This article reports on analyses of the instructional practices of six middle- and high-school science teachers in the United States who participated in a research-practice partnership that aims to support reform science education goals at scale. All six teachers were well qualified, experienced, and locally successful--respected by students,…

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is an important target of science teacher knowledge assessment. Most studies that have assessed the PCK across a large sample of science teachers used a text-based approach to elicit and assess the more declarative and static form of teachers' PCK. Recently, small-scale qualitative studies have adopted a novel…

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…

While research shows that responsive teaching fosters students' disciplinary learning and equitable opportunities for participation, there is yet much to know about how teachers come to be responsive to their students' experiences in the science classroom. In this work, we set out to examine whether and how engaging teachers as learners in doing…

Worldwide, teachers are expected to engage their students in authentic practices, like scientific modeling. Research suggests that teachers experience challenges when integrating modeling in their classroom instruction, with one explanation that teachers themselves lack the necessary modeling competence. Currently, theoretical conceptualizations…

Despite mixed results in research on student learning from drawing in science, there is growing interest in the potential for this visual mode, in tandem with other modes, to enact and enable student reasoning in this subject. Building on current research in this field, and using a micro-ethnographic approach informed by socio-semiotic…

Attaining the vision for science teaching and learning emphasized in the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the next generation science standards (NGSS) will require major shifts in teaching practices in many science classrooms. As NGSS-inspired cognitively demanding tasks begin to appear in more and more science classrooms, facilitating…

It is a widely held view that students' epistemic beliefs influence the way they think and learn in a given context, however, in the science learning context, the relationship between sophisticated epistemic beliefs and success in scientific practice is sometimes ambiguous. Taking this inconsistency as a point of departure, we examined the…

In the current debate on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), the term is used to refer to the context-specific knowledge that teachers activate when reflecting on practice. Against the background of this debate, we conducted an empirical study and sought to answer the question of which knowledge experts and novices activated in assessing a…

Research on the design of learning environments for K-12 science education has been informed by two bodies of literature: inquiry-based science and Constructionism. Inquiry-based science has emphasized engagement in activities that reflect authentic scientific practices. Constructionism has focused on designing intuitively accessible authoring…

Although research and policy suggest science and mathematics teachers should attend to their student's thinking during instruction, our field has inadequately defined what that means in relation to our ultimate goals for the practice. Here I present a theoretical argument that, in making their definitions, researchers should leverage the ways…

The amount of substance and its unit the mole is a basic concept in chemistry. However, previous research has shown that teaching and learning the concept are challenging tasks for both teachers and students. The purpose of this study was to pinpoint the problems which emerge in the teaching and learning process, and provide integrated suggestions…

Although pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has become widely recognized as an essential part of the knowledge base for teaching, empirical evidence demonstrating a connection between PCK and teaching practice or student learning outcomes is mixed. In response, we argue for further attention to the measurement of dynamic (spontaneous or flexible,…

Research aimed at understanding the role of the affective domain in student learning in classrooms has undergone a recent resurgence due to the need to understand students' affective response to science instruction. In a case study of a year 8 science class in North Queensland, students worked in small groups to write, film, edit, and produce…

This study was conducted in a large-scale environmental literacy project. In the project, we developed a Learning Progression Framework (LPF) for matter and energy in social-ecological systems; the LPF contains four achievement levels. Based on the LPF, we designed a Plant Unit to help Levels 2 and 3 students advance to Level 4 of the LPF. In the…