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Science classroom assessment often requires multilingual learners to demonstrate ideas using only English-language resources. These assessments can provide an incomplete picture of students' knowledge and limit subsequent learning opportunities. Increasingly, science teachers are incorporating translanguaging pedagogies in their instructional practices. Less is known about students' perspectives of translanguaging in science. In this manuscript, we employ "equity-as-access" and "equity-as-transformation" lenses to investigate multilingual learners' perspectives about translanguaging as a formative assessment practice. Data came from a larger participatory co-design design study in a culturally and linguistically diverse middle school in the Mountain West. We qualitatively analyzed 8 focus group interview transcripts with 13 sixth-grade students from across 4 formative assessment cycles. Analysis was both inductive and deductive. Findings suggest that sixth graders have savvy, nuanced views about translanguaging that bridge "equity-as-access" and "equity-as-transformation" lenses. They saw translanguaging as both supporting their English language development and as an important practice to allow them to focus bilingually on their science ideas without translating everything into English. Additionally, they highlighted tensions associated with welcoming translanguaging in schools with de facto English-only languaging norms. This study has implications for teachers, assessment designers, and researchers. Findings signal structural/policy changes needed to authentically center translanguaging as an equity-oriented practice across science assessment systems.

National governments are concerned about the disconnection of young people from science, which hampers the development of a scientifically literate society promoting sustainable development, wellbeing, equity, and a green economy. Introduced in 2015 alongside Agenda 2030, the "open schooling" approach aims at enhancing students' science connections through real-life problem solving with families and scientists, necessitating solid evidence for scalability and sustainability. This study conceptualizes "science connection," a term yet underexplored, as the integration of science's meaning and purpose into personal, social, and global actions informed by socioscientific thinking. It details a novel 32-item self-report questionnaire developed and validated from insights of 85 teachers into "science connection"-enhanced learning. A new consensual qualitative analysis method with visual and textual snapshots enabled developing quantitative measures from the qualitative findings with rigor. The multilanguage instrument provided just-in-time actionable data, enhancing the immediacy and applicability of the feedback to 2082 underserved students aged 11-18 across five countries participating in open schooling activities using the CARE-KNOW-DO model. This innovative feature supports open science and responsible open research, offering real-time insights and fostering immediate educational impact. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed five components of science connection: Confidence and aspiration in science; Fun participatory science with teachers, family, and experts; Active learning approaches; Involvement in-and-outside school science activities; and Valuing science's role to life-and-society. Many students felt connected to science--Brazil: 80%, Spain: 79%, Romania: 73%, Greece: 70%, UK: 57%--with boys: 75%, girls: 73%, nonbinary students: 56%. These differences need in-depth research. Results suggest that science connections decline from the primary to secondary education, but the CARE-KNOW-DO model may reengage older students. A robust science connection enhances scientific literacy and builds science capital. This instrument aids policymakers, educators, and learners in identifying factors that facilitate or impede students' engagement with science for sustainable development efforts.

This study examines the often-heard assumption in science teaching that some pedagogies in science classrooms can serve a dual function--improve the student-perceived teacher quality and improve students' affinity to STEM professions. We asked 7507 freshmen from 40 colleges in the United States, selected in a stratified random procedure, to retrospectively report their experiences of a list of 32 pedagogies during high school biology, chemistry, and physics classes. Our survey also asked students to rate each teachers' quality and to report their Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics career interests at the beginning and end of high school. We found that teachers' chosen pedagogies, on the whole, had a stronger impact on how students rated them than on students' career interests. Interestingly, we also found considerable differences between the disciplines.

This study explored a middle school science teacher's curricular sensemaking in interaction with their use of an educative storyline curriculum, aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards, that was intentionally designed for more opportunities for students' scientific sensemaking. Using a phenomenological case study methodology, we examined how the focal teacher perceived and resolved (un)certainties in their understanding that emerged in their interaction with the curriculum (i.e., their curricular sensemaking), and how the teachers' curricular sensemaking impacted opportunities for students' scientific sensemaking. Findings served to expand our notions of how teachers engage in curricular sensemaking, when this sensemaking occurs, and what teachers make sense of as they experience a new, reform-oriented curriculum for the first time. In particular, the focal teacher found two types of (un)certainty to be salient at various time points during his curriculum use: (un)certainty around students' scientific sensemaking through particular science practices and (un)certainty about how to navigate the storyline curriculum using students' ideas to drive learning forward. Cutting across these types of (un)certainty, our findings suggest the need to (1) support teachers in problematizing their own understandings about particular science practices and the extent to which their previous instruction aligns with reform-oriented conceptualizations of those practices, (2) build teachers' capacity to differentiate between various causes of student discomfort and uncertainty so that students' needs and scientific sensemaking goals can be attended to simultaneously, and (3) provide teachers with opportunities to consider how they might use a variety of participation structures to move learning forward while preserving students' rights and responsibilities for the scientific sensemaking.

The Framework for K-12 Science Education set an ambitious goal of broadening participation in science learning for all students. Meeting this vision will involve supporting teachers in making meaningful connections with the cultural and linguistic resources their students bring to school; in essence, developing pedagogies that frame these resources as assets important to learning. In this manuscript, we present a qualitative case study of one community of high school science teachers who participated in a year-long professional learning focused on formative assessment co-design related to natural selection. Findings show that the process of formative assessment co-design surfaced both deficit- and asset-based statements about students' contributions. Teachers were more likely to share deficit-based statements as compared to facilitators, whose statements were more asset-based. This was particularly true with reference to students' prior knowledge and linguistic resources. At the same time, our analysis suggests that teachers were more likely to share more asset-based framings of learners when practicing for and reflecting on enactment of formative assessment tasks. These findings suggest that supportive co-design environments can encourage teachers to take more asset-oriented views of learners. We discuss the implications of these findings for professional learning and science classroom practice.

One reason for the widespread use of the energy concept across the sciences is that energy analysis can be used to interpret the behavior of systems even if one does not know the particular mechanisms that underlie the observed behavior. By providing an approach to interpreting unfamiliar phenomena, energy provides a lens on phenomena that can set the stage for deeper learning about how and why phenomena occur. However, not all energy ideas are equally productive in setting the stage for new learning. In particular, researchers have debated the value of teaching students to interpret phenomena in terms of energy forms and transformations. In this study, we investigated how two different approaches to middle school energy instruction--one emphasizing energy transformations between forms and one emphasizing energy transfers between systems--prepared students to use their existing energy knowledge to engage in new learning about a novel energy-related phenomenon. To do this, we designed a new assessment instrument to elicit student initial ideas about the phenomenon and to compare how effectively students from each approach learned from authentic learning resources. Our results indicate that students who learned to interpret phenomenon in terms of energy transfers between systems learned more effectively from available learning resources than did students who learned to interpret phenomena in terms of energy forms and transformations. This study informs the design of introductory energy instruction and approaches for assessing how students existing knowledge guides new learning about phenomena.

