With the shifts in science education emphasizing the integration of science practices with science content, there is a need to know how teachers understand those science practices within their teaching practice. Our primary research question was, "What do novice elementary teachers know about the science practices, in terms of what the…

Questions of equity, diversity, and inclusion in the sciences have taken center stage in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. This paper focuses on the experiences of academics engaging in such work, particularly in their roles as educators, by sharing two of the authors' experiences introducing equity,…

Whereas science teachers often express initial enthusiasm about the student-centered, reform-oriented instructional strategies they encounter in professional development (PD), they rarely adopt them in practice. One possible obstacle is a mismatch between these strategies and teachers' beliefs about what is possible and desirable in their…

Drawing upon interviews with key actors involved in the development of and support for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in the United States, this article shows how a potentially controversial reform came to be actively supported by senior educators. We utilize Kingdon's (2003, "Agendas, alternatives, and public policies,"…

We argue that students should take on roles as "epistemic agents"--those who shape knowledge production and practices of a community. In this study, the research team--a science educator and two scientists--worked with a sixth-grade teacher to provide 90 students with opportunities to take up epistemic agency over a 22-day unit about…

Science education reforms focus on the integration of three dimensions: disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), scientific and engineering practices (SEPs), and crosscutting concepts (CCCs). While research has examined the role of DCIs and SEPs in teaching and learning, little research has explored how the CCCs might be integrated. This research proposes…

Promoting critical science agency (CSA) may be one way to promote educational justice. CSA is using science with other powerful forms of knowledge to address issues of injustice. However, the process of enacting CSA is always embedded within a sociopolitical context, which positions some students with more power than others. Drawing upon a social…

Writing is widely recognized as fundamental to the construction and communication of scientific knowledge. Building on this relationship between writing and knowledge construction, writing-to-learn (WTL) activities have shown to be effective in many science classrooms, but have not been widely implemented at the postsecondary level. To address the…

This article examines the tensions that arose as teachers, scientists, youth, and community organizers worked to develop a curriculum that was responsive to community concerns and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Within the context of urban heavy metal contamination and building on previous critiques of the standards, we identified…

This article reports a study in which two researchers collaborated with five teachers to facilitate discourse activities aimed to enhance students' learning from practical activities. The paper explores how certain teacher practices support or hinder students' learning. Four cases from the study were analyzed in depth using…

The Next Generation Science Standards and other reforms call for students to learn science-as-practice, which I argue requires students to become epistemic agents--shaping the knowledge and practice of a science community. I examined a framework for teaching--ambitious instruction--that scaffolds students' learning of science-as-practice as…

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…

In this paper, we introduce the Exploratory Behavior Scale (EBS), a quantitative measure of young children's interactivity. More specifically, the EBS is developed from the psychological literature on exploration and play and measures the extent to which preschoolers explore their physical environment. A practical application of the EBS in a…

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…

The role of the teacher is essential for students' successful engagement in scientific inquiry practices. This study focuses on teachers' use of an 8-week chemistry curriculum that explicitly supports students in one particular inquiry practice, the construction of scientific arguments to explain phenomena in which students justify their claims…