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Students with disabilities (SWD) in general education science classes are expected to engage in the scientific practices and potentially in the writing of arguments drawn from evidence. Currently, however, there are few research-based instructional approaches for teaching argument writing for these students. The present article responds to this need through the application of an instructional model that promises to improve the ability of SWDs to write scientific arguments. We approach this work in multiple ways. First, we clarify our target group, students with high incidence disabilities (learning disability, ADHD, and students with speech and language impairments), and discuss common cognitive challenges they experience. We then explore the role of argumentation in science, review research on both experts' (scientists') and novices' (students') argument writing and highlight successful cognitive strategies for teaching argument writing with neurotypical learners. We further discuss SWDs' general writing challenges and how researchers have improved their abilities to comprehend and evaluate scientific information and improve their domain-general writing. Cognitive apprenticeships appear advantageous for teaching SWDs science content and how to write scientific arguments, as this form of instruction begins with problem solving tasks that connect literacy (e.g., reading, writing, argumentation discourse) with epistemic reasoning in a given domain. We illustrate the potential of such apprenticeships by analyzing the conceptual quality of arguments written by three SWDs who participated in a larger quantitative study in which they and others showed improvement in the structure of their arguments. We end with suggestions for further research to expand the use of cognitive apprenticeships.

In this paper, we take a longitudinal case study approach to explore changes in two middle school teachers' beliefs and their self-reported changes in practice, as they implemented a cognitive apprenticeship intervention focused on teaching written scientific explanations. We collected interview data as the primary data source and triangulated it with the teachers' choices of tasks to explore how their beliefs about their students, their beliefs about writing, and their choices of instructional tasks changed over time. Findings suggest shifts in teachers' beliefs and changes in their instructional practices (i.e., choice of tasks) following implementation of the cognitive apprenticeship. Our study found that the utilization of cognitive apprenticeship influenced their beliefs and, consequently, their choice of writing tasks.

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.

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.

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.

Mathematics and science education researchers focused on teacher education emphasize attention and responsiveness to student thinking as central to effective classroom practice. Being responsive to student thinking involves attending to the substance of students' ideas--the meaning students are making--and pursuing that thinking, adjusting the flow of instruction as needed. Yet, attention and responsiveness to student thinking is irregular and generally rare among novice teachers. In this theoretical paper, we argue that the irregularity of attention and responsiveness to student thinking, including variability within individual teachers' practice, can be explained by a framework grounded in teachers' localized "framings" of their classroom activity--their sense of "what is it that's going on here." Using analyses of classroom episodes across contexts and timescales to illustrate our claims, we demonstrate how a framing-anchored framework can coordinate and improve upon three common explanations for the irregularity of novice teachers' attention and responsiveness to student thinking: underdeveloped skills and/or knowledge for attending and responding, "transmissionist" beliefs about learning, and institutional constraints (and teachers' perceptions thereof). Building on this argument, we suggest that teacher educators can work with novice teachers' framings of their classroom activities as a generative anchor for supporting attention and responsiveness to student thinking in classroom settings.

In this study, we explore how cross-linguistic differences can contribute to children's scientific thinking. We compared first and third grade Chinese students' pre-instructional ideas of the earth expressed in clinical interviews with that of their English-speaking and Greek-speaking counterparts (as recorded in the literature). Inspired by a "Complex Dynamic Systems" (CDS) theoretical perspective on cognition and by the literature on "linguistic relativity" we hypothesized that in cases when two language systems offer greatly different linguistic elements, differences can be expected in how these elements interact with other types of conceptual elements. Consequently, such changes in dynamics may lead to variations in system-level conceptual structures emerging from native speakers of different languages. Our findings showed that (1) Chinese students held no flat or dual earth type of pre-instructional ideas about the earth; (2) Chinese students provided significantly more sphere-based responses than their American and Greek counterparts when responding to questions directly addressing the shape of the earth; (3) such cross-linguistic differences largely vanished for questions not directly getting at the shape of the earth, resulting in high frequency of inconsistency when responses to all the interview questions were interpreted as a whole. We discuss the significance and possible implications of these results for research on cross-cultural conceptual development and for teaching and learning science.