Multiple external representations (MERs) are useful for teaching complex content in science education. An open question is whether there is an especially effective way to sequence MERs. On the one hand, the so-called concreteness fading approach suggests starting instruction with more concrete representations and proceeding stepwise to more idealized representations. The effectiveness of this fading approach is, however, supported mainly by studies in mathematics education, while the results in physics are equivocal. On the other hand, presenting different representations simultaneously may support linking, that is, the comparison and contrast of representations, which may benefit learning. In an experimental classroom study (N = 187), we compared concreteness fading and simultaneous presentation of MERs for learning a challenging physics content in high school, namely, Faraday's law. We found no significant differences between conditions in posttest performance, and an equivalence test with bounds d = -0.5 to 0.5 showed that both approaches performed equally. The results align with previous findings questioning the superiority of concreteness fading over other ways of sequencing MERs. Therefore, facilitating students' understanding of a complex physics content may involve more than determining the optimal order of presenting MERs. We discuss limitations of the present study and implications for future research and practice.

This article examines two teachers' efforts to re-organize their science teaching around issues of environmental and food justice in the urban community where they teach through the pedagogical approach of community-oriented framing. We introduce this approach to teachers' framing of phenomena in community as supporting students' framing of phenomena as personally and locally relevant. Drawing on classroom observations of remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, we took an analytic approach that characterized features of classroom discourse to rate community-oriented framing at the lesson level. Results show that teachers framed phenomena as both social and scientific, and as rooted in students' lived experiences, with classroom activities designed to gather localized and personalized evidence needed to explain or model phenomena. We also share examples of how Black and Latinx students took up this framing of phenomena in their classroom work. By providing a detailed description of the launch and implementation of activities, findings illustrate how community-oriented framing supported teachers in posing local questions of equity and justice as simultaneously social and scientific, and helping students perceive science learning as meaningful to their everyday lives. Community-oriented framing offers a practical means of designing locally and socially relevant instruction. We contribute to justice-centered science pedagogies by conceptualizing transformative science learning environments as those in which students understand their goal in science class as understanding, and later addressing, inequities in how socioscientific issues manifest in their community.

Inquiry-Based Teaching Practice (IBTP) is an essential component of science education, and promoting its implementation is at the heart of various reform efforts. Even though science teachers regard IBTP as an essential pedagogical method, they rarely use it for various reasons. This study utilizes Bronfenbrenner's ecological framework to examine potential factors at various levels of the educational ecosystem that predict the implementation of inquiry-based teaching practices among Grade 9 science teachers in South Africa. To this end, quantitative data from 537 educators who participated in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2019 national assessment were utilized. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and hierarchical multiple regression analysis. Results revealed that four variables at different socioeconomic levels were perceived to strongly predict teachers' implementation of inquiry teaching practices. These factors include teachers' job satisfaction, instructional resource shortage, and teachers' perception of the significance of various assessment strategies at the mesosystem level as well as teachers' participation in professional development at the exosystem level. Significant correlations exist between some of the predictive variables. Implications for policy are discussed.

Through the lens of science capital, this research aims to detect the key factors and their main effects in identifying students with science-related career expectations. A machine learning approach (i.e., random forest) was employed to analyze a dataset of 519,334 15-year-old students from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015. The global analysis identified 25 key factors out of 88 contextual features: (1) for "how you think," making students feel science is relevant, enjoyable, and interesting is relatively more crucial than being ambitious and confident; (2) for "what science you know," students' science and math literacy, epistemological beliefs, and awareness of environmental matters were the key factors; (3) for "who you know," parents valuing science, expecting their children to enter science, and providing emotional support were as similar as or even more important than their economic, social, and cultural status (ESCS)-related constructs, while teachers fairness ranked the top among all teaching-related features; and (4) for "what you do," appropriate science learning time, engagement in science activities, and ICT use for schoolwork were key factors. These findings indicate a relatively optimistic situation, as the most key capitals were malleable for educators. Accumulated local effect plots further discriminated how these key capitals related to students' career expectations in four distinct ways: "increasing," "S-shaped," "inverted-U-shaped," and "decreasing," shedding light on how we could optimize key resources to enhance aspirations. The comparison between global and Hong Kong analyses suggests the key factors identified by the global model were generally effective but not necessarily essential for a specific region. The cross-cultural generalizability or prevalence of capitals might vary by their forms.

Demand for engineering-interested and proficient high school graduates continues to grow across the nation. However, there remains a severe gap in college participation and employment in engineering fields for students with learning disabilities (SWLDs). One potential way to encourage SWLDs to consider engineering as a profession and promote the development of key science attitudes may be through engineering and technology career and technical education (E-CTE) coursework. In this study, we address the following research questions: Do SWLDs take E-CTE courses in the early years of high school at different rates compared to students without learning disabilities? What is the relationship between early E-CTE coursetaking and science attitudes (self-efficacy, utility, identity), and does this differ for students with and without learning disabilities? How do specific engineering career expectations change with respect to enrollment in early E-CTE coursework, and do these differ for students with and without learning disabilities? We utilize the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS) to respond to the research questions through moderation models and a student fixed effects methodology. Ultimately, we found no evidence of SWLD underrepresentation in E-CTE in high school. However, SWLDs were expected to benefit more than the general population from E-CTE participation with respect to higher levels of science self-efficacy and science identity. Implications from these findings include how to encourage persistence along the engineering pathway, the growth of career pathway policies at the state level, and how to incorporate E-CTE practices in academic courses.

This study used a cluster randomized controlled trial to investigate the effectiveness of two approaches to increasing middle school students' science learning when using an inquiry-based science curriculum. Eighty-nine schools, with 253 teachers and 20,591 students, were randomly assigned into one of three conditions: (a) a treatment condition in which the textbook curriculum was modified based on three principles of cognitive science coupled with teacher professional development (PD), (b) a second treatment condition in which teachers received PD designed to improve their knowledge of the science content, and (c) a business-as-usual control group. The cognitive science treatment had a small but statistically significant positive effect on content learning, with a stronger impact on students of higher prior achievement. Compared to business-as-usual, the intervention to increase teacher content knowledge had no impact.

We report on the development of a rubric to reliably qualify and score responses to the "Views of Nature of Science Questionnaire" (VNOS): The "VNOS Analysis and Scoring Rubric" (VAScoR). The "VAScoR" is designed to (a) provide systematic guidance for the qualitative analysis, and score assignment to nuanced categories, of "VNOS" responses, (b) explicitly scaffold qualitative inferencing and standardize score assignment to substantially lessen the burden of, and variance in, analyzing and scoring the "VNOS," and (c) improve the viability and meaningfulness of cross-study comparisons drawing on "VNOS" data. The rubric adopted the "VNOS's" consensus NOS framework and further delineated core and related elements across 10 target NOS aspects. The "VAScoR's" reliability was examined in two studies that drew on "VNOS" questionnaires completed by 185 preservice secondary science teachers (58% female; 126 undergraduate and 59 graduate students) enrolled over several years in a combined undergraduate and graduate licensure program in a large U.S. Midwestern university. In Study I, "VAScoR" analyses of 86 "VNOS" questionnaires undertaken by a single author were used to examine the rubric's intra-rater reliability, which resulted in a robust Cronbach's alpha value of 0.81. In Study II, analyses by four authors of a randomly generated, overlapping set of 18 questionnaires were used to examine inter-rater reliability, which was supported with substantial consensus among raters as indicated by a Cohen's kappa of 0.71. Further evidence for the "VAScoR's" inter-rater reliability was indicated by moderate to strong consistency among four raters with an overall Pearson's correlation coefficient of 0.82, and coefficient values ranging from 0.77 to 0.89 for six possible rater pairings.

