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An understanding of how sensemaking unfolds when elementary students engage in engineering design tasks is crucial to advancing engineering teaching and learning at K-12 levels. Sensemaking has been widely studied in the context of science as a discipline. In this paper, we seek to contribute to the more nascent efforts to build theory about the characteristics of sensemaking in elementary school engineering. We report on an interpretive case study of a 3rd grade student team who worked with minimal adult intervention to design a solution to an engineering challenge. Considering the entire trajectory of their design process, from the given problem to the solution, we observed that they navigated through multiple epistemic conflicts while making decisions that informed their final solution. We found that these conflicts served as "opportunities for sensemaking" and that exploring how the students resolved conflicts shed light on their sensemaking processes. Analysis of the team's navigation through epistemic conflicts to come to a design decision helped identify two distinct kinds of engineering sensemaking: student engagement in functional reasoning as they suggested design ideas, and student engagement in mechanistic reasoning as they interpreted test results. Both processes facilitated knowledge building, which in turn supported students' engineering design decisions.

Although research has highlighted the challenges of teaching in urban settings, particularly for science teachers, it has paid less attention to the development of science teaching identities in urban settings. This paper situates science teaching identity within societal discourses of science, education, and teaching to explore the ways in which macro-level discourses influence the positions available to science teachers in urban schools. Using questionnaire data from 64 teachers, discourse analysis is used to demonstrate how participants reinscribe or disrupt prominent macro-level discourses, including the elitism of science, accountability, and deficit views of urban areas, and the resulting positions that are created by this negotiation process. The findings include possible positions relative to science, education, and teaching as well as a consideration of differences between elementary and secondary teachers and between beginning and experienced teachers. Although many participants successfully disrupted damaging discourses of science as elite and disconnected, as well as discourses of accountability and the role of standardized testing, they were not able to disrupt deficit discourses that resulted in positioning themselves as outside of their students' worlds, often as saviors. The findings demonstrated the strong influence of deficit discourses on teachers' descriptions of their experiences as science teachers and the need to support teachers in understanding the historical and cultural contexts of urban education to identify and disrupt deficit discourses and create teacher positions based on asset and justice-based views of students, schools, and communities.

Both professional and classroom-based scientific communities develop and test explanatory models of the natural world. For students to take up models as tools for sensemaking, practice must be agentive (where students use and revise models "for" specific purposes) and conceptually productive (where students make progress on their ideas). In this paper, we explore principles to support agentive and conceptually productive modeling. One is that models can "do work"; that is, participate in students' sensemaking by offering resources, making gaps visible, or pushing back on modelers' understandings. A second is that working across, and seeking to align, multiple models--what we explain as "interlocking" models--supports models to do work. A third is that modeling activity can support fine-grained conceptual progress. We detail how we used these ideas to guide and refine the design of a fifth-grade investigation into the conservation of matter across phase change. We identify four ways that models participated in students' sensemaking as they interlocked: by providing "contradictions, constraints, representational surplus," and "gaps" for students to engage with. We discuss how designing for models to be co-participants in sense-making and to interlock can provide productive paths forward for curriculum designers, researchers, and teachers.

Building on previous research that has described the underrepresentation of women of color in science fields, this paper presents case studies of Black middle school girls to examine how their science identities developed over space and time. Data were collected over the course of their seventh-grade year in both in school (science classroom) and out-of-school (afterschool club) contexts. The Multidimensionality of Black Girls' STEM Learning framework was used to explore the role of the afterschool club as a counterspace and how students made sense of science, science people, and their current and future selves based on their experiences in school and after school science contexts. All three participants struggled to see their future selves as scientists and made distinctions amongst being a "science person," a person who likes science, or a scientist. They also negotiated views of science as active and hands-on in the afterschool setting while experiencing more passive and decontextualized forms of science in the formal school setting. Implications include a need to disrupt the culture of science and reimagine formal science education by learning from out-of-school time science programs that function as counterspaces to support Black girls' science identity. We conclude that there remains a need to draw attention to and understand the role of race and racism in science education so that Black girls' science identities are affirmed beyond counterspaces.

