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Microevolutionary mechanisms are taught almost exclusively in our schools, to the detriment of those mechanisms that allow us to understand the larger picture—macroevolution. The results are demonstrable; as a result of the strong emphasis on micro processes in evolution education, students and teachers still have poor understanding of the processes which operate at the macro level, and virtually no understanding at all of the history of life on our planet. Natural selection has become synonymous with the suite of processes we call evolution. This paper makes the case for a paradigm shift in evolution education, so that both perspectives—micro and macro—are given equal weight. Increasingly, issues of bioethics, human origins, cloning, etc., are being cast in a light that requires an understanding of macroevolution. To deny our students access to this debate is to deny the call for universal science literacy. A methodology from professional practice is proposed that could achieve this goal, and discussed in light of its utility, theoretical underpinnings, and historical legacy. A mandate for research is proposed that focuses on learners' understanding of several challenging macroevolutionary concepts, including species, the formation of higher groups, deep time, and hierarchical thinking. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed90:767–783, 2006 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the development and field test of an instrument, the Views on Science and Education Questionnaire, designed to measure participants' concepts of the nature of science (NOS) and relevant teaching attitudes. The questionnaire includes 15 questions, each followed by several items representing different philosophical positions. Participants rank each item on a five-point scale. The items were empirically based and described from the learners' perspectives, but the issues and subcategories covered were validated by a panel of experts. The latest version was administered to 302 college students. Combined conceptions and conflicting thoughts about NOS were detected. Furthermore, the instrument achieved a test–retest correlation coefficient of 0.82. The questionnaire is a valid and practical tool that can be used to determine participants' conceptions and attitudes toward teaching NOS. With this instrument, science educators and teachers can conduct comparison studies and relate views of NOS to other measurable educational outcomes. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed90:803–819, 2006 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores seventh graders' use of inscriptions in a teacher-designed project-based science unit. To investigate students' learning practices during the 8-month water quality unit, we collected multiple sources of data (e.g., classroom video recordings, student artifacts, and teacher interviews) and employed analytical methods that drew from a naturalistic approach. The findings showed that throughout the unit, provided with the teachers' scaffold and social, conceptual, and material resources, the seventh graders were able to use various inscriptions (e.g., digital pictures, Web pages, and models) to demonstrate meaningful inscriptional practices such as creating and using inscriptions to make arguments, to represent conceptual understandings, and to engage in thoughtful discussions. Inscriptions and associated practices provided students with experiences and understandings about certain ways to organize, transform, and link data or scientific ideas. However, when constructing inscriptions, students did not consider how the inscriptions could serve certain reasoning purposes. In addition, more scaffolds were needed to help students use multiple inscriptions to make a coherent argument. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed90:852–873, 2006 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this 2-year study was to investigate Malawian teacher educators' perspectives and dispositions toward teaching about ecological sustainability issues in Malawi, a developing country in sub-Sahara Africa. This study was embedded in a larger theoretical framework of investigating earth systems science through the understanding of nature–knowledge–culture systems from local, place-based perspectives. Specifically, we were interested in learning more about eco-justice issues that are related to environmental degradation in Malawi and the potential role of inquiry-oriented pedagogies in addressing these issues. In a science methods course, the African educators' views on deforestation and teaching about ecological sustainability were explored within the context of the local environment and culture. Teachers participated in inquiry pedagogies designed to promote the sharing of perspectives related to the connections between culture and ecological degradation. Strategies encouraging dialogue and reflection included role-playing, class discussions, curriculum development activities, teaching experiences with children, and field trips to a nature preserve. Data were analyzed from postcolonial and critical pedagogy of place theoretical perspectives to better understand the hybridization of viewpoints influenced by both Western and indigenous science and the political hegemonies that impact sustainable living in Malawi. Findings suggested that the colonial legacy of Malawi continues to impact the ecological sustainability issue of deforestation. Inquiry-oriented pedagogies and connections to indigenous science were embraced by the Malawian educators as a means to involve children in investigation, decision making, and ownership of critical environmental issues. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed90:660–680, 2006 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the series of articles pertaining to science teacher education and the content and impact of science method courses. Assumptions on the basis of teacher preparation programs; Adoption of conceptual change model; Differences in elementary and secondary science method courses; Reform of science teacher preparation.

Comments on how the issues of teacher knowledge and reflection affect the method of science teaching. Views on teacher education; Findings on the influence of knowledge in thinking and practice; Attitudes important to the reflection; Development of pedagogical content knowledge.

The article announces the first Outstanding Paper of the Year competition of the journal "Science Education." The Outstanding Paper of 1984 Award has been awarded to Glen S. Aikenhead for his paper on "Collective Decision Making in the Social Context of Science." Four Awards of Merit have also been presented to Mary W. Arnaudin and Joel J. Mintzes for their paper "Students' Alternative Conceptions of the Human Circulatory System: A Cross-Age Study."