Socioscientific issues (SSIs) can provide a context to address societal decision-making processes in school. In recent years, studies have demonstrated that one effective way to deal with these topics is through role play. However, role plays may induce an unreflected attitude change based on the roles the participants take on, which raises ethical concerns about indoctrination. To explain this change of attitude, we applied the Transportation-Imagery Model. We asked if transportation into a role play would bring about a change of attitude and behavior. Furthermore, we investigated whether the perspective of the prepared or performed characters affected transportation and the direction of an attitude change. The research was conducted in Germany with a sample of 256 secondary-school students (M[subscript age] = 16.9 years, SD[subscript age] = 1.5, 68% female). We found that transportation affected neither attitude change nor behavior. There was also no effect of the prepared or performed characters' perspective on transportation or attitude change. This suggests that role play does not constitute a form of manipulation and can be used as a learning method for SSIs without reservation.

The role of computation in science is ever-expanding and is enabling scientists to investigate complex phenomena in more powerful ways and tackle previously intractable problems. The growing role of computation has prompted calls to integrate computational thinking (CT) into science instruction in order to more authentically mirror contemporary science practice and to support inclusive engagement in science pathways. In this multimethods study, we present evidence for the Computational Thinking for Science (CT+S) instructional model designed to support broader participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pathways by (1) providing opportunities for students to learn CT within the regular school day, in core science classrooms; and (2) by reframing coding as a tool for developing solutions to compelling real-world problems. We present core pedagogical strategies employed in the CT+S instructional model and describe its implementation into two 10-lesson instructional units for middle-school science classrooms. In the first unit, students create computational models of a coral reef ecosystem. In the second unit, students write code to create, analyze, and interpret data visualizations using a large air quality dataset from the United States Environmental Protection Agency to understand, communicate, and evaluate solutions for air quality concerns. In our investigation of the model's implementation through these two units, we found that participating students demonstrated statistically significant advancements in CT, competency beliefs for computation in STEM, and value assigned to computation in STEM. We also examine evidence for how the CT+S model's core pedagogical strategies may be contributing to observed outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings and propose a testable theory of action for the model that can serve future researchers, evaluators, educators, and instructional designers.

Science should provide students an accurate and contemporary education on genetic influence, particularly how it impacts trait variability and developmental norms. Stories involving familial, racial, and sexual differences routinely appear in the popular media and sales of over-the-counter genetic tests are mounting. Unfortunately, research suggests genetic curricula in secondary education and university courses have little impact on genetic literacy; instead they appear to amplify genetic essentialism. This position paper reports on genetic essentialism, the impact of three components of science education (teachers, students, curriculum), and critiques existing genetic lessons in two prevalent scientific disciplines, biology and psychology. Two entrenched 19th century genetic paradigms (e.g., Mendelian inheritance and behavioral genetics) are specifically examined. The paper closes with specific recommendations for improving students' genetic literacy including important contemporary genetic science (e.g., epigenetics) and instructional approaches (e.g., learning progression, refutational teaching).

It is widely recognized that we need to prepare students to think with data. This study investigates student interactions with digital data graphs and seeks to identify what might prompt them to shift toward using their graphs as thinking tools in the authentic activity of doing science. Drawing from video screencast data of three small groups engaged in sensor-based and computer simulation-based experiments in high school physics classes, exploratory qualitative methods are used to identify the student interactions with their graphs and what appeared to prompt shifts in those interactions. Analysis of the groups, one from a 9th grade class and two from 11th/12th grade combined classes, revealed that unexpected data patterns and graphical anomalies sometimes, but not always, preceded deeper engagement with the graphs. When shifts toward deeper engagement did occur, transcripts revealed that the students perceived the graphical patterns to be misaligned with the actions they had taken to produce those data. Misalignments between the physical, digital, and conceptual worlds of the investigations played an important role in these episodes, appearing to motivate students to revise either their experimental procedures or their conceptions of the phenomena being explored. If real-time graphs can help foster a sense in students that there should be alignments between their data production and data representations, it is suggested that pedagogy leverage this as a way to support deeper student engagement with graphs.

Supporting student interest in science is critical for broadening participation in the field because interest, even more than achievement, is associated with pursuing future science education and careers. In this study, we explore the conjecture that equitable classroom cultures can support interest in science. Specifically, we examine the idea that science classroom cultures that equitably reflect collective enterprise (where students engage collaboratively in scientific sensemaking) and care (where students believe that they are valued and respected members of the classroom community) support students, particularly those from historically marginalized populations, to develop interest in science. The study is part of a field test of a new middle school science curriculum called OpenSciEd. Data consist of survey responses from 847 students across 34 teachers located in nine states. Our analysis employed mixed-effects models to accommodate the nested structure of the data. We found that classrooms vary substantially in the degree to which they reflect collective enterprise and care, indicating that classroom culture is a perceptible and consequential feature of the shared classroom environment. Student background did not predict reports of collective enterprise or care, providing evidence that classrooms in our sample were equitable along these dimensions. Critically, collective enterprise and care are both strongly associated with student-reported interest in science. These findings underscore the importance of attending to classroom culture and the relational aspects of science learning as we seek to expand interest in science, particularly for students from historically marginalized populations.

Preservice secondary science teachers often experience science learning in narrow and marginalizing ways in their science preparation. These experiences cause harm, particularly for preservice teachers of color. They also limit the disciplinary resources they can develop for later teaching science in ways that value and sustain their students' ways of knowing and being in the world. Our research explores possibilities for cultivating new spaces for preservice secondary science teachers to engage in science. In a content-focused education course, we designed for and studied preservice teachers' engagement in expansive and connective sensemaking, incorporating heterogeneity, power, and historicity in pursuits of explanatory accounts of the natural world. In this article, we examined how this course design can support preservice teachers to attune to heterogeneity in ways of knowing in science and to connect to identity and historicity in scientific sensemaking. Our analysis suggests that students' final projects reflected attunements to diverse knowing, communicating, and relating in science and deep connections with their identities and future-making, yet had fewer connections to sociohistorical narratives and structures. We developed illustrative case studies of four student projects, highlighting the personal, social, and political possibilities of creating space for future educators to imagine more expansive and connective forms of science. This study contributes a novel model for preservice science teacher education to support teacher learning to value and sustain their students' ways of knowing and being in the world.

Intuitive conceptions based on cognitive biases (teleology, anthropomorphism, and essentialism) often prove helpful in everyday life while simultaneously being problematic in scientific contexts. Nonetheless, students often have intuitive conceptions of scientific topics such as evolution. As potential approaches to enable students to self-regulate their conceptions in the context of evolution, we investigated the effectiveness of two instructional approaches that are based on metacognition and self-regulated learning: (a) a formative criteria-referenced self-assessment of one's conceptions and (b) instruction on conditional metaconceptual knowledge (metacognitive knowledge about why and in which contexts specific conceptions are appropriate or not). We conducted an experimental intervention study using a 2 × 2 factorial (plus an additional control group), pre-post-follow-up-test design in German upper secondary level biology classes (N = 730). The groups that received one or both interventions had higher conceptual knowledge (i.e., used less intuitive conceptions and/or more scientific conceptions) afterward than those whose conceptions were not addressed: The self-assessment resulted in higher use of scientific conceptions; the instruction on conditional metaconceptual knowledge additionally resulted in lower use of intuitive conceptions based on cognitive biases, more reported thought processes relating to inhibition of cognitive biases, and a better ability to identify inappropriate phrasing based on cognitive biases. No effects were found on students' self-reported metaconceptual awareness and regulation. However, the fact that students inhibited their intuitive conceptions in the post-test indicates that they were indeed metaconceptually aware of and self-regulated their conceptions. The results suggest that students can be taught to become aware of the differences between intuitive and scientific conceptions and to regulate the use of their intuitive conceptions in a scientific context.