In this paper, we present a third-grade ecology learning environment that integrates two forms of modeling--embodied modeling and agent-based modeling (ABMs)--through the generation of mathematical representations that are common to both forms of modeling. The term "agent" in the context of ABMs indicates individual computational objects or actors that obey simple rules assigned or controlled by the user. It is the interactions between these agents that give rise to emergent, aggregate-level behaviors in complex systems. While several researchers have argued for the effectiveness of ABMs for learning about complex systems, the design of classroom activity systems using ABMs, especially for elementary students, has received relatively less attention. In this paper, we report on a 2-week long proof-of-concept study conducted in a third-grade classroom of 15 students in which students began with an embodied modeling activity of foraging behavior, followed with the generation of mathematical inscriptions based on their embodied actions, and finally, conducted further inquiry of interdependence in an ecosystem using two separate ABMs. Furthermore, we show that the lens of mechanistic reasoning can be productively used to identify the process of students' conceptual development of interdependence in an ecosystem as they engage in the modeling activities.

This paper investigates the structure of German sixth-grade students' interest in science (N = 474; age 11-12 years) by considering different subject-related contexts (biology, chemistry, and physics) and different activities. Confirmatory factor analysis models were designed to validate the hypothetical structure of interest, connecting the whole spectrum of early school science with Holland's RIASEC model, and revealed that students' interest in science is best described by a cross-classified model with latent context and activity factors. Students were most interested in investigative and hands-on activities in all contexts. Despite the young age group, there were significant gender differences with regard to interest in contexts and interest in activities. For example, girls were more interested in "artistic" and "realistic" activities among most contexts and generally in the biological context. Surprisingly, boys were more interested in "social" physics activities than girls. This paper discusses implications for future research, for school science curricula as well as for how to engage students in science with particular emphasis on gender differences.

This study examines and compares how developers designed two primary science curricula to support teacher adaptation and enable use of innovative materials at scale. The two cases--"Literacy Science" (a science and literacy curriculum for grades 2-5) and "Science as Inquiry" (a curriculum focused on matter for grades 3-5)--were selected because the curricula shared many key features, yet the designers undertook the challenge of designing for adaptation in substantially different ways. Data sources for analysis included interviews with design team members, the curriculum materials, and a range of project documentation. A comparative case study approach was chosen to enable an examination of key contrasting features within the context of each curriculum. Both curricula provide teachers with supports to enact an inquiry-based curriculum in ways that honor science epistemologies. However, one designer team designed explicitly for adaptation by providing "worked examples" that described a range of possible classroom and learner contingencies, along with alternative solutions. By contrast, the other design 9team sought to "build teachers' pedagogical capacity" by providing access to content and explanations from the cognitive and natural sciences. The paper examines how these design stances informed materials developed to support teachers' content knowledge, as well as students' scientific inquiry and classroom discourse. These approaches represent different points on a continuum of design for adaptation, each with its own consequences for enactment and the design of written materials. The cases provide models for designers seeking to support teachers at scale.

The "Framework for K-12 Science Education" (NRC; 2012) placed renewed emphasis on creating equitable science learning opportunities for all learners by engaging in three-dimensional learning experiences: disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and science and engineering practices. Additionally, the "Framework" calls for a more inclusive approach to science learning that builds upon learners' linguistic practices and funds of knowledge and integrates open-ended, multimodal approaches to documenting learning throughout the assessment process. To support assessment developers in designing expansive "Framework"-aligned classroom-assessment approaches for emergent bilingual learners--learners developing two or more languages--tools are needed to guide design of assessments from their inception. This paper presents a literature-based framework for science assessment design for emergent bilingual learners that includes components critical to support these learners. We then operationalize the framework into five categories and analyze nine publicly available Next Generation Science Standards sample classroom assessments. The sample tasks allow us to illustrate how those engaged in classroom assessment design might create more expansive "Framework"-based science classroom assessments appropriate for emergent bilingual learners.

Opportunities for the development of science-related pedagogy during training are necessarily limited for the generalist primary (elementary), preservice teacher. While school placement is an important context within which to develop such professional expertise, the role of institution-based learning is less well understood in this regard. This paper explores the generation of science-related pedagogy as preservice primary teachers learn about the traditionally challenging subject of forces as part of their institution-based science education course. Findings illustrate how critical interpretation of the school curriculum is informed as a consequence of preservice teachers developing metacognitive awareness of their own learning of science. A subject matter learning audit provides a framework to enable the teachers to analyze their learning and apply their perspectives to the primary curriculum through focusing attention on the abstract and counterintuitive nature of forces. Pedagogic insight emerges as the student-teachers craft successive reflective accounts of their own understanding of forces and interpret the curriculum relating to forces. In doing so, they begin to translate their learning as pedagogical apparatus for their future work with pupils. The paper concludes with discussion of some implications for the role of institution-based learning in the development of pedagogical subject knowledge in science. (Contains 5 tables and 1 figure.)