This paper is an introduction to and a synthesis of three papers in this issue written by scholars deeply committed to partnering with communities to understand and enact what it means to realize transformational ends in and through science education. Partnering for justice must be a conversation, a work in progress, and a critical examination that leads to intentional and careful forward movement. It is a beautiful effort at flattening power hierarchies so diverse voices and expertise can be interwoven in service of youth and communities who have been invisibilized and marginalized. Committed to realizing new, hope‐filled futures, the three pairs of authors use their experiences and expertise to shed light on the work of partnering using a temporal lens: considerations related to the beginnings, middles, and endings of partnering, each of which requires special intentionality and care. Together the authors share core overlapping tenets with other critical scholars that could be considered a partnering for justice epistemology. This epistemology underscores how importantly different learning through partnering for justice is from traditional notions of academic research. I close the paper by sharing lessons learned from my own 20‐plus years of partnering for justice, using the tenets of partnering for justice epistemology as a lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in languages and literacies in science education (LLSE) has developed substantial theoretical and pedagogical insights into how students learn science through language, discourse, and multimodal representations. At the same time, language is central to the functioning of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). On this common basis concerning the role of language, this paper explores how foundational ideas from LLSE studies can inform the use of GenAI in science education. A bibliometric analysis of 412 journal articles from Web of Science provided the initial step to identify major themes and relationships in the LLSE literature. The analysis revealed four clusters of research in LLSE: reading and writing scientific text, science discourse and interaction, multilingual science classroom, and multimodality and representations. Each cluster was further analyzed through close reading of selected articles to identify and connect key constructs to the potential use of GenAI. These constructs include the interactive‐constructive reading model, text genre, reading‐writing integration, dialogic interaction, critical questioning, argumentation, translanguaging, hybridity, thematic pattern, modal affordance, and transduction. From these ideas and connections, the paper recommends several pedagogical principles for science educators to guide the use of GenAI. It concludes that LLSE research offers valuable insights for researchers and teachers to investigate and design the use of GenAI in science education. In turn, the impending use of GenAI also calls for a rethinking of literacy that will shape future research in LLSE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article states that the periodical "Science Education" will publish a special issue and implement a new section of the journal focusing on science studies and science education, starting in 2007. The focus of the field of science studies is to understand science as a socio-historical and epistemic effort. The article is seeking to publish papers that focus on how science studies apply to the theory, methodology, policy, and practice of science education. Disciplines of science study include the history, sociology, and philosophy of science, as well as cognitive and anthropological studies of science.

Although adults are known to play an important role in young children's development, little work has focused on the enactive features of scaffolding in informal learning settings, and the embodied dynamics of intergenerational interaction. To address this gap, this paper undertakes a microinteractional analysis to examine intergenerational collaborative interaction in a science museum setting. The paper presents a fine‐grained moment‐by‐moment analysis of video‐recorded interaction of children and their adult carers around science‐themed objects. Taking an enactive cognition perspective, the analysis enables access to subtle shifts in interactants' perception, action, gesture, and movement to examine how young children engage with exhibits, and the role adult action plays in supporting young children's engagement with exhibits and developing ideas about science. Our findings demonstrate that intergenerational "embodied scaffolding" is instrumental in making "enactive potentialities" in the environment more accessible for children, thus deepening and enriching children's engagement with science. Adult action is central to revealing scientific dimensions of objects' interaction and relationships in ways that expose novel types of perception and action opportunities in shaping science experiences and meaning making. This has implications for science education practices since it foregrounds not only "doing" science, through active hands‐on activities, but also speaks to the interconnectedness between senses and the role of the body in thinking. Drawing on the findings, this paper also offers design implications for informal science learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of research in improving science education in the U.S. The understanding of the process of teaching, learning, and schooling has improved. Thus, rapid societal changes has an impact on the image of the process of schooling in general, and the process of teaching and learning science in particular. With this regard, teachers must engage in constructing a curriculum to enhance the development of all students. Lastly, research should guide and inform policy formation and decision making regarding science teaching, preschool through college.