Writing in science can be challenging for all learners, and it is especially so for students with cognitive or language-based learning difficulties. We examined the effects of a cognitive apprenticeship on student disciplinary writing skills as well as near and far transfer of learning outcomes. This instructional approach included a gradual release of responsibility for learning through four, 3-day investigations that included authentic scientific experiments, small- and whole-group discussions, and the construction and revision of scientific arguments. Intervention students showed significant gains for both near (effect size = 1.08) and far (effect size = 0.76) transfer disciplinary writing outcomes. These results held true even when compared with a nonequivalent control group (effect size = 1.95). Students with disabilities demonstrated similar rates of growth as peers without disabilities, especially with respect to the quality of their claims and ability to provide scientific evidence. This study provides additional data on the value of cognitive apprenticeships in middle school science classrooms, and the results indicate the importance of discussion in helping students to think and write more like scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore how candidates in a graduate-level science teacher preparation cohort attended to the substance of student thinking while watching classroom videos or reviewing students' written work. We shared eight case samples of secondary science classroom work with the teacher candidates (six videos and two collections of student work), and asked them to discuss what they noticed in students' ideas and reasoning. We transcribed these conversations and coded candidates' comments in terms of what the candidates were attending to (e.g., student thinking, teachers' actions, student engagement). Our findings show that the teacher candidates were able to attend to specific student ideas and reasoning from the beginning of their pre-service preparation, but their practices of attending become more sophisticated over time. We discuss differences in the ways individual candidates participated and the ways in which participation dynamics within the cohort developed over time as participants assumed different roles and began to regulate their own discussions. We discuss the implications of this work for science teacher education. (Contains 4 tables and 3 footnotes.)

Calls for a "practice-based" approach to teacher education have become common in scholarship on teacher education, and preservice-teaching (PST) mathematics programs are increasingly heeding this call. Practice-based teacher education (PBTE) moves beyond standard approaches to teacher education in which PSTs learn about teaching in ways they are then expected to apply in practice and toward an approach that provides PSTs opportunities to gain experience in particular core practices in ways that approximate enactment in the classroom. A growing body of research suggests that teachers' responses, including the questions they ask, can help students' develop content knowledge and proficiency in mathematics and science practices in the classroom. However, despite evidence that PSTs can notice students' thinking in various activities in their preparation programs, it is not clear that they are sufficiently well-prepared to propose quality responses before entering the classroom. In this paper, we describe two different approaches that we have taken to provide support for quality teacher questioning in the LessonSketch environment. From our results, we develop a hypothesis that a pedagogical approach that primes novices to notice model questioning can support a stance of focusing on the substance of students' thinking and probing rather than guiding students' thinking in their proposed questions.

"Vision and Change in Undergraduate Education: A Call to Action," published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011, suggested cultivating biological literacy and practicing more student-centered learning in undergraduate life sciences education. We report here on the use of Group Active Engagement (GAE) exercises in an introductory biology course designed to incorporate the core concepts and competencies suggested by "Vision and Change" while focusing on collaborative, student-centered learning. Although current research provides evidence for the value of active learning pedagogies in supporting students' conceptual understanding, we argue that the GAE exercises may prove to be effective in supporting both students' conceptual understanding and their core scientific competencies. We describe our implementation of GAE exercises and analyze data from surveys, interviews, and in-class videos to explore students' perceptions of and participation in the GAE exercises. Through this analysis, we present the GAE exercises as curricular and instructional practices that meet the recommendations of "Vision and Change."

This paper addresses the impact of teachers' beliefs about argumentation and their community of practice framed views of teaching on co-designing an environmental health afterschool club curriculum with researchers. Our team collaborated with a group of four middle school teachers, asking them to co-design a club that would facilitate (1) students' understanding of environmental health, (2) use of electronic resources, and (3) argumentation skills. The process included researcher-led sessions emphasizing the importance of argumentation to science and teacher-led curriculum design sessions. The qualitative analysis of the meetings and teacher interview transcripts suggests that while teachers viewed argumentation as important, its practice was relegated to the background by the focus on student engagement and perceived logistical and systemic constraints. The paper concludes that in addition to stressing relevance of argumentation to science learning, researchers involved in co-design need to emphasize the potential of argumentation to engage students and to fit into science curriculum. The analysis also reveals teacher--participants' views of environmental health as an important area of middle school education, relevant to students' lives, linkable to the existing curriculum, essential for informed citizenship, and capable of inspiring interest in science. These findings underscore the importance of integrating environmental health into science education and advocating for its inclusion in informal and formal educational settings.