There is international concern over persistent low rates of participation in postcompulsory science--especially the physical sciences--within which there is a notable underrepresentation of girls/women. This paper draws on data collected from a survey of more than 9,000 10/11-year-old pupils and 170 interviews (with 92 children and 78 parents) from a 5-year study of children's science aspirations and career choice in England, to explore how gender interacts with girls' science aspirations. The research found that even though most children aged 10/11 years enjoy science, the majority already see science careers as "not for me." Using a feminist poststructuralist theoretical lens, this paper explores the identity work undertaken by the minority of girls who "do" identify with science and who express science aspirations at this age. It is argued that dominant associations of science with "cleverness" and masculinity pressurize girls to balance their science aspirations with performances of popular heterofemininity to render them "thinkable" (and that this occurs only within narrow parameters, through identity performances as either "feminine scientists" or "bluestocking scientists"). The paper concludes by discussing potential challenges girls may face in sustaining "thinkable" identifications with science and wider implications for encouraging greater female participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. (Contains 6 footnotes.)

Although the core work of science is oriented toward constructing, revising, applying, and defending models of the natural world, models appear only rarely in school science, and usually only as illustrations, rather than theory building tools. We describe the rationale and structure for a learning progression to understand the development of modeling under supportive forms of instruction. In this case, elementary and middle school students are modeling "big ideas" in the life sciences that hold the promise of serving as a conceptual foundation for reasoning about the theory of evolution later in their education. In this conceptual paper, we sketch changes from grades K through 6 in representational and modeling practices across three interlocking constructs that, considered collectively, comprise the aforementioned conceptual foundation: "Change" (in individuals and populations), "Variation," and "Ecosystems." The paper closes by delineating pedagogical principles for supporting the development of modeling across grades of instruction.

This paper describes research on the use of journals in a general education chemistry course for elementary education majors. In the journals, students describe their understanding of a topic, the development of that understanding, and how the topic connects to their lives. In the process, they are able to engage in reflection about several things. How the frequency and nature of those reflections relate to overall course outcomes, the content and quality of final exam essays on those topics, and student metacognition in problem solving are the basis of this paper. The following types of reflections were identified in the journals: action, prior knowledge, project ideas, text resources, classroom events, and monitoring of knowledge. A multiple linear regression analysis of the students' final course grade earned versus student grade point average (GPA), composite score on the ACT exam, the number of reflections made for each reflection type, and the total number of reflections made throughout all journals was used to determine the significance of the type of reflections made by students in relationship to their chemistry content understanding. The results indicate that students' prior GPA and their reflections on classroom events and their own knowledge correlate positively and significantly with a final course grade. However, student reflections on text resources have a negative and significant correlation with the final course grade. In addition, students' journal entries and final exam responses were coded for similarities in writing. The results indicate that those students who had strong similarities in writing for both their journal and final exam exhibited significantly stronger content understanding on the final exam essay. Finally, metacognition in problem solving, assessed with the Metacognitive Activities Inventory (MCA-I) survey of metacognition, was also positively correlated with the types of reflection that correlate with overall course performance. (Contains 11 tables.)

Being able to make claims about what students know and can do in science involves gathering systematic evidence of students' knowledge and abilities. This paper describes an assessment system designed to elicit information from students at many placements along developmental trajectories and demonstrates how this system was used to gather principled evidence of how students reason about food web and food chain disturbances. Specifically, this assessment system was designed to gather information about students' intermediary or middle knowledge on a pathway toward more sophisticated understanding. Findings indicate that in association with a curricular intervention, student gains were significant. However, despite overall gains, some students still struggled to explain what might happen during a disturbance to an ecosystem. In addition, this paper discusses the importance of having a cognitive framework to guide task design and interpretation of evidence. This framework allowed for the gathering of detailed information, which provided insights into the intricacies of how students reason about scientific scenarios. In particular, this assessment system allowed for the illustration of multiple types of middle knowledge that students may possess, indicating that there are multiple "messy middles" students may move through as they develop the ability to reason about complex scientific situations. (Contains 6 tables and 1 figure.)