The predominant conceptualization of scientific literacy occurs on the micro scale of an individual person. However, scientific literacy can also be exhibited at the meso scale by groups of people in communities of place, practice, or interest. What comprises this community level scientific literacy (CSL) is both understudied and undertheorized. In this paper, we utilized a systematic literature review to describe how CSL is characterized in the extant literature and a Delphi survey of experts to elicit more current thought. Guided by cultural‐historical activity theory, inductive and deductive analyses produced seven elements of CSL and their constituent characteristics: (1) resources, (2) attributes of those resources, (3) actors, (4) interactions between actors, (5) contexts, (6) topics, and (7) purposes. The typology created through this process is meant to be generative, serving as a starting point for continuing refinement within science education and other fields related to science learning and knowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When learning about scientific phenomena, students are expected to mechanistically explain how underlying interactions produce the observable phenomenon and conceptually connect the observed phenomenon to canonical scientific knowledge. This paper investigates how the integration of the complementary processes of designing and refining computational models using real‐world data can support students in developing mechanistic and canonically accurate explanations of diffusion. Specifically, we examine two types of shifts in how students explain diffusion as they create and refine computational models using real‐world data: a shift towards mechanistic reasoning and a shift from noncanonical to canonical explanations. We present descriptive statistics for the whole class as well as three student work examples to illustrate these two shifts as 6th grade students engage in an 8‐day unit on the diffusion of ink in hot and cold water. Our findings show that (1) students develop mechanistic explanations as they build agent‐based models, (2) students' mechanistic reasoning can co‐exist with noncanonical explanations, and (3) students shift their thinking toward canonical explanations after comparing their models against data. These findings could inform the design of modeling tools that support learners in both expressing a diverse range of mechanistic explanations of scientific phenomena and aligning those explanations with canonical science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of both professional science practice and children's science learning show that care is not merely ancillary to disciplinary work but a core and generative constituent of science practice. In science education research, however, students' care is often overlooked. In this paper, we describe the expression of care across two STEM classrooms (6th and 9th grade) studying biology and ecology and participating in a pen pal exchange. We analyze artifacts from the pen pal exchange as well as students' retrospective interviews and written reflections. Two ways of expressing care surfaced in students' letters: caring for guppies and caring for pen pals. We describe each form of care using examples from our data. We find that students' care for guppies and pen pals was both instrumental (in service of their investigations) and intrinsic (positioning guppies and pen pals as inherently valuable). We then connect these findings to studies of care in children's science learning and in professional science. We discuss methodological and practical implications for recognizing and analyzing how students' care manifests in classrooms and for designing learning activities that cultivate care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a literature review of science teaching approaches that seek to support equity in science classrooms, focusing on marginalization based on (i) race/ethnicity, (ii) social class/socioeconomic background, and (iii) religion. Considered were approaches that science teachers can use in science classes in secondary schools. They were analyzed and discussed against the backdrop of critical pedagogy by Paulo Freire and the educational theory by Hannah Arendt, which constitutes a novelty in science education research. The review used meta interpretation combined with systematic searches in the ERIC database. It is, thus, limited to works published in English. A total of 930 articles (2013–2021) were identified out of which 64 were fully analyzed. The analysis shows that most approaches strive to provide more equal access to the existing science knowledge and structures of the community. This corresponds to the introduction to the "old world" in a conservative interpretation of Arendt's term. I argue that in addition, it is necessary to employ a more radical interpretation of the "old world" as fundamentally plural which is done in translanguaging and grappling with racism. Further, the transformative nature of science education needs to be strengthened in terms of Freire's critical pedagogy and Arendt's concept of natality. This means allowing students to become aware of oppressive structures to induce change. Only youth participatory science, youth participatory action research, and grappling with racism explicitly aim for this. This shows that nuanced perspectives on equity in science education are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the principle that only papers which represent a genuine contribution to the literature of science education should be published in the journal. The author has developed guidelines for determining what a genuine contribution to the literature consists of. These guidelines are stated as considerations about the paper's significance and organization and the quality of the writing.

This paper is one of three sequential papers interrogating equity in partnerships (or partnering relationships [PRs]) in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. In this piece, we prioritize abundance framing and dignity‐conferring work when engaging in partnerships with and for communities who have been historically marginalized. We propose a framework of seven drivers that define the directions and/or success of PRs: (1) mission, vision, or values; (2) goals or outcomes; (3) practices or processes; (4) power, privilege, or oppression; (5) communities and geography; (6) time and urgency; and (7) partners. This framework can be used to examine PRs at any phase of their existence to ensure equity‐centered and dignity‐conferring processes and outcomes. We discuss case studies that are common or specific challenges or frustrations that occur in nonequity‐centered PRs. We frame these as six vexations: (1) sustainable PRs; (2) dignity‐conferring PRs; (3) repetitive PRs; (4) political PRs; (5) "mission trip" PRs; (6) and deceptive PRs. We address these by using a data feminist lens (a perspective inspired by the book Data Feminism that centers on justice in defining and presenting outcomes), and future dreamings (a perspective that centers on potential ahead) to define our suggestions for designing intentional endings of partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concepts in science education such as "science identity" and "science capital" are informed by dominant epistemological