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.…

Although visual aids are widely considered a valuable source of scaffolding, the nature and active utilization of these aids in current science classrooms are not well understood. This qualitative study explores interaction in the teaching of concepts related to evolution, with a specific focus on a teacher's use of different visual support…

In this study, we examined students' epistemological and positional framing during small group scientific modeling to explore their context-dependent perceptions about knowledge, themselves, and others. We focused on two small groups of Korean eighth-grade students who participated in six modeling activities about excretion. The two groups were…

Metadiscourse, or metatalk, is a discursive resource used in virtually any text or conversation to organize its content or signal the author's stance toward the content. Despite its prevalence in classroom talk, few have examined the role of metadiscourse and how it assists teachers and students to manage classroom communication of scientific…

Learning in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) is challenging, leaving many students to give up on these subjects. Specifically, females are underrepresented in STEM industries. Identifying how male and female students deal with STEM learning challenges, and how this relates to learning outcomes, may inform teaching that best…

Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for integrating knowledge and practice in learning experiences in K-12 science education. "PlantingScience" (PS), an ideal curriculum for use as an NGSS model, is a computer-mediated collaborative learning environment intertwining scientific inquiry, classroom instruction, and online…

This study investigated the modalities of science teaching practice and students' pedagogic subject positioning through the linguistic features of science classroom discourse and the discursive interaction. For this purpose, this study sought to develop a methodology for classroom discourse analysis, the TMARC (Triangular Model of Analyzing…

Whole-class discussion is a common instructional approach used by secondary science teachers. When orchestrated well, such an approach can provide students with opportunities to engage in extensive science talk with the benefit of teacher guidance and feedback. Our study investigated teachers' approaches to discussion during the piloting of an…

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…

Typically, the scientific method in science classrooms takes the form of discrete, ordered steps meant to guide students' inquiry. In this paper, we examine how focusing on the scientific method as discrete steps affects students' inquiry and teachers' perceptions thereof. To do so, we study a ninth-grade environmental science class in which…

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…

This research project explores the language practices that emerged as a teacher taught a lesson designed to promote science literacy development for traditionally underrepresented students. This ethnographic study of a Detroit, Michigan, school examined the teacher's use of science language and its influence on students' use of science language.…

This paper explores both the obstacles and the possibilities for students developing identities associated with science by engaging in solidarity-building classroom interactions. Data come from ethnographic research conducted in a diverse eighth-grade urban magnet school classroom in which the teacher taught out of field for part of the year.…

In this paper, we draw upon a framework for analyzing the discursive interactions of science classrooms (Mortimer & Scott, 2003, "Meaning Making in Secondary Science Classrooms," Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press), to probe the movement between authoritative and dialogic discourse in a Brazilian high school science class. More…

The paper presents an intensive study of a micro-event aiming at the characterization of teacher's discourse from a multimodal communication perspective in a secondary school science classroom dealing with the topic of "water cycle." The research addresses the following questions: (a) What communicative modes are used by the teacher?, (b) what…