One aspect of scientific inquiry that appears to be particularly challenging to learn is how explanatory models are developed and used in science. It is even more challenging to learn to teach through methods that engage young students in building and using explanatory models. In part, this is because to do so requires that teachers make real-time instructional decisions in response to the ideas that students articulate. In this paper I present an example of a teacher who participated in a series of activities during a professional development course that guided her and her colleagues through the process of developing and revising an explanatory model of magnetic phenomenon. She subsequently transformed this series of activities to use with her elementary school students. Contrasting the series of activities in the elementary classroom to the corresponding professional development activities revealed improvisational instructional acts and shed light on aspects of the classroom context that necessitated and facilitated improvisation. In particular, this paper highlights the multiple pedagogical and disciplinary structures that teachers implicitly chose among when improvising. (Contains 2 tables, 4 figures, and 2 footnotes.)

This paper examines the use of students' lived experiences in an urban elementary science classroom. Students bring different funds of knowledge that are accumulated through their lived experiences into the classroom, and I examine what those funds of knowledge mean to an elementary science teacher working in an urban school. I describe how a female elementary teacher integrates her life experiences with that of her students, and utilizes those experiences to teach meaningful science. This paper also discusses what it means to students when their lived experiences are the part of science learning. I also include a description of how the Linking Food and the Environment (LiFE) curriculum can provide a framework to teach science using students' lived experiences.

The national efforts underway to include engineering in K-12 science education present a variety of new challenges, including how to prepare teachers to teach a new discipline. In this paper, we focus on elementary teachers and how they enter into "responsive teaching," in which they closely attend and meaningfully respond to students' thinking. This pedagogical approach is particularly critical for teaching engineering design in ways that support students in developing original solutions to complex, dynamic problems. Drawing on 3 years of professional development that helped teachers incorporate engineering in literacy contexts, we investigated the knowledge and abilities teachers displayed for responsive teaching and how features of instructional design and classroom dynamics impacted their teaching. Throughout the project, we observed and videotaped professional development workshops and teachers' classrooms, and interviewed teachers about their classroom experiences. We then conducted a thematic analysis across these data sources, presenting common themes as conjectures for how teachers enter into responsive teaching in engineering. We discuss how these conjectures can inform teacher research and the design of teacher preparation programs in engineering.

This exploratory project considers the use of "wonder" as a pedagogical tool with preservice elementary teachers (PSETs). An ongoing vexation facing science teacher educators is helping future elementary teachers overcome anxiety and negative associations with science due to their own school science experiences, while simultaneously encouraging innovative and ambitious teaching practice. Utilizing wonder as a pedagogical tool for emotional and aesthetic engagement with science holds promise as an entry point to connect future teachers with meaningful science content and practice. The link between wonder and science is well-articulated by successful scientists throughout history, and yet is rarely employed explicitly within elementary or teacher education science learning contexts. Forging a pedagogy of wonder demands connection to the emotive embodiment of science as a uniquely human process that nurtures our intense need to know. This qualitative case study is an effort to better understand if utilizing pedagogy intentionally focused on wonder could impact PSETs' perceptions of science and scientific thinking. This paper describes the key findings that emerged while utilizing pedagogy steeped in wonder with PSETs, and the degree to which engaging with wonder impacted their perceptions of science and their future science teaching. This research supports the critical role that wonder could play in changing PSETs' relationship with science and assisting them in the development of the pedagogical courage necessary to envision possibilities beyond their past experiences.

In this paper, we review research on how students' interest in science changes through the primary to secondary school transition. In the literature, the findings generally show that primary students enjoy science but come to lose interest during secondary school. As this claim is based mainly on interview and questionnaire data, that is on secondary reports from students about their interest in science, these results are reexamined through our own extensive material from primary and secondary school on how interest is constituted through classroom discourse. Our results suggest the possibility that primary students do not lose their interest in science, but rather that an interest in science is never constituted. The overview indicates that studies relying on interviews and questionnaires make it difficult to ascertain what the actual object of interest is when students act in the science classroom. The possibility suggested should, if valid, have consequences for science education and be worthy of further examination.

When collecting data, science education researchers frequently have multiple respondents evaluate multiple artifacts using multiple criteria. Herein, the authors introduce Multifaceted Rasch Measurement (MFRM) analysis and explain why MFRM must be used when "judges'" data are collected. The authors use data from elementary science methods students enrolled in a senior-level, semester-length course. Acting as judges, students used the 23-item Elementary Science Teaching Analysis Matrix (ESTAM) instrument to evaluate five separate science lessons taught by five different teachers. Our MFRM analysis documents that multiple judges need not act as identical robots. Rather, differences in judges' severity can be computed and corrections made in an analysis to take into consideration differing judge severity. This paper extends the current literature in "Science Education" regarding the application of Rasch measurement.