and ontological positions, which translate into assumptions about what counts as science and whose science counts. In this theoretical paper we draw on decolonial and antiracist perspectives to examine these assumptions in light of the heterogeneous onto‐epistemological and axiological values, cultural perspectives, and contributions of nondominant groups, and specifically of those who have been historically marginalized based on their gender, race, ethnic, age, and/or social class identity. Building on these arguments, we critique deficit‐based approaches to science teaching, learning, and research, including those that focus on systemic injustice, yet leave intact dominant framings of the scientific enterprise, which are exclusionary and meritocratic. As an alternative, we offer a design of science teaching and learning for the pluriverse—"a world where many worlds fit". This alternative allows us to reconstruct science and science‐related "outcomes," such as identity, in the service of cultural, epistemic, and linguistic pluralism. We close the paper with the idea that because mainstream theories reproduce deficit framings and educational injustices, we must engage with decolonial1 theories of pluriversality and discuss different onto‐epistemologies to be able to grapple with existing social, racial, environmental injustices, and land‐based devastations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current science instruction does not educate K‐12 students equitably and creates short‐ and long‐term impacts on individual students and society. While students may be present in class, they may not have access to quality science learning experiences. The goals of this paper are to show how science instruction may not be reaching its aim of equitable access and to offer recommendations for creating a new baseline standard for equitable science instruction. Though not exhaustive, this paper identifies groups of students who are marginalized in current‐day science instruction—the racially minoritized, those with physical and cognitive differences, and those in urban or rural communities. First, this paper challenges the neutrality of science by highlighting systemic yet negative outcomes that disproportionately impact minoritized populations in everyday life because of the narrow network of people who define and solve problems. Second, this paper identifies examples where science instruction is not of its highest quality for the highlighted groups. Third, we present a synthesis of research‐informed solutions proposed to improve both the quality of science instruction and its equitable access for the highlighted groups, creating a new baseline standard for equitable science instruction. An elevated baseline would address the existing disparities in who has access to quality science instruction and consequently reduce the gatekeeper effect of who defines and solves societal problems that perpetuate intergenerational inequities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intercultural teaching practices for science education (ITPSE) are suitable to support science teachers in bringing cultural inclusion into their classrooms. The epistemological bridge is the base of the ITPSE design since this approach describes culturally inclusive teaching of science. There is an ITPSE of planning and one of enactment. With those ITPSE, teachers engage students in explaining a phenomenon from science's epistemology and nonhegemonic cultures' epistemologies. Design‐based research is the methodology to produce the ITPSE through three design–test–design cycles. This paper reports on the third cycle to identify evidence to redesign the ITPSE. As a result, the teacher enacted through the ITPSE a version of the epistemological bridge very close to the framework. In addition, her reflection and feedback pointed to the guiding tools refinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Families commonly document their outings by capturing their experiences through digital photographs and videos. However, little is known about the ways in which families engage their personal mobile devices to document educational family outings and how they subsequently talk about the digital artifacts that captured their informal learning experiences. This paper presents new evidence on family digital artifact creation during an informal science institution (ISI) visit, the expected and actual uses of their digital artifacts after the visit, and family conversations reminiscing about the ISI visit with the digital artifacts. Using a concurrent triangulation mixed‐methods design, data on family digital artifact creation during an aquarium visit (N = 204) and digital artifact use after the visit (n = 67) were collected using parent surveys. Audio‐recorded parent‐child conversations with a subset of families (n = 25) document whether and how families use their digital artifacts to reminisce about the aquarium visit. Quantitative findings detail family digital technology practices during informal learning experiences, and qualitative findings suggest evidence of informal science learning in the everyday interactions of the families who elected to continue the study. The study indicates that family storytelling and digital technology practices may help to bridge informal science learning from ISI to home and frames family non‐participation within an anti‐deficit perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science educators are integrating more and more computational thinking (CT) activities into their curricula. Proponents of CT offer two motivations: familiarizing students with a realistic depiction of the computational nature of modern scientific practices and encouraging more students from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. However, some studies show that increasing exposure to computing may not necessarily translate to the hypothesized gains in participation by female students and students of color. Therefore, paying close attention to students' engagement in computationally intense science activities is important to finding more impactful ways to promote equitable science education. In this paper, we present an in‐depth analysis of the interactions among a small, racially diverse group of high school students during a chemistry unit with tightly integrated CT activities. We find a salient interaction between the students' engagement with the CT activities and their social identification with publicly recognizable categories such as "enjoys coding" or "finds computing boring." We show that CT activities in science education can lead to numerous rich interactions that could, if leveraged correctly, allow educators to facilitate more inclusive science classrooms. However, we also show that such opportunities would be missed unless teachers are attentive to them. We discuss the implications of our findings on future work to integrate CT across science curricula and teacher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that the current science curricula are failing to educate students to be competent outsiders to science. Historically, science education has rested on two premises. The first is that it is possible for students to acquire sufficient scientific knowledge from K‐12 education to become intellectually independent. That is that science education can produce