Energy is a central concept across the sciences and an important goal of science education is to support all students so that they develop a full understanding of the energy concept. However, given the abstract and complex nature of the energy concept, only a few students develop an understanding so that they can use energy ideas to make sense of phenomena. Research into energy learning progressions aims at developing models of learning about energy to guide instruction so that students can be best supported in developing competence and has provided a rich model of how students' understanding of energy develops over time. Being largely based on cross-section data, however, the extent to which this model can guide instruction is limited, especially concerning the continued learning of students about energy. To address this gap - the limited evidence regarding what supports students' continued learning about energy - it was investigated how holding non-normative ideas and the integratedness of students' energy knowledge affect students' continued learning about energy. Drawing on data from a 4-year longitudinal study covering Grades 6-9 on students' learning about energy, diagnostic classification models were used to characterize students' non-normative idea profiles and the integratedness of their knowledge and then related both to their continued learning. The results suggest no detrimental effects of holding non-normative ideas and strong positive effects of holding integrated knowledge for students' continued learning about energy. Implications for teaching and future research are discussed.

Researchers and practitioners in the United States increasingly promote phenomena-based instruction in science that supports the development of a coherent storyline throughout the unit. Questions about "who" is constructing the science storyline and "how" still remain. Employing a qualitative ethnographic case study approach, we explore how three Latinx female students authentically contribute in their high school chemistry class and change the science storyline originally developed by the teacher. Data include over 950 min of video recordings, student artifacts, and interviews collected from a unit about reaction rate, which was contextualized by students' experiences with a local wildfire. The analysis points to three instructional moves that appear to play an important role in shifting the collective storyline: connecting to Latinx students' personal concerns, moving across multiple figured worlds, and recognizing students' epistemological contributions. Implications for supporting minoritized students are discussed.

Much research attention has been focused on learning through game playing. However, very little has been focused on student learning through game making, especially in science. Moreover, none of the studies on learning through making games has presented an account of how students engage in the process of game design in real time. The present study seeks to address that gap. We report an exploratory embedded case study in which three groups of students in one classroom created a computer game designed to teach peers about climate science, while drawing on scientific knowledge, principles of game design, and computational thinking practices. Data sources were student design sheets, computer video, and audio screen capture while students created their game, and interviews after completing the curriculum unit. A theme-driven framework was used to code the data. A curricular emphasis on systems across climate systems, game design, and computational thinking practices provided a context designed to synergistically supported student learning. This embedded case study provides a rich example of what a collaborative game design task in a constructionist context looks like in a middle school science classroom, and how it supports student learning. Game design in a constructionist learning environment that emphasized learning through building a game allowed students to choose their pathways through the learning experience and resulted in learning for all despite various levels of programming experience. Our findings suggest that game design may be a promising context for supporting student learning in STEM disciplines.

Marginalized communities cannot and do not have decontextualized experiences with how socioscientific issues, such as exposure to COVID-19 as frontline essential workers, high Black infant mortality rates, air pollution leading to respiratory problems, and other issues, affect their communities. As PreK-12 science teachers and teacher educators strive to dismantle oppressive practices in their classrooms and curriculum, it would be helpful to learn from Black women science teachers who have been engaging in anti-racist practices before the racial awakenings of Summer 2020. In this study, three different virtual focus groups, or Sista Circles, were conducted with 18 Black women secondary science teachers. Ranging from 1 to 22 years of experience, Black women teachers across the country and international participants in Canada and Qatar participated in the Sista Circles. From intersectional qualitative analysis and narrative inquiry, the findings of the study reveal that Black women science teachers enact anti-racist science teaching by bringing something new to the community; using NGSS standards within the context of the community; teaching at the intersection of history, culture, and science learning and teaching; and building critical consciousness in the science classroom. Furthermore, the findings of the study have implications for the use of anti-racist frameworks within the context of science education that were authentically the practices of the Black women in the study. This study offers insights into how the critical consciousness of Black women teachers can be represented in the science classroom even in times of nonsupport from peers and administration. The power and necessity of Black women teachers are paramount in science classrooms specifically because of the neutral, apolitical ways science teaching has been approached in the past. The narratives and stories shared here exemplify how Black women science teachers transform science teaching and learning by displaying various acts of Criticality.

Previous studies have documented the promising results from student-constructed representations, including stop-motion animation (SMA), in supporting mechanistic reasoning (MR), which is considered an essential thinking skill in science education. Our current study presents theoretically and empirically how student-constructed SMA contributes to promoting MR. As a theoretical perspective, we propose a framework hypothesizing the link between elements of MR and the construction nature of SMA, that is, chunking and sequencing. We then examined the extent to which this framework was consistent with a multiple-case study in the domain of static electricity involving five secondary school students constructing and using their own SMA creation for reasoning. In addition, students' reasoning in pre- and postconstruction of an SMA was examined. Our empirical findings confirmed our framework by showing that all students identified the basic elements of MR, that is, entities and activities of entities, when engaging in chunking and sequencing. Chunking played a role in facilitating students to identify entities responsible for electrostatic phenomena, and sequencing seemed to elicit students to specify activities of these entities. The analysis of students' reasoning in pre- and postconstruction of SMA found that student-generated SMA has a potential effect on students' retention of the use of MR. Implications for instruction with SMA construction to support MR are discussed.

Floating and sinking (FS) is a key topic in science education, both at primary and secondary levels. The interpretation of FS phenomena, however, is challenging due to the difficulty of the scientific concepts and explanatory models involved (e.g., density, buoyancy), along with students' everyday experiences, which conflict with scientific explanations. Consequently, many studies over the last few decades have investigated how FS could be taught effectively to students of different ages while utilizing multiple teaching approaches. This meta-analysis summarizes findings from 69 intervention studies on teaching FS conducted between 1977 and 2021. Over all studies, we estimated a mean effect size of g = 0.85 (95% CI = 0.71, 0.99). This large effect size demonstrates that, although FS is a challenging concept, teaching FS is effective even in elementary school. Moreover, in a moderator analysis, we investigate the effect of intervention characteristics, students' age, as well as study design, and assessment features on the mean study effect size. To analyze the effect of these moderator variables, we use a three-level hierarchical meta-regression model for dealing with multiple effect sizes from single studies. We found two intervention characteristics that explain variance in study effect sizes: longer lasting interventions result in larger effect sizes and interventions where hands-on experiments are applied are more effective than those utilizing virtual experiments. Furthermore, studies with a treatment-control group comparison have significantly smaller effect sizes than studies with a pre-post design. We discuss the implications of our findings regarding the moderator variables for effective teaching of FS and further research on FS.