There is increased attention in the science education community on the importance of engaging students in the practices of science. However, there is much to be learned about "how" students enter into and sustain their engagement in these practices. In this paper, we argue that "epistemic affect"--feelings and emotions experienced within science, such as the excitement of having a new idea or irritation at an inconsistency--is part of what instigates and stabilizes disciplinary engagement. We first discuss affect as evident in accounts of professionals; we then show its emergence and role in 2 case studies of elementary school students. In the end, we argue that epistemic affect is part of the "substance" that students should learn in science, and we discuss implications for research and instruction.

Comments on three articles in this issue on universalists versus multiculturalists. Supports teaching culturally relevant science. The three papers share the goal of improving the teaching of science to minority and non-minority children and increasing the participation of children of color in science. (SAH)

The close association between science and masculinity has been widely discussed, yet few studies have focused on boys' negotiation with, and participation in, school science. This paper seeks to trouble monolithic notions of the link between science and masculinity, arguing that the "ideal science student" is a classed, racialized, and gendered construction. Drawing on interviews, observations, surveys, and student work samples, we construct longitudinal case studies of four scientifically talented boys from fourth to sixth grades, showing how "being smart" is a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for boys who want to position themselves or end up getting positioned as "scientific." We also demonstrate how "being interested in science" is a useful, but not essential, component of these boys' identity performances and recognition work. We explain how the boys take up different positions in relation to the "smart science boy" subject position (the "smart boy," "smart science boy," "wannabe smart science boy," and "geeky science boy") and argue that the boys' in/ability to authentically inhabit the "ideal science student" subject position is constrained and facilitated by their class and ethnic positionings.

The Next Generation Science Standards call for the adoption of many aspects of scientific inquiry in the classroom. The ways in which classroom talk and classroom environment change as students and teachers learn to utilize inquiry approaches are underexplored. This study examines the frequency with which linguistic markers related to access and power appear in student and teacher speech in the elementary science classroom. As teachers begin to implement argument-based inquiry methods, teacher and student use of these markers changes significantly. These changes indicate that students whose teachers utilize argument-based inquiry have greater access and power in the science classroom. In this paper, the mechanisms by which teachers afford their students access and power are explored from a quantitative perspective.

Recent comparative data on high school graduates show that many American students are not well prepared in fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and that there is a persistent achievement gap according to the socioeconomic backgrounds of students. The research for this paper focuses on the role of elementary education in science as an important preparatory step. National trend data show a decline in instructional time in the elementary grades on science instruction over the past two decades. State-level data show wide variation in the amount of class time spent on science education and a positive relationship between the amount of class time and student achievement scores in science as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress Grade 4 assessment.

The article presents a critique of papers by Professors Atkins and Karplus on elementary science education. The author indicates the personal biases that she brings to the discussion of the two reports. The article discusses Atkins and Karplus' assumption that the modern world demands a citizenry that is literate with respect to both concepts and the methods of science. The author comments on Atkins and Karplus' recognition that children differ widely both in their abilities to grasp ideas and in the ways they arrive at conclusions.

Science performance assessments (SPAs) are designed to elicit a wider range of scientific knowledge and abilities than ordinarily measured by more traditional paper-and-pencil tests. To engage in SPAs and thus demonstrate abilities such as scientific inquiry, students must interact with various participants and communicate in a variety of ways. Using an analytical framework that draws on functional and interactional views of language, we analyzed video footage of one SPA, "The World Down Under," enacted in three fifth-grade classrooms. The video analysis revealed a wide variety of language demands that students encountered during the SPA, including a range of participant structures (whole class, small group, and individual), communicative modes (interpreting language, presenting language, and engaging interpersonally), and 18 different texts. Moreover, the language demands differed by classroom. A closer look at two video episodes illustrated how this more expansive communicative context afforded two English Learners (ELs) with opportunities to navigate the language demands of the assessment. However, the same language demands could present challenges for ELs with lower levels of English proficiency. The findings contribute to science education by bringing attention to the nature and role of language in SPAs, which has only begun to be described in the literature.