individuals capable of evaluating scientific evidence and arguments critically for themselves. This belief is what underlies many of the conceptions of scientific literacy and is the basis of the rationale that is used to sustain and justify what is offered in nearly all countries across the globe. The second is the belief that the science that students will encounter will have been filtered such that it can be trusted. Nothing today could be further from the truth. Today, misinformation abounds and much of it purports to be scientific. Very few conceptions of scientific literacy have considered how students can be prepared to evaluate the claims that abound on social media. Current conceptions of "scientific literacy," we argue, are failing to articulate the competencies and knowledge required in today's changed context. In what follows, we lay out our arguments for why it is time to rethink the conception of scientific literacy by considering what it requires to be a competent outsider to science. Then drawing on our recent report, we lay out what might be done within science education to address the specific phenomenon of misinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In considering goals for science education, it is conventional to make arguments for the utility of scientific knowledge for a variety of purposes. Less prominent are rationales based on the beauty or truth of science. In this paper, we examine how an approach to science education might be different if we shift the goals of communication to an appreciation of the ways in which our knowledge is limited, and how the practical boundaries of our knowledge can be closer than we think—in other words, how we are collectively ignorant. Key to this approach is a renewed understanding of the role of material investigations in providing partial knowledge. Instead of providing incontrovertible evidence, empirical investigations provide a form of "explanatory excess" whereby the appropriate choice of explanation is not necessarily one that can be simplistically determined. Although scientific practices provide techniques to minimize the possibility of error in making our conclusions, these practices are performed by fallible human communities, from which the notion of "tentative, yet durable" claims derives. We argue that public scientific literacy may be better served by more circumspect claims of validity, and crucially, an enhanced understanding of the ways in which materiality influences epistemic processes and limits our claims. We illustrate these proposals through the case of the International Young Physicists' Tournament, a contest that invites participants to play with interesting physical phenomena for over a year. We identify three factors prominent in these tournament problems that present possibilities for increasing the authenticity of practical investigations. These are (i) multiple physical interactions in phenomena leading to the openness of choice of explanatory theory; (ii) the qualitative, subjective nature of the explanatory utility of theories; and (iii) the material contingency of empirical investigations. We argue that a more open‐handed embrace of the limits of our knowledge may serve as a better epistemic orientation for science instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes a strategic framework to guide teachers' curriculum adaptation, planning, and enactment as a lever for redistributing epistemic agency. This framework intends to position teachers as strategic decision‐makers around when and how to open up aspects of their curriculum. We argue that seeing the aspects of Next Generation Science Standards‐aligned curricula—the methods of investigation, the anchoring phenomena, and the explanatory models students construct—as entry points for redistributing epistemic agency may help teachers make inroads to shifting their classroom practice towards more responsive instruction. Importantly, our tool acknowledges that there are different "levels" at which teachers might strategically decide to open up space for student decision‐making. These decisions may have a differential impact on students' subsequent participation in science practices. In this paper, we will use three cases to highlight the specific and incremental ways that teachers can open up aspects of the curriculum and how those openings redistributed epistemic agency in their classroom. We argue that this framework may be used as a tool for engaging teachers in conversation about how they can begin to position students as partners in the epistemic decisions that drive classroom activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All authors were participants in the associated NSF-sponsored project Science Education Campaign for Research, Equity & Teaching (NSF #2029956). The first two essays of this issue belong among those published as the I Equity-Centered Science Education i Special Issue. Her framing and commentary piece complements the following papers published in the special issue: Kang, H., & González-Howard, M. (2022). [Extracted from the article]

This paper's focus is on the "middle" of partnerships for equity in science education. Middle is used in a temporal sense, meaning the time after the general purposes and terms of working together have been set and before outcomes have been achieved. The middle of the partnership also represents people interacting, bounded around the edges, by their institutional roles, norms, resources, and priorities. As co‐authors who had not previously collaborated (or even met in person), we approached the construction of this manuscript as a dialogue where we learn by sharing narrations of experiences and values and principles. We were inspired by the conversational book between Horton and Freire (1990) and specifically their discussion of "Is it possible to just teach biology?" (p. 102). In our conversation, we illustrate the ways in which partnerships may make justice‐oriented science education possible. Our focus is on complementary and contradictory knowledges, and ways of knowing, institutional resources and constraints, and strategies for making transformative change. We explore the middle of partnerships as a series of opportunities for learning and growing, caring for one another, and building solidarity spaces together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is evidence to support the existence of identity‐based disparities, inequities, and biases in the academic journal peer‐review process, little research supports the presence of this bias in the peer‐review process for academic journals in science education. Through an analysis of six leading journals in science education, we aimed to investigate the extent to which diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), as well as the presence of bias in the peer‐review process, are addressed by these journals. We analyzed trends in the gender/sex, geographical affiliation, race/ethnicity, and the presence of equity‐centered research focus for members of these journals' editors and editorial boards. We found that although gender/sex is well‐balanced in these journals' editors and editorial boards, they are typically North American centric, and White individuals are overwhelmingly represented. Four journals had a quarter or more of individuals who pursue equity‐centered