There is growing recognition in the education community that the problem-solving practices that comprise computational thinking (CT) are a fundamental component of both life and work in the twenty-first century. Historically, opportunities to learn CT have been confined to computer science (CS) and elective courses that lack racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. To combat this inequity, a number of scholars have proposed integrating CT practices into core curriculum--especially science, technology, engineering, and math curriculum. Successfully achieving the goal of integrated CT, however, depends on frameworks to guide integration, professional development for teachers, exemplars of successful integrations, and identifications of the barriers teachers encounter. Research pertaining to each of these areas is in its infancy. This study addresses these needs through a collective case study of 10 secondary science teachers' implementations of a novel, process-based, unplugged approach to CT/science integration and the factors that supported or hindered their CT/science integration efforts. The results of this work reveal that: (1) an unplugged and process-based approach to CT/science integration shows promise as a vehicle for infusing CT into diverse science classrooms; (2) educators' teaching context exerts a strong influence on their CT-integration efforts and persistence; and (3) special attention is needed to support teachers in their CT/science integrations including algorithm creation. This study also demonstrates the utility of the Fraillon et al.'s CT framework as a guide for CT/science integration efforts and sheds light on the unique affordances of unplugged strategies for implementing CT-integrated science curricula.

This study investigated the effects of presenting domain information (basic information about the domain) either together with or instead of offering exploratory practice (an exploratory opportunity in a simulation-based representation of the learning domain) prior to inquiry learning for facilitating students' hypothesis generation and subsequent inquiry processes and their knowledge acquisition. Secondary school students (n = 118) completed a simulation-based inquiry task on force and motion. They were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: the D + E condition (n = 29), in which domain information and exploratory practice were available; the D condition (n = 30), in which only domain information was available; the E condition (n = 32), in which only exploratory practice was available; or the C condition (n = 27), with no support at all. Students' knowledge was measured with a pre- and posttest and a test on knowledge of variables. Inquiry processes were inferred from information students entered in a Hypothesis Scratchpad and an Observation tool, and from a final summary that they had to write. Results indicated that providing students with domain information alone helps to foster their knowledge of variables before generating hypotheses and leads to knowledge acquisition. The results also showed that the opportunity to explore before experimenting does not affect students' inquiry behavior or learning performance, even when combined with providing students with domain information.

Meaningful participation in science and engineering practices requires that students make their thinking visible to others and build on one another's ideas. But sharing ideas with others in small groups and classrooms carries social risk, particularly for students from nondominant groups and communities. In this paper, we explore how students' perceptions of classrooms shape their contributions to classroom knowledge building in science across a wide range of classrooms. We examine the claim that when students feel a sense of belonging in class, they contribute more and perceive their ideas to be more influential in knowledge building. Data comes from classroom exit tickets (n = 10,194) administered in 146 classrooms as part of a 10-state field test of a new middle-school science curriculum, OpenSciEd, which were analyzed using mixed effects models. We found that students' sense of belonging predicted the degree to which they contributed ideas out loud in class (Odds ratio = 1.57) as well as the degree to which they perceived their contributions as influencing others (Odds ratio = 1.53). These relationships were particularly strong for students who reported a lower a sense of belonging. We also found significant differences by both race and gender in whether students said they contributed and believed their ideas influenced those of others. These findings suggest that a learner's sense of belonging in class and willingness to contribute may be mutually reinforcing, highlighting the need to promote content-specific strategies to foster belonging in ways that support collaborative knowledge building.

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, parents, colleagues, and administrators--but they differed in their success in supporting students' three-dimensional learning. Our goal is to understand how the teachers' instructional practices contributed to their similarities in achieving local success and to differences in enabling students' learning, and to consider the implications of these findings for research-practice partnerships. Data sources included classroom videos supplemented by interviews with teachers and focus students and examples of student work. We also compared students' learning gains by teacher using pre-post assessments that elicited three-dimensional performances. Analyses of classroom videos showed how all six teachers achieved local success--they led effectively managed classrooms, covered the curriculum by teaching almost all unit activities, and assessed students' work in fair and efficient ways. There were important differences, however, in how teachers engaged students in science practices. Teachers in classrooms where students achieved lower learning gains followed a pattern of practice we describe as "activity-based teaching," in which students completed investigations and hands-on activities with few opportunities for sensemaking discussions or three-dimensional science performances. Teachers whose students achieved higher learning gains combined the social stability characteristic of local classroom success with more demanding instructional practices associated with "scientific sensemaking" and "cognitive apprenticeship." We conclude with a discussion of implications for research-practice partnerships, highlighting how partnerships need to support all teachers in achieving both local and standards-based success.

Argumentation is fundamental to science education, both as a prominent feature of scientific reasoning and as an effective mode of learning--a perspective reflected in contemporary frameworks and standards. The successful implementation of argumentation in school science, however, requires a paradigm shift in science assessment from the measurement of knowledge and understanding to the measurement of performance and knowledge in use. Performance tasks requiring argumentation must capture the many ways students can construct and evaluate arguments in science, yet such tasks are both expensive and resource-intensive to score. In this study we explore how machine learning text classification techniques can be applied to develop efficient, valid, and accurate constructed-response measures of students' competency with written scientific argumentation that are aligned with a validated argumentation learning progression. Data come from 933 middle school students in the San Francisco Bay Area and are based on three sets of argumentation items in three different science contexts. The findings demonstrate that we have been able to develop computer scoring models that can achieve substantial to almost perfect agreement between human-assigned and computer-predicted scores. Model performance was slightly weaker for harder items targeting higher levels of the learning progression, largely due to the linguistic complexity of these responses and the sparsity of higher-level responses in the training data set. Comparing the efficacy of different scoring approaches revealed that breaking down students' arguments into multiple components (e.g., the presence of an accurate claim or providing sufficient evidence), developing computer models for each component, and combining scores from these analytic components into a holistic score produced better results than holistic scoring approaches. However, this analytical approach was found to be differentially biased when scoring responses from English learners (EL) students as compared to responses from non-EL students on some items. Differences in the severity between human and computer scores for EL between these approaches are explored, and potential sources of bias in automated scoring are discussed.

The purpose of this case study, informed by a Lakatosian perspective, is to identify how an alternative conception that originates in present learning but is related directly to subsequent learning contexts can be constructed. Before the study, one of the authors found by accident that a student who had learned about Avogadro's principle and chemical reaction in South Korea constructed an alternative conception related to the volume of gas. Later, we identified seven Korean high school students with the alternative conception through a test and analyzed their underlying understandings qualitatively through interviews. The results show that they had a scientific conception--core conception--and intuitive assumptions about implicit information of external representations--implicit assumptions--in common. The students' implicit assumptions could be divided into three types again: core assumption, auxiliary assumption, and context-inducing assumption. The core assumption, like the core conception, played a significant role in constructing the alternative conception (hard core), while the auxiliary assumptions were incomplete implicit assumptions to protect the alternative conception (protective belt). The context-inducing assumption was an implicit assumption bringing the context of the subsequent curriculum, and the core conception and the core assumption could be interpreted in this induced context. At the end of the study, the implications related to learning progressions were discussed.

