Argumentation plays a significant role in science as a scientific practice in which knowledge is constructed, evaluated, and modified. Scientific argumentation (SA) is thus a promising activity for students to pursue in order to think and act like scientists and to enhance their understanding of science. Considering the impact that assessments…

Science education frameworks in the United States have moved strongly in recent years to incorporate more dimensions of learning, including measuring student use of scientific practices employed during scientific inquiry. For instance, the Next Generation Science Standards and related multidimensional frameworks adopted or adapted recently by more…

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…

Helping students develop informed views about scientific inquiry (SI) has been and continues to be a goal of K-12 science education, as evidenced in various reform documents. Nevertheless, research focusing on understandings of SI has taken a perceptible backseat to that which focuses on the "doing" of inquiry. We contend that this is…

Describes the development and testing of an instrument for use at the eighth grade level to measure four science processes: observation, inference, verification, and classification. Indicates that the two forms of the instrument are average in reliability and high in factor validity. (CC)