research. Only two journals provided detailed information on how manuscripts are reviewed in their author submission guidelines. All used a double‐blind approach to peer‐review. One of the journals includes an explicit position on DEI. Based on the analyses and reflections on our own experiences, we recommend science education journals consider ways to probe whether bias does exist in their peer‐review process, diversify their board to be more inclusive of scholars from communities historically marginalized, and move to a triple‐blind approach to their peer‐review process as mechanisms to mitigate bias in the journal peer review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing equity issues in science education requires a reorientation to how science students are advised and how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, particularly science, is viewed. STEM education is often figuratively described as a pipeline containing students who leak out before reaching the nexus of their STEM education/career journey. The authors of this paper argue that STEM education must be viewed from an ecosystems perspective, where students interact with one another, their physical environment and cultural contexts, and other humans who can support them in becoming STEM professionals. Within this STEM ecosystem, many individuals have a pivotal role in supporting students as they learn and develop within the science field. These individuals, particularly advisors, must possess knowledge, beliefs, skills, and dispositions that help students cultivate a sense of belonging, engage them in critical thinking about their academic and career choices, and aid their identity development in learning as becoming in STEM professions. The authors describe who these individuals are, the roles they play, and also provide practical examples, using vignettes, of how advisors can support students of color pursuing science degrees and careers. Finally, recognizing that students' STEM advising ecosystem operates at any grade level or stage of life, the authors have organized the descriptive portion of this study according to the following levels elementary, secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responsive teaching—or teaching that builds from the "seeds of science" in student thinking—is depicted in STEM education literature as both important and challenging. U.S. science education reform has been calling for teachers to enact instruction that attends to and takes up the substance of students' STEM ideas; however, responsive teaching represents a substantial shift from the current state of affairs in most U.S. classrooms, where content is often presented authoritatively as facts, definitions, and algorithms, with little consideration of student thinking. Drawing on language from literature about sense‐making, this paper identifies some of the "vexation points" that novice science teachers face as they consider implementing responsive teaching practices in science—that is, what doesn't make sense, to teachers, about this instructional approach. In particular, we show that novice teachers express moral concerns about responsive teaching; themes in their written reflections suggest that they perceive responsive teaching to put truth, success, and faith at risk. We argue that though these concerns originally seem distinct from the institutional constraints to responsive teaching posed by the literature, teachers' concerns about truth, success, and faith are in fact mutually reinforced by and reinforcing of external constraints. We use this connection to pose implications for research and teacher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the tools developed in the area of Science Education aimed at analyzing either the product or the process of argumentation do not consider the following: (a) arguments are a part of dialogues, (b) dialogues present different objectives, (c) dialogues start from different assumptions, and (d) dialogues shape the roles and moves of interlocutors. This paper intends to address the analysis of argumentative exchanges within educational science dialogues considering several aspects of argumentation that have neglected to be investigated in the field of education, such as the relations among individual moves and the dialogues they are part of, and the influence of such moves on knowledge construction. Toward this purpose, a proposed tool is presented, which describes argumentative dialogues in science teaching contexts across the varied and interrelated dimensions. This tool, consisting of six analytical aspects, is applied to high school chemistry students' argumentative dialogues taking place during modeling activities. Data collection (involving audio and video recording plus observations made by the researchers) revealed the main affordances of this tool as follows: (a) favoring an understanding of the individual and collective students' intentions; (b) enabling the characterization of argumentative discourse beyond the moves of refuting, questioning and providing support; (c) enabling the identification of whether knowledge construction has occurred; and (d) the possibility of analyzing teaching situations across different contexts. Thus, the tool supports the descriptions and analyses of the scientific argumentation process and the associated knowledge construction by students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Wide-scale adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards has raised new challenges for classroom teachers as they learn not only how to engage students in this new vision of science learning, but also how to assess students' engagement in that learning. This paper introduces a virtual special issue of Science Education focused on dilemmas of three-dimensional science assessment raised by the current wave of reform. Drawing on the author's extensive secondary science classroom research experiences, the paper identifies five dilemmas facing science teachers as they have learned about three-dimensional classroom assessment. It matches each of these dilemmas with an article previously published in Science Education that provides framing and insight to inform the issues involved with that dilemma. The introduction closes with questions for the field raised by these problems of practice, and makes suggestions for researchers as they support teachers in designing, adapting, enacting, and using information from assessments linked to the Next Generation Science Standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an author's comment on the article "The Problem of Technology in the Study of Student Conceptions in Science," by I. O Ambiola. Abimola raises a fundamental issue about the study of students' conception in science, and asserts the importance of the study is in the need for researchers and readers to understand the nature and implications of the terminology used in reporting research. The author's response to Abimola is motivated by the desire to strengthen the arguments about the importance of terminology by raising two related issues which run counter to some other aspects of the paper. These arguments include other significant factors, apart from views of science, which influence researcher's use of terminology to label misconceptions, and the value of seeking a single descriptor for conceptions.