Science teachers and educators seek to promote equity and inclusion within their classrooms. Yet, many do not examine how their roles could reproduce oppression that continues to exclude certain groups of students. Centering on how oppression interacts with science teaching and learning, this naturalistic study observed Ms. William and her implementation of two STEM units that integrate science and engineering, to understand power, race, and privilege dynamics in her middle school STEM classrooms. Specifically, we focused on understanding oppression at the interpersonal and internalized level in Ms. William's class. We collected and analyzed video recorded lessons from two different classrooms, two STEM curricula Ms. William had co-developed, and conducted semi-structured interviews after she taught her two STEM units. We identified themes of oppression perpetuated in the classroom by employing thematic analysis, which when guided by our theoretical framework enabled us to illuminate the complex relationship between science teaching and maintaining whiteness as the dominant discourse in science learning. Our findings suggest that an active and critical role from science teachers and educators are required; we must reflect deeply on our science curriculum and teaching strategies and identify practices that remains to be oppressive if promoting equity and inclusion is at the forefront of our science teaching.

This study explores how a biology teacher from a summer science program engaged high school students of color in a three-week science unit exploring community health at the intersection of history, race, place, and power. The goal of this study is to better understand what community-driven science looks like in a science classroom when a health equity unit is guided by a biology teacher who engages the socio-historical, political, and relational aspects of community structure and agency. Using student and instructor interviews, program observations, and student artifacts, I examine how the instructor's positioning as a Black woman scientist shaped her goals and vision and the instructional and pedagogical resources made available during the unit. In addition, I explore how engaging in community-driven science practices during the unit such as critical inquiry and data analysis supported students' sense making about community health and the possibilities they imagined for their communities. Findings illuminate how engaging community health at the intersection of history, race, place, and power shaped engagement in community-driven science practices and supported student sense making in ways that surfaced challenges, tensions, and opportunities for disrupting and reimagining community narratives. Further, finding highlight the importance of an instructor's lived experiences and pedagogical vision in supporting emergent forms of student agency and place remaking, and generating possibilities for community healing and hope.

Reforms such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for substantial change in teacher practice such as instruction that is more phenomenon-based, three-dimensional, supportive of student epistemic agency, and coherent from the student perspective. Such change requires ongoing support in the form of aligned curricular materials and professional development (PD), but little work has been done to understand how teachers respond to PD over time in the NGSS era. Therefore, this study investigated how teachers' beliefs about science instruction and self-efficacy in implementing a reform science curriculum changed over time. Using survey data from the field test of the OpenSciEd middle school curriculum implementation, we tracked changes in teaching beliefs and self-efficacy beliefs in 322 teachers over 2 years, which included four rounds of PD workshops and implementation of four new curricular units. Teachers' teaching beliefs and self-efficacy beliefs changed initially and leveled out over time, but self-efficacy took longer to change than teaching beliefs. This suggests that teachers may require more time, iteration, or enactment to increase their confidence in implementing new instruction as compared to their beliefs in the value of the new approach. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we identified teacher characteristics associated with differences in those changes. Teachers who had more experience and found the PD more valuable were less likely to hold traditional teaching beliefs and more likely to have higher self-efficacy. Of these variables, teachers' value of the PD is particularly interesting because it can be designed for. Based on these results, we argue that PD should be designed to build trust and to provide a rationale for PD activities for participants to help understand the value of the experiences.

Student participation in the science practices is more than following directions to conduct pre-determined experiments and analyze data with expected solutions. This requires classroom shifts that increase the epistemic agency of students: increase student involvement and authority in developing science knowledge and practices, rather than the teacher and textbook serving as sole sources of authority. In previous work, the authors described how three teachers differentially create opportunities for students to act as epistemic agents and to engage in collective knowledge-building work. The descriptive nature of this previous research provided information about what variability can look like in classrooms attempting these reform-oriented pedagogical shifts. This paper extends this prior work by presenting an expanded, but still exploratory analysis of how those three teachers, who participated in the same professional development community and were working with common instructional materials, attempted to support student agency through science practices in a common lesson. The present goal is to use a multi-case study to identify emerging variations in key elements of knowledge and practice for inviting students' epistemic agency, even as teachers work toward specific learning goals. From these cases the research is advanced by building theoretical conjectures that can be explored further in future work about how teachers' choices about collective knowledge building may yield differential opportunities for students to experience epistemic agency.

This paper aims to identify neighborhood institutional resources (e.g., nonprofit organizations, libraries, and labor market conditions) that promote Mexican-origin high school students' progress in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pathway into postsecondary education. A nationally representative, longitudinal sample of 1340 Mexican-origin students from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 was used to investigate students' postsecondary education STEM outcomes. Neighborhood institutional resources, assessed during the high school years, were appended from multiple administrative data sources at the zip code level. Multilevel models utilizing the Heckman correction model, to correct for selection bias in postsecondary education pursuits, revealed that neighborhood resources during high school, specifically more minority- and immigrant-serving organizations and a more STEM-focused local labor market, support Mexican-origin students' postsecondary STEM degree attainment, after controlling for risks and resources in the family and school contexts. We conclude by calling attention to how neighborhood institutional resources may facilitate Mexican-origin students' STEM achievement and fulfill the labor market demands within high-growth sectors of the economy.

Research indicates many professional development (PD) programs fail to promote a significant change in science teaching, despite the resources invested in them. While previous research addresses this problem through aspects of policy making, design, and teachers' identity, we suggest a focus on teachers' engagement in learning during PD sessions. Engagement is critical for learning processes and outcomes and affects teachers' professional learning, and, hence, their teaching. Yet little research explores teachers' engagement during professional learning. Most researchers approach engagement from a psychological perspective, using self-report tools, usually questionnaires. To enable a more complete understanding of science teacher engagement in PD, we offer a novel multimodal contextual perspective on engagement, one that perceives engagement as embodied, situated, local, and dynamic. We present a multimodal situated analytical tool referring to the expected behavior in specific contexts, as defined by the norms of the situation and its participants. To develop the tool and apply it, we used video-recorded PD sessions of Israeli elementary and middle school science teachers, focusing our analysis on the engagement of 10 teachers over 21.5 h. We used multimodal analysis to map teachers' engagement in relation to the requested action, referring to: (1) five engagement levels determined by the expected behavior; (2) different engagement modalities--verbal, body posture and gestures, gaze, and facial expressions; and (3) engagement duration. We demonstrate the potential of this analytical framework to advance the understanding of PD interactions by comparing: (1) two teachers' engagement in the same activity; and (2) teachers' engagement in three PD activities: whole-class learning, game playing, and inquiry-into-practice. The analysis reveals differences within and between teachers, as well as between the activities, in levels of engagement and alignment between modalities. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and suggest how the tool may be applied in research.

