We explored the potential for addressing nature of science through a historic narrative about disagreement between researchers concerning a socio-scientific issue, incidence of juvenile thyroid cancer following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. The narrative was developed from authentic sources and tested in two cycles. Eight groups of three…

Agreement has become widespread that students' peer-to-peer argumentation should play a central role in science classrooms. Coordinating evidence with claims lies at the heart of a skilled argument. Yet evidence takes numerous forms that pose different interpretational challenges. Might cognitive limitations on the part of the individual student…

This article provides a validation framework for research on the development and use of science Learning Progressions (LPs). The framework describes how evidence from various sources can be used to establish an interpretive argument and a validity argument at five stages of LP research--development, scoring, generalisation, extrapolation, and use.…

This study focuses on an educational proposal on nutrition within the framework of a context-based approach to science teaching. The intervention was conducted with 100 students between the ages of 9 and 15 in the City of Buenos Aires with the intention of developing their ability to identify checkable and non-checkable claims. Even when it has…

Secondary school students often only use the rules for doing scientific inquiry when prompted, as if they fail to see the point of doing so. This qualitative design study explores conditions to address this problem in school science inquiry. Dutch students (N = 22, aged 14-15) repeatedly consider the quality of their work: in a conventional,…

This paper explores students' ability to analyse and interpret empirical data as inadequate data analysis skills and understandings may contribute to the renowned disappointing outcomes of practical work in secondary school physics. Selected competences, derived from a collection of leading curricula, are explored through interviews and practical…

Research in learning progressions (LPs) has been essential towards building understanding of how students' ideas change over time. There has been little work, however, into how ideas between separate but related constructs within a multi-faceted LP relate. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the idea of "progression webs" to…

The aim of the present study was to examine science and non-science education secondary school teachers' skill to evaluate arguments, and how this skill relates to their skill to construct arguments and to their perceptions about their ability to teach argumentation skills effectively. The study also examined whether teachers' argument skills and…

This research aimed to investigate the nature of cognitive processes when college students reason about evidence on global climate change (GCC). Twenty-six undergraduate students participated in this qualitative study, where they were interviewed to evaluate competing arguments on key issues related to GCC and discuss their own perspectives.…

Evidence of student thinking takes a variety of forms (e.g. verbal responses, gestures) and has varying degrees of visibility within classroom interactions. The purpose of this study was to characterise the nature of pre-service science teachers' (PSTs') noticing skills of different forms of evidence of student thinking using video-based…

Today's world requires citizens to make informed decisions by critically evaluating evidence and alternative explanations. The purpose of this study was to explore pre-service elementary teachers' capability of building a model--evidence link, their evaluation levels on the topic of wetlands, and their evaluations of the trustworthiness of the…

This study explored the interplay between science teachers' pedagogical beliefs, scientific evidence, and diversity. This study adopts a sociocultural view of science that views science as a cultural way of knowing, and acknowledges that it is laden with cultural understandings, interpretations, and a language of its own. This paper reports…

Practical independent research projects (IRPs) are a feature of school science in a number of countries. To assess the impact of IRPs on students, a systematic review of the literature was undertaken. Thirty-nine papers met the review inclusion criteria, reporting on work from twelve countries. The review indicates that IRPs are often associated…

Researchers taking a domain-general approach to the development of scientific reasoning long thought that the ability to engage in scientific reasoning did not develop until adolescence. However, more recent studies have shown that preschool children already have a basic ability to evaluate evidence and a basic understanding of experimentation.…

This research explored how Karen (first-generation refugees from Burma) elementary students engaged with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) practice of constructing scientific explanations based on evidence within the context of a cross-cultural learning community. In this action research, the researcher and a Karen parent served as…