Students with disabilities (SWD) in general education science classes are expected to engage in the scientific practices and potentially in the writing of arguments drawn from evidence. Currently, however, there are few research-based instructional approaches for teaching argument writing for these students. The present article responds to this need through the application of an instructional model that promises to improve the ability of SWDs to write scientific arguments. We approach this work in multiple ways. First, we clarify our target group, students with high incidence disabilities (learning disability, ADHD, and students with speech and language impairments), and discuss common cognitive challenges they experience. We then explore the role of argumentation in science, review research on both experts' (scientists') and novices' (students') argument writing and highlight successful cognitive strategies for teaching argument writing with neurotypical learners. We further discuss SWDs' general writing challenges and how researchers have improved their abilities to comprehend and evaluate scientific information and improve their domain-general writing. Cognitive apprenticeships appear advantageous for teaching SWDs science content and how to write scientific arguments, as this form of instruction begins with problem solving tasks that connect literacy (e.g., reading, writing, argumentation discourse) with epistemic reasoning in a given domain. We illustrate the potential of such apprenticeships by analyzing the conceptual quality of arguments written by three SWDs who participated in a larger quantitative study in which they and others showed improvement in the structure of their arguments. We end with suggestions for further research to expand the use of cognitive apprenticeships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of environmental pollutants on human and environmental health are a growing concern. Little science curriculum focuses specifically on environmental health, and little data exists on the extent to which environmental health is taught on a national level. Students have the right to access information that can enable them to make informed choices. In the political arena, legislators, lobbyists, environmental groups, and other stakeholders argue from vastly different perspectives issues of environmental health, such as the causes and consequences of global warming. Scientists, for their part, use argumentation to make progress in developing and supporting coherent theories. For several decades, education researchers have argued for the need to integrate scientific argumentation into the high school science classroom. Scientific argumentation involves making claims, supporting them with evidence, providing "warrants" or reasoning for how the evidence supports the claims, anticipating counterclaims, and preparing to respond to those counterclaims. This article describes a sequence of lessons surrounding a mock legislative hearing to help students learn about environmental health and participate in argumentation. The lessons, appropriate for biology, chemistry, or environmental science classes, use Tox Town, a free online resource developed by the National Library of Medicine, as the main source of information. (Contains 3 figures.)

We present a class discussion that took place in the second author's high school biology class. Working from video data that we transcribed, studied, and analyzed closely, we recount how the question "Is air matter?" posed at the beginning of a unit on photosynthesis led to student-driven inquiry and learning. This case study illustrates what we argue is important in effective science teaching and learning: attending and responding to the substance of student thinking. We use it to articulate two reasons for attentive and responsive teaching: to help students understand science concepts, and to help students learn how to learn.

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. (Contains 1 figure and 9 notes.)

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. (Contains 3 footnotes.)

Stage-based views of teacher development hold that novice teachers are unable to attend to students' thinking until they have begun to identify themselves as teachers and mastered classroom routines, and so the first emphases in learning to teach should be on forming routines and identity. The authors challenge those views, as others have done, with evidence of novices attending to students' thinking early in their teaching and offer "framing" as an alternative perspective on whether and how teachers attend to student thinking. By this account, most teachers work in professional contexts that focus their attention on curriculum, classroom routines, and their own behavior, rather than on student thinking. An account of framing suggests an early, strong emphasis on attention to student thinking in teacher education. (Contains 3 notes.)

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]

We present a class discussion that took place in the second author's high school biology class. Working from video data that we transcribed, studied, and analyzed closely, we recount how the question 'Is air matter?' posed at the beginning of a unit on photosynthesis led to student-driven inquiry and learning. This case study illustrates what we argue is important in effective science teaching and learning: attending and responding to the substance of student thinking. We use it to articulate two reasons for attentive and responsive teaching: to help students understand science concepts, and to help students learn how to learn. Key Words: Secondary science; inquiry; everyday assessment., Prominent journals for secondary science teachers, such as ABT and The Science Teacher, provide many useful activities and approaches that can help teachers plan instruction. In our experience of teaching [...]