The interrelationship of science and engineering and the recent inclusion of engineering in K-12 science standards have promoted the incorporation of engineering design in science classrooms. However, empirical studies on the impacts of engineering design on science learning show mixed findings and indicate that factors such as the complexity of design tasks, a lack of connections between design tasks and the underlying science concepts, and the limited experience with engineering among science teachers can influence learning gains from design activities. One useful approach for addressing these challenges is through the use of technologies such as interactive simulations, which have become increasingly prevalent in STEM education. In the present study, we used a simulation to investigate the effects of task context (science vs. engineering) on students' investigation behaviors and their understanding of science concepts. Furthermore, considering the relative novelty and complexity of an engineering context to many students, we examined how structuring students' responses in the engineering context affects their behaviors and learning. A total of 349 high school students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: science, structured engineering, and unstructured engineering. In the science condition, students used the simulation to investigate the effects of four variables on the saturation concentration of solutions. Using the same simulation, students in the structured and unstructured engineering conditions were directed to recommend the optimal variable values that meet a set of given constraints and maximize the saturation concentration for a commercial product. The only difference between the two engineering conditions was whether structuring was provided in the response fields presented to students as they entered responses for the target variables. Results suggested that the engineering context stimulated students to engage in more comprehensive investigation behaviors as compared to the science context. In contrast, students in the science condition exhibited more systematic behaviors. However, the increased comprehensiveness of behaviors in the engineering conditions did not translate into significantly greater learning of the science content in these conditions, indicating that students might have focused on the surface features associated with the engineering goal without making deep connections between the two domains. Furthermore, structuring students' responses within an engineering context as used in the current study did not lead to significant differences in investigation behaviors or learning outcomes.

In the United States, the Next Generation Science Standards advocate for the integration of computational thinking (CT) as a science and engineering practice. Additionally, there is agreement among some educational researchers that increasing opportunities for engaging in computational thinking can lend authenticity to classroom activities. This can be done through introducing CT principles, such as algorithms, abstractions, and automations, or through examining the tools used to conduct modern science, emphasizing CT in problem solving. This cross-case analysis of nine high school biology teachers in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States documents how they integrated CT into their curricula following a year-long professional development (PD). The focus of the PD emphasized data practices in the science teachers' lessons, using Weintrop et al.'s definition of data practices. These are: (a) creation (generating data), (b) collection (gathering data), (c) manipulation (cleaning and organizing data), (d) visualization (graphically representing data), and (e) analysis (interpreting data). Additionally, within each data practice, teachers were asked to integrate at least one of five CT practices: (a) decomposition (breaking a complex problem into smaller parts), (b) pattern-recognition (identifying recurring similarities in data practices), (c) algorithms (the creation and use of formulas to predict an output given a specific input), (d) abstraction (eliminating detail in order to generalize or see the "big picture"), and (e) automation (using computational tools to carry out specific procedures). Although the biology teachers integrated all CT practices across their lessons, they found it easier to integrate decomposition and pattern recognition while finding it more difficult to integrate abstraction, algorithmic thinking, and automation. Implications for designing professional development experiences are discussed.

There are international concerns about decreasing rates of chemistry degree enrolment. This article seeks to understand students' reasons for not/choosing to pursue a chemistry degree, drawing on (i) open-ended survey responses from a sample of 506 students in England aged 21-22 who had studied advanced level ("A level") chemistry at age 18 (as either a full A level or a half "AS" level) and had either chosen (n = 70) or not chosen (n = 436) to pursue undergraduate chemistry and (ii) 185 interviews conducted with a subsample of 18 young people who had been longitudinally tracked from age 10 to 22 (with 17 of their parents) who took advanced level chemistry and then either did (n = 5), or did not (n = 13) go on to study for a chemistry degree. Analysis revealed four key reasons for not/choosing chemistry that were present to varying extents in both the quantitative and qualitative data ("relative interest, connection and options"; "experiences of chemistry A level; feeling 'not/clever enough'"; and "views of chemistry jobs"). Four additional factors were predominantly found in the qualitative data ("associations of chemistry with masculinity"; "encouragement from a significant adult"; "views of higher education"; and "chemistry work experience/outreach"). Applying a sociological lens, we suggest that not/choosing chemistry was a relational process, produced through interactions of habitus, capital, and field. We identify conceptual and methodological implications and extrapolate reasons why chemistry degree enrolments may be declining, offering suggestions for how chemistry education might further support participation.

This study explores the role of unconventional forms of classroom assessments in expanding minoritized students' opportunities to learn (OTL) in high school physics classrooms. In this research + practice partnership project, high school physics teachers and researchers co-designed a unit about momentum to expand minoritized students' meaningful OTL. Specifically, the unit was designed to (a) expand what it means to learn and be good at science using unconventional forms of assessment, (b) facilitate students to leverage everyday experiences, concerns, and home languages to do science, and (c) support teachers to facilitate meaningful dialogical interactions. The analysis focused on examining minoritized students' OTLs mediated by intentionally designed, curriculum-embedded, unconventional forms of assessments. The participants were a total of 76 students in 11th or 12th grade. Data were gathered in the form of student assessment tasks, a science identity survey, and interviews. Data analysis entailed: (a) statistical analysis of student performance measured by conventional and unconventional assessments and (b) qualitative analysis of two Latinx students' experiences with the co-designed curriculum and assessments. The findings suggest that the use of unconventional forms of curriculum-embedded assessment can increase minoritized students' OTL if the assessment facilitates minoritized students to personally and deeply relate themselves to academic tasks.

The current study is about students' engagement with socioscientific issues (SSI). We explored the use of sources of knowledge about SSI and attitudes toward SSI among a sample of 1676 Dutch 8- to 16-year-old students. First, we developed a questionnaire that measured students' use of four sources of knowledge about SSI: Social Resources (online media use and talking with parents and friends), In-Class Resources (in-class talk and in-class offline media use), Visit Resources (visiting the zoo or a science museum with parents or school), and Offline Media Resources (engaging with issues or the news via books, magazines, newspapers, or TV). Second, we performed a latent profile analysis to explore students' patterns of use of these sources. This resulted in five profiles: Social Visitors (5.9%), Offline Media Consumers (10.6%), Media Discussers (14.3%), In-Class Users (21.0%), and Non-Users (48.3%). Third, we related these profiles to students' attitudes toward SSI, as measured with the Pupils' Attitudes toward Socioscientific Issues (PASSI) questionnaire. In line with the sources of knowledge profiles, the Non-Users felt and thought most negatively about engagement with SSI, while the Media Discussers showed the most positive attitudes. We believe that our exploration of the profiles adds to the discourse about students' socioscientific capital. Moreover, this study informs teachers about the resources that students may bring into the learning environment and their decision-making about SSI. The study concludes with practical suggestions about stimulating the use of sources of knowledge for certain groups of students and fostering positive attitudes toward engagement with SSI.

Argumentation plays a significant role in science as a scientific practice in which knowledge is constructed, evaluated, and modified. Scientific argumentation (SA) is thus a promising activity for students to pursue in order to think and act like scientists and to enhance their understanding of science. Considering the impact that assessments usually have on teaching and their role in understanding students' ability, this study aims to explore the assessment of scientific argumentation competence (SAC) and Chinese high school students' performance and perceptions of SA. This study, therefore, proposes a three-component framework for understanding SAC, including the competencies to identify, evaluate, and generate the SA elements outlined in Toulmin's argument model. Based on this framework, we hypothesize three levels of SAC and develop a test including 22 items to see whether these proposed SAC elements are valid and to what extent they represent students' levels of SAC. An iterative procedure is adopted to develop and validate the assessment instrument, validity evidence is collected from the analysis of teachers' interviews, students' think-aloud and follow-up interviews, and from confirmatory factor analysis and Rasch analysis of students' scores on the test. The results suggest that the measure, which includes three SAC components has acceptable reliability and validity, and the three-level progression of SAC is aligned with and further expands previous learning progressions of SA. We also find that most students in our sample are at level 1 of SAC and they in general hold positive attitudes toward learning through argumentation, but their willingness in engaging with SA tends to be affected by their perception of the intrinsic and practical value of SA and their personality. Providing them with explanations of SA elements does not improve their test performance.

