is a fundamental human phenomenon. Yet there is little educational research on the potential functions of laughter on the enacted (lived) curriculum. In this study, we identify the functions of laughter in a beginning science teacher's classroom throughout her first year of teaching. Our study shows that laughter is more than a gratuitous…

The forecast for the first quarter of this century is that the issue of teaching science in the language to which the learner is most familiar will receive more attention in our quest to win more students for science. Over two-thirds of countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe have developed policies on the use of the mother tongue for teaching…

Current research indicates that student engagement in scientific argumentation can foster a better understanding of the concepts and the processes of science. Yet opportunities for students to participate in authentic argumentation inside the science classroom are rare. There also is little known about science teachers' understandings of…

The findings reported on in this manuscript emerged from a design experiment conducted at a low-income urban middle school intended to support the teacher in incorporating pedagogical practices supportive of students' everyday knowledge and practices during a 6th grade unit on food and nutrition from the LiFE curriculum. In studying the impact of…

Modeling is a core practice in science and a central part of scientific literacy. We present theoretical and empirical motivation for a learning progression for scientific modeling that aims to make the practice accessible and meaningful for learners. We define scientific modeling as including the elements of the practice (constructing, using,…

In this study I rely on sociocultural views of learning and teaching to describe how fifth- sixth-grade students in a Fostering a Community of Learners (FCL) classroom gradually adopted scientific ideas and language in a socially complex classroom. Students practiced talking science together, using everyday, scientific, and hybrid discourses as…

Examines the way teachers humanize science by focusing specifically on their use of analogies and metaphors. Explores classroom discourse in order to examine how teachers creatively use analogies to clarify an idea, develop a concept, or communicate a message leading to new research questions about the cultural, linguistic, and social…