In this paper, we examined data collected as part of a 5-year project designed to foster reform-based urban science teaching through teachers' communities of inquiry. Drawing upon a distributed leadership framework, we analyzed teacher "talk" during professional learning community (PLC) meetings. This analysis yielded five elements: teacher learning and collaboration, community formation, confidence in knowledge of content and guided inquiry, concerns about the impact of accountability measures on teaching and learning, and sustainability of reform. Follow-up interviews with participants reinforced the importance of these elements. While accountability measures were found to have a significant impact on science teaching, participants were also able to use their PLC-based experiences to develop strategies to deal with such external constraints. Facilitation and leadership also play key roles in establishing and maintaining PLCs in this urban setting. Finally, we present a revised framework that incorporates the elements we identified to describe those local and systemic factors critical for successful implementation and influence of professional development efforts. (Contains 1 figure and 4 tables.)

The concern about students' engagement with school science and the numbers pursuing the further study of science is an international phenomenon and a matter of considerable concern among policy makers. Research has demonstrated that the majority of young children have positive attitudes to science at age 10 but that this interest then declines sharply and by age 14, their attitude and interest in the study of science has been largely formed. This paper reports on data collected as part of a funded 5-year longitudinal study that seeks to determine how students' interest in science and scientific careers evolves. As an initial part of the study, six focus group discussions were undertaken with schoolchildren, age 10-11, to explore their attitudes toward science and interest in science, the findings of which are presented here. The children's responses are analyzed through the lens of identity, drawing on a theoretical framework that views identity as an embodied and a performed construction that is both produced by individuals and shaped by their specific structural locations. This work offers new insights into the manner in which students construct representations of science and scientists. (Contains 3 footnotes.)

Preservice elementary teachers face many challenges in learning how to teach science effectively, such as engaging students in science, organizing instruction, and developing a productive learning community. This paper reports on several iterative cycles of design-based research aimed at fostering preservice teachers' principled reasoning around these problems of practice through modeling-centered scientific inquiry. The first design cycle introduced preservice teachers to modeling and simulation software tools in an effort to advance their understanding of science and technology; the second used an instructional framework embodying modeling-centered inquiry to advance their views of effective science teaching and their lesson-planning practices; the third engaged preservice teachers in analyzing and modifying curriculum materials using reform-based criteria to foster effective curriculum materials use. Outcomes from these iterations indicate that the preservice teachers were most likely to advance their knowledge and practices within a coherent approach that focused on a core scientific practice such as modeling-centered inquiry, provided opportunities to unpack and apply robust tools such as reform-based instructional frameworks, and addressed their perceived problems of practice. The findings from this set of approaches are compared to others in an effort to point toward promising future directions for effective science teacher education. (Contains 2 tables and 3 footnotes.)

Implementation of science curriculum materials has been a fundamental challenge in science education for decades. Policy researchers have argued that alignment of standards, curriculum, and assessment are the key to supporting implementation. This paper focuses on teachers' perceptions of curricular alignment and on curriculum implementation using empirical data from a statewide systemic inquiry science reform effort targeting students from kindergarten to eighth grade. We find that the success of alignment policies depends on teachers' construal of the relationship between standards and curriculum materials and on allocation of time for planning at the school level. (Contains 4 tables, 2 figures and 1 footnote.)

New views of proficiency in K-8 science that highlight the importance of engaging children in the discourses and practices of science have raised the stakes for elementary teachers and the teacher educators who prepare them. In this paper, a framework for teaching science as argument is presented. The framework is advanced as a means of addressing problems of practices faced by preservice teachers, creating coherence for the design of teacher education experiences, and serving as a tool for shaping a design-based research agenda. Findings of three research studies that examined preservice teachers' developing understandings and practices for teaching science as argument and the ways in which teacher education experiences mediated learning are synthesized. Across the studies, findings suggest that the framework serves as a powerful scaffold for preservice teachers' developing thinking and practice. More specifically, early attention to evidence and argument can leverage other important aspects of effective science teaching, such as attention to classroom discourse and the role of the teacher in monitoring and assessing children's thinking. In closing, a case is made for coherence among science learning opportunities, learning to teach science experiences, and field experiences. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

Teaching literacy in inquiry-based science-teaching settings has recently become a focus of research in science education. Because professional scientists' uses of reading, writing, and speaking are foundational to their work, as well as to nonscientists' comprehension of it , it follows that literacy practices should also be central to science teaching. Science as a vehicle through which to develop literacy skills is an attractive alternative that some teachers choose in order to include science in their curriculum. In this paper, we present descriptions of three elementary teachers' efforts to teach literacy practices through science. Our descriptions, through which we illustrate a range of ways in which teachers link science and literacy instruction, are grounded in these teachers' accounts and our observations of their teaching. We end with a comparison of these teachers' approaches, and draw from this analysis considerations for implementing literacy instruction in elementary science education.