Recent reforms in K-12 science education call for curricular materials that are designed to be "coherent for students." This form of coherence arises when the classroom community sees their science work as addressing their questions and problems. In enactment, the teacher sometimes has to improvise from the planned trajectory of the storyline to follow students' emergent science work. In this single instrumental case study, I used interaction analysis to identify and describe episodes of whole group storyline discussion where one expert middle school science teacher worked with his students as their science work diverged from the storyline. The descriptive account for each episode documents how the teacher attended to the conceptual, epistemic, and/or interactive facets in the substance of students' talk. It also traces how collective knowledge objects (i.e., consensus model, driving questions board, and experimental graph) were developed through this attentional work in each episode. The results suggest that the teacher facilitated episodes of principled improvisation (PI) related to the students' interactive role in the discussion, the science ideas they raised for a consensus model, and the measurement errors they experienced in an investigation. These episodes were principled because the teacher foregrounded particular trajectories in the storyline to mediate and add rigor to the students' divergent lines of science work. They were improvisational because the teacher backgrounded other storyline trajectories to more effectively address and work with students' emergent ideas. In each PI, the teacher shared epistemic agency with students to co-develop each collective knowledge object. These findings show the analytical and practical value in conceptualizing epistemic agency and teachers' instructional design work in relation to students' convergent and divergent science work in the curriculum.

Student science proficiency development demands sustainable and coherent learning environment support. Scholars argue that project-based learning (PBL) is an efficient approach to promoting student science learning, compared to conventional instructions. Yet, few studies have delved into the learning process to explore how a coherent PBL system consisting of curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional learning promotes student learning. To address the gap, this study investigated whether students' science proficiency on the three post-unit assessments predicted their achievement on a third-party-designed end-of-year summative science test in a coherent high school chemistry PBL system aligned with the recent US science standards. The study employed a cluster randomized experimental design to test an intervention using our PBL system and only used data from the treatment group. The sample consisted of 1344 treatment students who participated in our PBL intervention and underwent the pretest and end-of-year summative test. Students' responses to the three post-unit assessments were selected and rated to indicate their science proficiency. Two-level hierarchical linear models were employed to explore the effects of students' performances of three post-unit assessments on their end-of-year summative achievement, considering and controlling for student prior knowledge (i.e., pretest and prior post-unit assessments). This study suggests two main findings. First, students' science proficiency in the three units could cumulatively and individually predict their summative science achievement. Second, students' performances on the two types of tasks (i.e., developing and using models) in the three post-unit assessments could also be used to predict their summative science achievement. This research contributes to the field by showing that a coherent standards-aligned PBL system can significantly and sustainably impact student science proficiency development.

Students' out-of-school science participation has been identified as a factor that supports adaptive science outcomes. Researchers have largely investigated students' out-of-school science participation in terms of structured science activities (e.g., attending a science camp), with far less consideration of how students' involvement in unstructured out-of-school science activities (e.g., using at-home science kits) may also be associated with students' aspirations and achievement in science. Research in this area has established a conceptual framework by which activities can be categorized by the activity's level of interaction (i.e., whether receptive or active). Although this conceptual framework is useful to understand the types of unstructured activities in which students engage, this research has tended to overlook the fact that students often participate in more than one out-of-school unstructured activity. The present investigation addressed this dearth of research by examining the extent to which different typologies of student participation in out-of-school receptive and active unstructured activities existed. The study also examined if these profiles were uniquely associated with students' aspirations and achievement in science above and beyond the effects of their current level of in-school participation. The study employed a latent class analysis of N = 996 Australian high school students (40.60% girls) from six schools serving predominately above average socioeconomic status Australian high school students. Four distinct profiles of out-of-school participation in unstructured activities were found: Optimal, Receptive, Active, and Minimal Out-of-School Participation (OSP). The Optimal OSP and Receptive OSP profiles were associated with the higher aspirations (beyond students' in-school participation), and both were significantly higher than the Active OSP and Minimal OSP profiles. Students' in-school participation was most strongly associated with students' achievement. These findings suggest that encouraging students' participation in unstructured activities, especially receptive unstructured activities, and their in-school participation may be viable avenues by which to improve students' science aspirations and achievement.

Design-based learning is considered a powerful way to help students apply and develop understanding of science concepts, but research has shown that the success of this approach is not a given. Examining students' understanding of science concepts in various design-based learning contexts has thus continued to be an important field of research. To help advance such work, we explored the affordances of a novel analytic approach for studying data gathered in design-based learning classrooms. We used the "chemical thinking framework," specifically its "conceptual sophistication" dimension, to analyze 10th-grade, chemistry students' design talk and drawings. We gathered this data during small-group design planning and drawing activities in the classrooms of two teachers whose students were designing a product that harnesses chemical energy to change the temperature of a beverage or snack. The findings demonstrate that this analytic approach was able to reveal that students (implicitly) drew on their understanding of several chemistry concepts while designing. Moreover, it showed that students could use everyday as well as more sophisticated understandings regarding a given chemistry concept while designing. This study furthermore unveiled differences in what and how students' design talk and drawings may reveal use of conceptual understanding, and it showed that different student teams may use a unique combination of understandings during design planning and drawing. We describe how this study's analytic approach complements existing approaches in design-based learning research, and how our findings provide implications for research and practice.

This study uses portraiture methodology to co-construct and share the story of a nationally recognized rural K-8 science teacher with more than 30 years of teaching experience. Our analysis and synthesis revealed one central theme "Step Outside" and three subthemes: (1) Step Outside of the rural classroom, (2) Step Outside of the K-8 teacher's comfort zone, and (3) Step Outside of science silos, that have been central to the teacher's personal and professional journey. Examining the ways, these subthemes have intersected across the career of an exceptional rural teacher offers valuable insight to the development of teacher identity and how it shapes practice and research, especially within marginalized contexts such as K-8 science education and rural settings.

Understanding science allows students with and without developmental and behavioral-based (DB) disabilities to better appreciate the world around them as well as prepare them for the growing science-related job market. However, students in the United States consistently underperform on science achievement tests compared to students from other nations. This underperformance could be attributed, in part to science having many specialized vocabulary terms that are not often taught explicitly, leaving students with incomplete or inaccurate understandings of word meanings. Improving science vocabulary instructional practices may support students with and without DB disabilities in enhancing their science achievement. To address this need, researchers implemented multicomponent multimedia professional development (PD) to support middle-school science teachers in delivering high-quality vocabulary instruction in inclusive settings. In this paper, data collected from a study evaluating the efficacy of the PD were analyzed to determine the influence on student outcomes using ANOVA and multilevel modeling methodologies. Though initial results indicate a promising impact on teacher instructional practices, little is known whether teacher participation in the PD affected student science vocabulary and content knowledge growth. Using multilevel modeling, student science knowledge growth was evaluated following their teachers' exposure to the PD. The findings from this study indicate having indirect exposure to PD had a positive effect on science content knowledge for students with and without DB disabilities (N = 980). In addition, the authors found students with DB disabilities whose teachers had access to PD showed a larger gain in science knowledge than general education students whose teachers did not have access to the PD.