Science education researchers agree about the importance of evidence in science practices such as argumentation. Yet, disagreements and ambiguities about what counts as "evidence" in science classrooms pervade the literature. We argue that these ambiguities and disagreements can be viewed as falling along three fault lines: (i) the source of evidence, specifically, whether it must be first‐hand; (ii) whether "evidence" must always be empirical; and (iii) the extent to which evidence is inferred, and what degree of inference transforms "evidence" into something else. In this paper, after showing how these three fault lines manifest in the literature, we argue that these three dimensions of disagreements and ambiguities are not confined to research and research‐based curricula; they are also salient in teachers' classroom practice, as illustrated by a dramatic, multiday debate between a mentor teacher and her teacher intern. After establishing the salience of the three fault lines in both research and practice, we explore whether Next Generation Science Standard (NGSS) can provide a resolution to the teachers' debate and to the disagreements/ambiguities in the literature. Our analysis reveals that NGSS reproduces rather than resolves those three fault lines—but in doing so, it invites a resolution of a different type. Instead of providing a single, precise, context‐independent definition of "evidence," NGSS implicitly reflects a defensible view that what counts as "evidence" depends on the epistemic aims of the practices in which the students are engaged. This implied context‐dependency of what counts as good evidence use, we argue, could be made explicit in an addendum document clarifying aspects of NGSS. Doing so would provide valuable guidance to teachers, teacher educators, and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on interactions in a science professional development (PD) course in which participating teachers engaged in doing science. Whereas the PD design of this course aligned with research on effective PD practices, we found that these practices did not sufficiently account for the affective and relational dynamics that unfolded in the PD interactions. In this paper we explore how critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be used both to theorize and analyze the affective and relational work happening in PD, through the critical lenses of power and positioning. Our analysis surfaces tensions between participants and facilitators, as well as among participants, which often related to their notions of disciplinary expertise. More important, our analysis shows that attunement to affective and relational dynamics, including explicit attention to communication norms, is essential for engendering productive learning opportunities within PD spaces. We discuss the implications of this study for teacher educators and PD facilitators, and we end with directions for future research on affective and relational dynamics in teacher learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors refutes the critical response to their paper on science capital. Topics include an expression of their disappointment on some basic misunderstanding of their arguments such as "straw doll" accusation and an alleged "reification of science," why they do not propose science capital as a "separate concept" that is distinct from cultural capital, and a challenge to the responder's position that the authors should not focus on science but only on the unjust sociocultural system.

Highlights several research works from the European research project called Science Teacher Training in an Information Society (STTIS). Study of the curriculum innovations in science as the central concern of the project; Research strategy used by STTIS participants; Themes and conclusions common to all the papers.

This paper explores the potential of civic science education (CSE), which includes experiences that have been intentionally designed to foster or enhance individuals' interactions with and/or engagement in science‐related public matters. To begin, we provide a theoretically‐grounded definition of CSE, including three sub‐categories: foundational, exploratory, and purposefully active. We then explore the scholarly arguments for why enacting CSE could help to support students' science learning and civic engagement and also strengthen civil society. Next, the paper examines current educational practices related to CSE, such as citizen science, exploring socioscientific issues, and various civic education pedagogies, detailing what researchers have learned from empirical studies of these practices. Building on this prior theory and research, we argue that CSE could motivate students both to learn science and become engaged in civic issues, with slightly different expected outcomes across the three CSE categories. We conclude by encouraging educators and researchers to explore the great potential of such practices, providing specific recommendations for curriculum development and empirical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For well over a century, the journal Science Education has been publishing articles about the teaching and learning of science. These articles represent more than just a repository of past work: they have the potential to offer insights into both the history of science education as well as well as the dynamics of field‐specific change. It can be difficult, however, for educators, researchers, reformers, and policymakers to grasp the nuances of over 100 years of scholarship given the overwhelming amount of textual material. To address this problem, we have used latent Dirichlet allocation, an automated machine‐learning algorithm from the field of natural language processing, to perform an automated literature review and classification of the corpus of work in Science Education. Using this technique, we have classified research in the journal into 21 distinct topics, falling into three thematic groups: science content topics, teaching‐focused topics, and student‐focused topics. We have also quantified the rise and fall of these topics and groups over time, and used them to begin to extract insight into the development of the field, including the effects of national policy changes on topics of interest to the research community, the interrelationships between different research topics, and the effects of intellectual cross‐pollination. Based on this analysis, we argue that this technique shows great promise for even larger‐scale analyses of educational literature and other textual data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The Maker Movement has taken the educational field by storm due to its perceived potential as a driver of creativity, excitement, and innovation (Honey & Kanter, ; Martinez & Stager, ). Making is promoted as advancing entrepreneurship, developing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce, and supporting compelling inquiry-based learning experiences for young people. In this paper, we focus on making as an educative inquiry-based practice, and specifically tinkering as a branch of making that emphasizes creative, improvisational problem solving. STEM-rich tinkering activities are designed to support interdisciplinary investigations and creativity using a STEM-rich palette of tools, concepts, and phenomena. To date, the majority of research on making has focused on analysis of makerspaces, maker communities, and design and implementation of maker activities. In this paper, we describe a study that documented dimensions of learning in tinkering programs designed for museum visitors. The study, which was jointly negotiated among a team of researchers and practitioners, led to the development of a Tinkering Learning Dimensions Framework and a publicly available video library of tinkering exemplars, both of which are being actively used by tinkering practitioners in their direct service to the public and professional development work for the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates techniques for assessing and representing information in cognitive structure by researchers from Madison, Wisconsin. Researchers in science education should focus increased attention on science content as a research variable. With this admonition in mind, an attempt has been made to describe means by which in science students' cognitive structures might be assessed and then graphically represented. Both the assessment and representation techniques described in this paper deal with meaning and consequently could be of great value in learning studies.

The author offers an opinion regarding assessment and evaluation as a primary concern of science educators in the U.S. The number of volumes and articles in the journal, all of which are related to science test, assessment instruments, and evaluation of science programs, indicate that science educators are trying to find measures or tests to be used in science learning and science instruction. The author said that it is not certain though that everything of importance in science education can be reliably measured. It is for this reason that continuing effort to broaden the range, enhance the usefulness, improve the precision, and increase the sophistication of assessment instruments and techniques is worthwhile.

