Multilingual youth, from nondominant communities, are often denied critical opportunities for engagement in robust sensemaking due to deficit-based perspectives and linguistic hierarchies. To advance equity, it is important to recognize all youth as epistemic agents and facilitate opportunities to take on intellectual positions. Drawing on…

Science teachers' professional learning about student motivation can play a key role in developing their ability to nurture student motivation and cope with motivational challenges. To advance the understanding of how on-the-job discussions facilitate teacher learning about student motivation, this study investigated how elementary-school science…

Students' difficulties in interpreting what counts as knowledge have been addressed in past research on science education. The implementation of progressivist pedagogy in terms of more student-active classroom practice and the introduction of a variety of discourses into the science classroom deepens students' difficulties. The integration of…

Reform-based science instruction is guided by teachers' normative beliefs. Discursive claims are how teachers say they teach science. Previous research has studied the change in teachers' beliefs and how beliefs influence intended practice and action in the classroom. Few studies have connected what teachers believe, how they say they teach, and…

In this study, we examined opportunities for reasoning and meaning making that read-alouds of children's literature science information books and related hands-on explorations offered to young Latina/o students in an urban public school. Using a qualitative, interpretative framework, we analyzed classroom discourse and children's writing…

This quasi-experimental, mixed methods study examined the transfer of a well-established pedagogical strategy, Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL), to an online workshop environment (cPLTL) in a general chemistry course at a research university in the Midwest. The null hypothesis guiding the study was that no substantive differences would emerge between…

This study examines how a first-year biology teacher facilitates a series of whole-class discussions about evolution during the implementation of a problem-based unit. A communicative theoretical perspective is adopted wherein evolution discussions are viewed as social events that the teacher can frame intellectually (i.e., present or organize as…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine, from a cross-cultural perspective, students' epistemological patterns of reasoning about socioscientific issues (SSI), and to identify potential interactions of cultural and scientific identity. Mediating factors associated with students' argumentation and discourse about SSI, as well as the…

The purpose of this study was to find out how teachers use questions in classroom discourse to scaffold student thinking and help students construct scientific knowledge. The study was conducted in large-class settings where the medium of instruction was English although the students were non-native speakers of the language. Six teachers teaching…

This study explores the effectiveness of a cooperative learning (CL) approach, where students work together and elaborate concepts of physics. The group problem-solving tasks were conceptual questions from physics, where the students had to discuss and provide explanations of some phenomena. The effectiveness of the learning-in-groups approach was…

Teachers' failure to use the microcomputer-based laboratory (MBL) more widely may be a result of not recognizing its capacity to transform laboratory activities. This research aimed to increase understanding of how MBL activities designed to be consistent with a constructivist theory of learning support or constrain student construction of…

This study investigated teacher-child interaction within small-group science activities in a fourth-grade classroom. This qualitative study revealed three "zones of interaction," or teacher-child interaction categories: Individual Zones of Interaction, Multiple Zones of Interaction, and a Collective Zone of Interaction. Each zone was further…

Explores the nature of explanations used by 20 middle school science teachers utilizing the constant comparative analysis method in analyzing transcripts of classroom discourse. Discusses a subsuming categorical framework for the 10 types of explanations generated, along with examples of each type, namely: analogical, anthropomorphic, functional,…

The purpose of this article is to report findings from an ethnographic study that focused on the co-development of science literacy and academic identity formulation within a third-grade classroom. Our theoretical framework draws from sociocultural theory and studies of scientific literacy. Through analysis of classroom discourse, we identified…

The purpose of this study was twofold. One purpose was to identify the locally negotiated literate practices that defined ways of communicating information and knowledge across the curriculum in a fourth/fifth grade classroom. Through an ethnographic and sociolinguistic set of analyses, this investigation illustrated how the teacher worked to…