Stage-based views of teacher development hold that novice teachers are unable to attend to students' thinking until they have begun to identify themselves as teachers and mastered classroom routines, and so the first emphases in learning to teach should be on forming routines and identity. The authors challenge those views, as others have done, with evidence of novices attending to students' thinking early in their teaching and offer framing as an alternative perspective on whether and how teachers attend to student thinking. By this account, most teachers work in professional contexts that focus their attention on curriculum, classroom routines, and their own behavior, rather than on student thinking. An account of framing suggests an early, strong emphasis on attention to student thinking in teacher education. Keywords: teacher education; science education; teacher development; attention, Introduction Kay (1) was a novice teacher last year, working as a paid intern while she took classes toward her credential. As part of her coursework for the credential program, [...]

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]

Writing in science can be challenging for secondary students, particularly for those with learning disabilities, students who are English learners (EL), and students who struggle with literacy due to other cognitive, language-based, or motivational learning difficulties (i.e., at risk or struggling learners). Moreover, science teachers are generally not equipped to support students' writing in ways that are authentic to science. Despite being described more than 30 years ago, the field lacks information on cognitive apprenticeships that focus on disciplinary literacy, especially in science. In this paper, we take up these challenges and describe two intervention programs with middle school teachers and their students, focusing on the scientific practices of explanation and argumentation. We describe efforts to support students' written construction and critique of explanations and arguments, and suggest ways that general and special educators can support students' engagement in scientific practices through writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we take a longitudinal case study approach to explore changes in two middle school teachers' beliefs and their self-reported changes in practice, as they implemented a cognitive apprenticeship intervention focused on teaching written scientific explanations. We collected interview data as the primary data source and triangulated it with the teachers' choices of tasks to explore how their beliefs about their students, their beliefs about writing, and their choices of instructional tasks changed over time. Findings suggest shifts in teachers' beliefs and changes in their instructional practices (i.e., choice of tasks) following implementation of the cognitive apprenticeship. Our study found that the utilization of cognitive apprenticeship influenced their beliefs and, consequently, their choice of writing tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematics and science education researchers focused on teacher education emphasize attention and responsiveness to student thinking as central to effective classroom practice. Being responsive to student thinking involves attending to the substance of students' ideas—the meaning students are making—and pursuing that thinking, adjusting the flow of instruction as needed. Yet, attention and responsiveness to student thinking is irregular and generally rare among novice teachers. In this theoretical paper, we argue that the irregularity of attention and responsiveness to student thinking, including variability within individual teachers' practice, can be explained by a framework grounded in teachers' localized framings of their classroom activity—their sense of "what is it that's going on here." Using analyses of classroom episodes across contexts and timescales to illustrate our claims, we demonstrate how a framing-anchored framework can coordinate and improve upon three common explanations for the irregularity of novice teachers' attention and responsiveness to student thinking: underdeveloped skills and/or knowledge for attending and responding, "transmissionist" beliefs about learning, and institutional constraints (and teachers' perceptions thereof). Building on this argument, we suggest that teacher educators can work with novice teachers' framings of their classroom activities as a generative anchor for supporting attention and responsiveness to student thinking in classroom settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we explore how cross-linguistic differences can contribute to children's scientific thinking. We compared first and third grade Chinese students' pre-instructional ideas of the earth expressed in clinical interviews with that of their English-speaking and Greek-speaking counterparts (as recorded in the literature). Inspired by a "Complex Dynamic Systems" (CDS) theoretical perspective on cognition and by the literature on "linguistic relativity" we hypothesized that in cases when two language systems offer greatly different linguistic elements, differences can be expected in how these elements interact with other types of conceptual elements. Consequently, such changes in dynamics may lead to variations in system-level conceptual structures emerging from native speakers of different languages. Our findings showed that (1) Chinese students held no flat or dual earth type of pre-instructional ideas about the earth; (2) Chinese students provided significantly more sphere-based responses than their American and Greek counterparts when responding to questions directly addressing the shape of the earth; (3) such cross-linguistic differences largely vanished for questions not directly getting at the shape of the earth, resulting in high frequency of inconsistency when responses to all the interview questions were interpreted as a whole. We discuss the significance and possible implications of these results for research on cross-cultural conceptual development and for teaching and learning science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calls