Educators involved in the improvement of science instruction need to explore how science education could better align with the needs and interests of specific communities, especially in areas of Central America where local knowledge has been expunged from schools. In this paper, I draw upon Culturally Sustaining and Revitalizing Pedagogies to explore a single community's visions for science education and how these visions may be used as pathways for restoring relevant science education practices. To do this study, a case study approach was used to collect 150 h of science lesson observations at three schools in a small Nicaraguan community and interview 18 science teachers and community members. Many of these teachers and community members provided detailed accounts of local science knowledge or methods of teaching science that had been replaced with Westernized curriculum and pedagogies to the detriment of learning and their community. Results indicate two overarching visions: (1) a vision for reviving Scholar Orchards and (2) a vision for learning science with community resources. These findings highlight the need to partner with local teachers and community members when designing, implementing, and evaluating science education because they possess sophisticated visions for making science more relevant, sustaining, and revitalizing within their community context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how students make progress toward three-dimensional (3D) understanding of the patterns of evolution. Specifically, it proposes a learning progression that explains how scientific practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas come together in naming and grouping, length of change over time, and the role of common ancestry in evolutionary relatedness. To develop this learning progression, we created a 3D plant evolution curriculum for urban middle school students and over two implementation cycles we measured student understanding before, during, and after use of the curriculum. We used an iterative design, grounded in evidence of student learning over time to develop and revise our learning progression framework, assessments, and curriculum. The learning progression developed through this process is a template for conceptual learning through scientific practice, the type of 3D learning advocated by the Next Generation Science Standards. This paper describes the interplay between scientific practice learning and conceptual learning and the implications of this research for curriculum and assessment design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we take the view that school classrooms are spaces that are constituted by complex power struggles (for voice, authenticity, and recognition), involving multiple layers of resistance and contestation between the 'institution,' teachers and students, which can have profound implications for students' science identity and participation. In particular, we ask what are the celebrated identity performances within science classes, how are these re/produced and/or contested, and by whom? Analyzing data from 9 months of observations of science classes with nine teachers and c. 200 students aged 11-15 from six London schools and 13 discussion groups with 59 students, we identify three dominant celebrated identity performances ('tick box' learning, behavioral compliance, and muscular intellect) and discuss the complex ways in which these are promulgated both institutionally and interpersonally by teachers and students, drawing out the implications for students' performances of science. The paper concludes with reflections on the equity implications for science education policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that there is an emergent confusion in the literature in the use of the terms 'argument'' and 'explanation.' Drawing on a range of publications, we point to instances where these terms are either used inappropriately or conflated. We argue that the distinction between these two constructs is, however, important as a lack of clarity of fundamental concepts is problematic for a field. First, a lack of common conception hinders effective communication and, second, it makes defining the nature of the activity we might expect students to engage in more difficult. Drawing on a body of scholarship on argument and explanation, this paper is an attempt to clarify the distinction and to explain why such a distinction might matter. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 627-638, 2011 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this position paper, we examine the science teaching orientation component of the S. Magnusson, J. Krajcik, and H. Borko (1999) pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) model for science teaching. We trace the origin of the construct in the literature, identifying multiple definitions that have lead to ambiguity. After examining published studies using the PCK model, we identified the following methodological issues: (a) using orientations in different or unclear ways, (b) unclear or absent relationship between orientations and the other model components, (c) simply assigning teachers to one of nine categories of orientations, and (d) ignoring the overarching orientation component. To bring clarity to the literature, we propose defining science teaching orientations as a set of beliefs with the following dimensions: goals and purposes of science teaching, views of science, and beliefs about science teaching and learning. Consequently, there is a need for new instruments to elicit these dimensions. We conclude by making recommendations to address the four issues identified in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nature of science (NOS) has increasingly been emphasized as an important element in science education. This paper engages in the question of how teachers negotiate different approaches to and contexts for NOS teaching. This exploratory study is part of a three‐year longitudinal project where six in‐service teachers developed and negotiated their NOS‐teaching practices. Pickering's (1995) theory of the mangle of practice is used for the analysis of teachers' focus‐group discussions. In a mangled practice, school science traditions, policy documents, and students' and teachers' expectations and identities are rubbed against each other. As part of the project teachers planned, implemented, and reflected on two NOS activities at different levels of contextualization. The concepts alignment, resistance, and accommodation are used as an analytical tool to understand the processes of the mangle in relation to teachers' negotiations concerning the two activities during the focus groups. The results of the mangle are presented in relation to a backdrop of three teaching traditions (facts, lab‐work, and discussions) that the teachers' claim to depart from. The results show how the alignment and resistance of different components of the mangle lead to various accommodations as regards both the activities and the three traditions. The article concludes by discussing how the teachers' negotiations highlight what becomes possible and what becomes challenging when NOS meets existing traditions, and what this means in respect of possibilities for NOS learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]