This ethnographic cross-case study examines five teachers' year-long efforts to implement practice-based physics instruction within the unique organizational context of a no-excuses charter network. The teachers were attempting to adapt their didactic, rigid, and compliance-based instructional approach to include more opportunities for students to…

An essential aspect of scientific practice involves grappling with the generation of predictions, representations, interpretations, investigations, and communications related to scientific phenomena, all of which are inherently permeated with uncertainty. Transferring this practice from expert settings to the classroom is invaluable yet…

Science education researchers have highlighted how uncertainty can foster meaningful scientific sense-making, supporting students to re-evaluate their understandings of scientific phenomena and pursue deeper causal accounts. However, facilitating whole-class conversations motivated by uncertainty is complex and challenging, calling for further…

With the shifts in science education emphasizing the integration of science practices with science content, there is a need to know how teachers understand those science practices within their teaching practice. Our primary research question was, "What do novice elementary teachers know about the science practices, in terms of what the…

This qualitative case study delved into students' understanding and positioning while they participated in solving an authentic, conceptually-based problem in a high-school chemistry class. Verbal and nonverbal cues, particularly gestures, offered broader awareness of students' engagement in sensemaking during the learning experience. The…

The study explores how a complexity approach empowers science learning. A complexity approach represents systems as many interacting entities. The construct of micro-macro compatibility is introduced, the degree of similarity between behaviors at the micro- and macro-levels of the system. Seventh-grade students' learning about gases was studied…

While the opportunity to engage in scientific reasoning has been identified as an important aspect of informal science learning (National Research Council, 2009), most studies have examined this strand of science learning within the context of physics-based science exhibits. Few have examined the presence of such activity in conjunction with live…

Curriculum materials are important resources with which teachers make pedagogical decisions about the design of science learning environments. To become well-started beginning elementary teachers capable of engaging their students in inquiry-based science, preservice elementary teachers need to learn to use science curriculum materials…

This article draws on M. M. Bakhtin's (1981) notion of dialogism to articulate what it means to understand a scientific idea. In science, understanding an idea is both conceptual and epistemic and is exhibited by an ability to use it in explanation and argumentation. Some distillation of these activities implies that dialogic understanding of a…

This is a critical time for the science education community as we embark on the creation and implementation of new national science standards. The purpose of this essay is to offer insight into how the language of curriculum standards, including that found in state science standards in the United States over the past 15 years, has posed barriers…

Describes the results of a study on the similarities and differences in laboratory tasks used in science education at upper secondary school and university level in the three main science subjects in seven European countries. Some differences are noted between the science subjects and educational levels, but the dominant impression of the analysis…

Describes the development of a project-based unit on hot-air balloons used with Israeli junior high school students. Concludes that students in the program gained experience with high-level scientific principles and technological processes, the project allows for a learning environment of cooperation and teamwork, and collaboration between…