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As colleges moved to online teaching during the COVID‐19 pandemic, many instructors found it difficult to maintain student engagement and classroom community in the virtual environment. We developed a semester‐long activity for a molecular biology research methodology course where students created, and shared original memes related to course content with peers through group chat. Surveys and semi‐structured interviews revealed that the exercise was effective in promoting student engagement, a sense of community, and relieving stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite broad consensus on the value of classroom dialog for promoting scientific argumentation, tensions have emerged in the literature regarding the degree to which teachers should guide the dialogic process (dialogic stance). We use the lens of responsive teaching to examine how one teacher adjusts his instruction to foster dialog in three middle‐school science classrooms. Applying grounded theory to classroom dialogs and teacher interview data, we examine the dynamic interplay of the teacher's overarching goal and moment‐to‐moment pedagogical aims to understand shifts in his dialogic stance. Our findings illustrate the value of foregrounding responsiveness to students' disciplinary thinking when offering guidance to teachers about when and how to support students in peer‐based argumentative dialog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

We raise concerns about the current state of research and development in formative assessment, specifically to argue that in its concentration on strategies for the teacher, the literature overlooks the disciplinary substance of what teachers and students assess. Our argument requires analysis of specific instances in the literature, and so we have selected four prominent publications for consideration as examples. These, we show, pay little attention to the student reasoning they depict, presume traditional notions of 'content' as correct information, and treat assessment as distinct from other activities of learning and teaching, even when they claim the contrary. We then offer an alternative image of formative assessment centered on attention to disciplinary substance, which we illustrate with an example from a high school biology class. Assessment, we contend, should be understood and presented as genuine engagement with ideas, continuous with the disciplinary practices science teaching should be working to cultivate. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 1109-1136, 2011 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typically, the scientific method in science classrooms takes the form of discrete, ordered steps meant to guide students' inquiry. In this paper, we examine how focusing on the scientific method as discrete steps affects students' inquiry and teachers' perceptions thereof. To do so, we study a ninth-grade environmental science class in which students first reviewed a typical version of the scientific method, then brainstormed about which sites on school grounds could be good earthworm habitats and how to test their ideas. Our discourse analysis explores the dynamics between the “steps” of the scientific method and students' engagement in more authentic scientific inquiry. We argue that focusing on the scientific method as discrete steps can distract students from their ongoing, productive inquiry and can also draw teachers' attention away from students' productive inquiry. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed94:29–47, 2010 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]