This paper describes a comprehensive set of studies designed to assess the potential for commercial reading programs to teach reading in science. Specific questions focus on the proportion of selections in the programs that contain science and the amount of science that is in those selections, on the genres in which the science is portrayed, on the areas and topics of science covered, on the accuracy of the scientific content, on the text features used to communicate the science, and on the instructional strategies and assessment techniques recommended. The findings show that commercial reading programs have changed substantially from the days when they were dominated by literary texts and contained hardly any science. Now, there is a variety of genres and scientific content in about one fifth of the selections. The content is also generally accurate. So, there is considerable potential offered by these programs for teaching children to read science. Unfortunately, the findings also show that the recommended instructional strategies and assessment techniques do little to capitalize upon this potential. In particular, the findings demonstrate that, although most of the science is cast in the expository genre, most of the recommended instruction and assessment is more appropriate to the literary genres. (Contains 13 tables.)

This paper presents results from a study aimed at helping preservice elementary and middle school teachers incorporate model-centered scientific inquiry into their science teaching practices. Specifically, the authors studied the effect of using a guided inquiry and modeling instructional framework (EIMA) and accompanying science methods instruction on preservice elementary teachers' science lesson design skills, scientific model use, and teaching orientations. Analysis of preservice teachers' pre-posttests, classroom artifacts, peer interviews, and lesson plans throughout the semester indicates that the framework successfully built on preservice teachers' prior instructional ideas, and that the majority of preservice teachers learned and used the framework in their lesson plans and teaching. Additionally, analysis of pre-posttest differences indicates an increase in posttest lesson plans that focused on engaging students in scientific inquiry using several kinds of models. Most importantly, the framework and accompanying instruction enabled two thirds of the class to move their teaching orientations away from discovery or didactic approaches toward reform-based approaches such as conceptual change, inquiry, and guided inquiry. Results from this study show that using instructional frameworks such as EIMA can enable preservice teachers to socially construct, synthesize, and apply their knowledge for enacting reform-oriented science teaching approaches such as model-centered scientific inquiry.

In this paper, we draw from a narrative life history approach to report in depth on the experiences of one teacher, Shagufta, in a high-poverty urban elementary school in Lahore, Pakistan. The purpose of reporting Shagufta's story is twofold. First, we want to make sense of her role as a science teacher--what should the children in her school learn in science, and why, if these children are expected by Pakistani society to leave formal education before the eighth grade? Second, what core tensions mark Shagufta's story as she has tried to craft her science teaching practice?

Argues that scientific knowledge in school is a social construct in which curriculum proposals are simply points of departure that are transformed by the social interaction that takes place within the classroom. Considers discourse as playing an important role in knowledge construction. Contains 31 references. (DDR)

Described are the results of a formal reasoning test taken by both Japanese and American students. The most likely reasons for the difference between test score results are discussed. Japan's "hands-on" and group inquiry-oriented curriculum approach is cited as one difference. (KR)

Discussed is the elementary science teacher curriculum and its role in students' interest in science. Qualifications, teacher attitudes about science, college preparation, hands-on experience, science instruction, science method instruction, and the role of the administrator are described in terms of effective elementary science programs. (KR)

Discussed is the history of school science curriculum reform from the Sputnik era to 1990. The relationship between the crisis in the 1950s and 1990 is addressed. A list of curriculum development programs for all levels and special needs students is included. (KR)

The article studies the concepts of magnetism held by elementary school children. The study examines whether the children's concepts of magnetism parallel the historical development of man's knowledge of the subject. Children were questioned individually by the author. Each child was asked with the following basic questions: Why do magnets pick up metals?; Will a magnet pick up paper?; Why does this end (N) of a magnet attract this end (S)?; and what is the difference between magnetism and gravity? Children's concepts of magnetism were classified according to the following topics: Composition, Power, Electricity, Earth, Gravity, Magic, Temperature, Pressure and Unclassified. Concepts allude to operations of glue, magic, temperature, pressure, rust, size, physical composition, chemical composition and mechanical force.

