Both professional and classroom-based scientific communities develop and test explanatory models of the natural world. For students to take up models as tools for sensemaking, practice must be agentive (where students use and revise models "for" specific purposes) and conceptually productive (where students make progress on their ideas).…

How anthropomorphic reasoning functions in scientific thinking has been a controversial topic. There is evidence it is problematic as well as evidence it can play productive roles, for scientists and for students. In science education, however, the prevailing view remains that it is an impediment. For this study, we have chosen examples of what we…

This exploratory qualitative study examined science teacher enactment of crosscutting concepts (CCCs), a core aspect of Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) three-dimensional learning, which also includes disciplinary core ideas and science and engineering practices (SEPs). We collected naturalistic observational and interview data from 13…

Evolution is challenging to understand for students. Frequently, students hold coexisting intuitive conceptions based on cognitive biases and scientific conceptions of evolution. For the self-regulation of intuitive and scientific conceptions, metacognitive awareness is fundamental. However, students are mostly unaware of their conceptions. A…

Despite the importance of developing elementary science teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT), there are limited assessments that have been designed to measure the full breadth of their CKT at scale. Our overall research project addressed this gap by developing an online assessment to measure elementary preservice teachers' CKT about…

This study reports on a case study about multimodal work in a primary physics classroom focusing on forces. Previous research reports that students benefit from multimodal work in science classrooms. Yet, few systematic studies have been performed to reveal how students represent their experiences and ideas of science phenomena over time within…

When learning about scientific phenomena, students are expected to "mechanistically" explain how underlying interactions produce the observable phenomenon and "conceptually" connect the observed phenomenon to canonical scientific knowledge. This paper investigates how the integration of the complementary processes of designing…

In this study, we investigated the construction of science learning opportunities focusing on space-time relationships. Guided by ethnography in education, we followed the everyday life of a classroom over their three first years at elementary school. Based on macroanalysis, we examined discursive interactions in temporally distant events and how…

This study aimed to investigate whether the presence (when using physical manipulatives [PMs]) or absence (when using virtual manipulatives [VMs]) of haptic sensory feedback (i.e., open-ended haptic manipulation of physical materials with the use of the hands) during experimentation can impact preschoolers' conceptual understanding of concepts…

The greenhouse effect is a complex scientific phenomenon that plays a crucial role in understanding climate change. Grasping students' understanding of this phenomenon on the content-specific level but also how students' conceptions are organized is vital for effective climate change education. This study addresses both levels and delves into the…

Sensemaking has been advocated as a core practice of science education to support students in constructing their own understanding through a prolonged trajectory. However, the field lacks a discussion of teaching strategies that can better support students as they develop in the trajectory of sensemaking, which includes four phases: initial…

In this study, we examined the ways in which two middle school science teachers elicited and were responsive to students' initial science ideas for explaining an anchoring phenomenon while teaching the same model-based learning unit focused on plate tectonics. Data sources included student models, classroom video, and classroom artifacts. Our…

This study contributes to discussions on facilitating students' sense-making in science by analyzing the utterances of high-achieving students in dialogues during practical work and identifying characteristics of their language use and learning processes. The context of the study is a general science course at an upper secondary school in Norway.…

Time is a central concept for astronomy, yet how it is communicated in educational contexts has received insufficient attention in the literature. This study explores how time-related concepts are communicated in the planetarium, by analyzing 34 different planetarium sessions held in a diversity of Portuguese institutions. Sessions were video and…

We previously proposed a hypothetical learning progression around the disciplinary core idea of the Solar System and its formation as a first step in a research program to begin to fill this gap and address questions of student learning in this domain. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of two dimensions within the learning progression,…