for a "practice-based" approach to teacher education have become common in scholarship on teacher education, and preservice-teaching (PST) mathematics programs are increasingly heeding this call. Practice-based teacher education (PBTE) moves beyond standard approaches to teacher education in which PSTs learn about teaching in ways they are then expected to apply in practice and toward an approach that provides PSTs opportunities to gain experience in particular core practices in ways that approximate enactment in the classroom. A growing body of research suggests that teachers' responses, including the questions they ask, can help students' develop content knowledge and proficiency in mathematics and science practices in the classroom. However, despite evidence that PSTs can notice students' thinking in various activities in their preparation programs, it is not clear that they are sufficiently well-prepared to propose quality responses before entering the classroom. In this paper, we describe two different approaches that we have taken to provide support for quality teacher questioning in the LessonSketch environment. From our results, we develop a hypothesis that a pedagogical approach that primes novices to notice model questioning can support a stance of focusing on the substance of students' thinking and probing rather than guiding students' thinking in their proposed questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the impact of teachers' beliefs about argumentation and their community of practice framed views of teaching on co-designing an environmental health afterschool club curriculum with researchers. Our team collaborated with a group of four middle school teachers, asking them to co-design a club that would facilitate (1) students' understanding of environmental health, (2) use of electronic resources, and (3) argumentation skills. The process included researcher-led sessions emphasizing the importance of argumentation to science and teacher-led curriculum design sessions. The qualitative analysis of the meetings and teacher interview transcripts suggests that while teachers viewed argumentation as important, its practice was relegated to the background by the focus on student engagement and perceived logistical and systemic constraints. The paper concludes that in addition to stressing relevance of argumentation to science learning, researchers involved in co-design need to emphasize the potential of argumentation to engage students and to fit into science curriculum. The analysis also reveals teacher–participants' views of environmental health as an important area of middle school education, relevant to students' lives, linkable to the existing curriculum, essential for informed citizenship, and capable of inspiring interest in science. These findings underscore the importance of integrating environmental health into science education and advocating for its inclusion in informal and formal educational settings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the era of growing concerns about human-induced climate change and sustainable development, it is important for the schools to prepare students for meaningful engagement with environmental policies that will determine the future of our society. To do this, educators need to face a number of challenges. These include deciding on the science knowledge and skills needed for informed citizenship, identifying teaching practices for fostering such knowledge and skills, and finding ways to implement new practices into the tightly packed existing curriculum. This paper describes two collaborative efforts between the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and University of Maryland College of Education that attempt to meet these challenges. The focus of both projects is on helping students develop information seeking and evaluation and argumentation skills, and applying them to complex socio-scientific issues that have bearing on students' daily lives. The first effort involves codesigning an afterschool environmental health club curriculum with an interdisciplinary team of middle school teachers. The second effort is the development and implementation of a week-long school drinking water quality debate activity in a high school environmental science classroom. Both projects center on Tox Town, an NLM Web resource that introduces students to environmental health issues in everyday environments. The paper describes successes and challenges of environmental health curriculum development, including teachers' and researchers' perception of contextual constraints in the club and classroom setting, tensions inherent in co-design, and students' experience with socioscientific argumentation. [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]

In this paper, we explore how candidates in a graduate level science teacher preparation cohort attended to the substance of student thinking while watching classroom videos or reviewing students' written work. We shared eight case samples of secondary science classroom work with the teacher candidates (six videos and two collections of student work), and asked them to discuss what they noticed in students' ideas and reasoning. We transcribed these conversations and coded candidates' comments in terms of what the candidates were attending to (e.g., student thinking, teachers' actions, student engagement). Our findings show that the teacher candidates were able to attend to specific student ideas and reasoning from the beginning of their pre-service preparation, but their practices of attending become more sophisticated over time. We discuss differences in the ways individual candidates participated and the ways in which participation dynamics within the cohort developed over time as participants assumed different roles and began to regulate their own discussions. We discuss the implications of this work for science teacher education. [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]

The article describes an activity program titled "The Invented Cell" which aims to teach students about the structure of the cell and its functions.