Propositions expressed by students during interviews prior to and after audiovisual instruction served as the basis for Concept Propositional Analysis (CPA) to assess cognitive structure. CPAs for two students are reported and aspects of Ausubelian principles are discussed. The method showed that new learning can be linked to previous misconceptions. (DH)

Proposes a framework for interpreting current research in science education. Presents four prototypes for describing research which are derived from comparisons and combinations of "spontaneous" and "formal" knowledge. Discusses possible applications of the use of the framework in science education. (TW)

Promotes teacher supervision that is aimed at helping teachers reflect on their own practice. Outlines views that teaching which aims at the development of intellectual independence needs to address epistemological issues. Argues that attention has to be directed at knowledge and control. Outlines a scheme to address these issues. (CW)

This paper describes research on the use of journals in a general education chemistry course for elementary education majors. In the journals, students describe their understanding of a topic, the development of that understanding, and how the topic connects to their lives. In the process, they are able to engage in reflection about several things. How the frequency and nature of those reflections relate to overall course outcomes, the content and quality of final exam essays on those topics, and student metacognition in problem solving are the basis of this paper. The following types of reflections were identified in the journals: action, prior knowledge, project ideas, text resources, classroom events, and monitoring of knowledge. A multiple linear regression analysis of the students' final course grade earned versus student grade point average (GPA), composite score on the ACT exam, the number of reflections made for each reflection type, and the total number of reflections made throughout all journals was used to determine the significance of the type of reflections made by students in relationship to their chemistry content understanding. The results indicate that students' prior GPA and their reflections on classroom events and their own knowledge correlate positively and significantly with a final course grade. However, student reflections on text resources have a negative and significant correlation with the final course grade. In addition, students' journal entries and final exam responses were coded for similarities in writing. The results indicate that those students who had strong similarities in writing for both their journal and final exam exhibited significantly stronger content understanding on the final exam essay. Finally, metacognition in problem solving, assessed with the Metacognitive Activities Inventory (MCA-I) survey of metacognition, was also positively correlated with the types of reflection that correlate with overall course performance. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 96:543-565, 2012 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the assessment of potential difficulties in comprehending fourth grade science textbooks. the primary characteristics of expository text which contribute to comprehension are complexity of the content area, structural form of the text and text reading level. These characteristics influence the ease with which a reader can process and retain information from text. This paper is designed to present the results of the three components of science text. The purpose of this paper is to show that reading level distribution of used elementary science texts may interfere with the potential understanding of the science texts. The analysis presented focuses on three objectives which are enumerated in the article.

The article focuses on the report of two courses in chemistry taught at Cragin Elementary School in the U.S. The study is aimed to encourage and stimulate inclination toward science and to show the children what the researched laboratories looked like. Furthermore, safety has been suggested throughout the chemistry courses. The article the features the design and demonstration of the chemistry experiments. Finally, a sample a test paper and chemistry test has been presented.

The article presents information on the use of models as a valuable adjunct to learning and participating in the scientific enterprise. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has proposed the concept of models at the elementary level, integrating steps in learning the scientific approach. According to the AAAS the activity of model formulation should help to give the student a real "feel" for the potentialities and satisfactions of the scientific approach. According to the educator R.D. Anderson, a "mental model" is a theoretical form or structure which is hypothesized on the basis of observations of natural phenomena. The Physical Science Study Committee has described models as ideas, pictures, systems of concepts which describe the things one investigate. The construction of a physical or mathematical models is the creative heart of all science. A paper "The Scientific Approach to Knowledge" by the AAAS states that the best way to achieve the generalization and retention of "process" skills is to continue to provide for a kind of "process" emphasis in instruction. Students should be instructed in the scientific approach to the generation of organized knowledge.

The article discusses the basis of selecting science learning materials in the elementary level in New York City. It explains on the eagerness of adults and children to learn about and make use of new scientific developments. It focuses on the need for science learning materials on the elementary level to make the pursuit of science by young people. It provides information on the potentialities of using science learning materials by youngsters in the elementary level.

This article discusses how a unit of study in science taught in the seventh and eighth grade is followed through at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa. One of the changes in the methods of teaching has been a shift from the old stereotyped method of imparting knowledge by the teacher to the student to the pupil-teacher planning methods. The pupil-teacher planning method is a method which utilizes the efforts and thinking of both the teacher and the students. The teacher has to keep in mind the all-important fact that he is working with students as well as with subject matter. The students at Roosevelt High School have been very interested in learning to use and to spell scientific terms that appear in each unit. When the outlines are handed to the students, they mark each misspelled word with a colored pencil. After receiving their outline again the students copy all words so marked, and hand the list to the teacher. The teacher compiles a complete list from all the papers. This compilation is given to every student, who must learn to spell and recognize all the words on the list.