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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.

We analyze the identity trajectory of a single case study, Cassidy, within the physics community. We focus our analysis on two settings in the physics community: an undergraduate research experience, and undergraduate coursework. We use video data from three interviews (spanning roughly fifteen months) to longitudinally analyze shifts in participation. We discuss Cassidy's experience through two constructs: "normative identities," Cassidy's sense of the valued roles within physics, as well as "personal identity," who Cassidy is within the physics community and the extent to which she aligns with "normative identities." In attending to shifts in the alignment between personal and normative identities, we identify several "entry points," or salient events that open up new opportunities for participation.

Through analysis of a classroom lesson led by a decorated teacher, we illustrate how instructional practices favor students seeking empirical patterns at the expense of using mechanistic reasoning. In the lesson, when students spontaneously come up with hypothetical mechanisms to explain why a light bulb in an electric circuit does or does not light, the teacher, following the guidance of standardized curricula, redirects them toward pattern-seeking. We argue that this bias toward pattern-seeking in Chinese national standards and curricula, along with ambiguity in those documents on what an "explanation" is, sits in tension with students' productive abilities and propensities for engaging in mechanistic explanation. In discussion, we extend the argument to show a less severe but similar bias toward pattern-seeking in the United States' Next Generation Science Standards.

Background: While there has been increasing recognition of the importance of attending to students' views about what counts as knowing and learning a STEM field, surveys that measure these "epistemological" beliefs are often used in ways that implicitly assume the fields, e.g., "physics," to be a single domain about which students might have sophisticated or naïve beliefs. We demonstrate this is not necessarily the case and argue for attending to possible differences in students' epistemological beliefs across different sub-domains of physics. In modern physics and quantum mechanics courses for engineering and physics students, we administered a set of modified Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) items. Each selected item was turned into two items, with the word "physics" changed to "classical physics" in one and "quantum physics" in the other. Results: We found significant splits between students' survey responses about classical vs. quantum physics on some items, both pre- and post-instruction. In classical physics, as compared to quantum physics, students were more likely to report the salience of real-world connections and the possibility of combining mathematical and conceptual reasoning during problem solving. Conclusions: These findings suggest that attending to sub-domain specificity of students' beliefs about physics can be fruitful and ought to influence our instructional choices.

Undergraduate research can support students' more central participation in physics. We analyze markers of two coupled shifts in participation: changes in students' views about the nature of science coupled to shifts in self-efficacy toward physics research. Students in the study worked with faculty and graduate student mentors on research projects while also participating in a seminar where they learned about research and reflected on their experiences. In classroom discussions and in clinical interviews, students described gaining more nuanced views about the nature of science, specifically related to who can participate in research and what participation in research looks like. This shift was coupled to gains in self-efficacy toward their ability to contribute to research; they felt like their contributions as novices mattered. We present two case studies of students who experienced coupled shifts in self-efficacy and views about nature-of-science shifts, and a case study of a student for whom we did not see either shift, to illustrate both the existence of the coupling and the different ways it can play out. After making the case that this coupling occurs, we discuss some potential underlying mechanisms. Finally, we use these results to argue for more nuanced interpretations of self-efficacy measurements.

Students' epistemological views about biology--their ideas about what "counts" as learning and understanding biology--play a role in how they approach their courses and respond to reforms. As introductory biology courses incorporate more physics and quantitative reasoning, student attitudes about the role of equations in biology become especially relevant. However, as documented in research in physics education, students' epistemologies are not always stable and fixed entities; they can be dynamic and context-dependent. In this paper, we examine an interview with an introductory student in which she discusses the use of equations in her reformed biology course. In one part of the interview, she expresses what sounds like an entrenched negative stance toward the role equations can play in understanding biology. However, later in the interview, when discussing a different biology topic, she takes a more positive stance toward the value of equations. These results highlight how a given student can have diverse ways of thinking about the value of bringing physics and math into biology. By highlighting how attitudes can shift in response to different tasks, instructional environments, and contextual cues, we emphasize the need to attend to these factors, rather than treating students' beliefs as fixed and stable. (Contains 2 figures and 2 footnotes.)

This study explored how researchers' views about the form of students' epistemologies influence how the researchers develop and refine surveys and how they interpret survey results. After running standard statistical analyses on 505 physics students' responses to the Turkish version of the Maryland Physics Expectations-II survey, probing students' epistemologies and expectations, we interpreted the results through two different theoretical lenses, the beliefs perspective and the resources perspective. We showed that the beliefs and resources frameworks provided different interpretations of the psychometric analyses, leading to different conclusions about how the survey results should be interpreted and how the survey should be improved. (Contains 6 tables.)

Explores connections between naive epistemology and everyday instructional practice. Reviews examples of naive epistemologies as made up of fine-grained, context-sensitive resources. Presents strategies designed to help students tap those resources for learning introductory physics. Reflects on this work as an example of interplay between two modes of inquiry into student thinking, that of instruction and formal research on learning. (Author/KHR)

Questions the scientific community's consensus on the epistemological sophistication concerning scientific knowledge. Argues for a distinction between correctness and productivity of an epistemological stance and against certain blanket generalizations about the nature of knowledge and learning that do not attend to context. (Author/MM)

Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students’ difficulties with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology. Students’ beliefs about knowledge and learning can hinder the activation and integration of productive knowledge they have. Such explanations, however, risk falling into a ‘deficit trap’—substituting a concepts/skills deficit with an epistemological one. Our interview-based case study of a freshman engineering major, ‘Jim,’ explains his difficulty solving a physics problem (on hydrostatic pressure) in terms of his epistemology, but avoids a deficit trap by modeling the dynamics of his epistemological stabilities and shifts in terms of fine-grained cognitive elements that include the seeds of epistemological expertise. Specifically, during a problem-solving episode in the interview, Jim reaches and sticks with an incorrect answer that violates common sense. We show that Jim has all the mathematical skills and physics knowledge he would need to resolve the contradiction. We argue that his difficulty doing so stems in part from his epistemological views that (i) physics equations are much more trustworthy than everyday reasoning, and (ii) physics equations do not express meaning that tractably connects to common sense. For these reasons, he does not view reconciling between common sense and formalism as either necessary or plausible to accomplish. But Jim’s in-the-moment shift to a more sophisticated epistemological stance highlights the seeds of epistemological expertise that were present all along: he does see common sense as connected to formalism (though not always tractably so), and in some circumstances, this connection is both salient and valued. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most research on personal epistemologies has conceived them as made up of relatively large, coherent, and stable cognitive structures, either developmental stages or beliefs (perhaps organized into theories). Recent work has challenged these views, arguing that personal epistemologies are better understood as made up finer grained cognitive resources whose activation depends sensitively on context. In this article, we compare these different frameworks, focusing on their instructional implications by using them to analyze a third-grade teacher's epistemologically motivated intervention and its effect on her students. We argue that the resources framework has more predictive and explanatory power than stage- and beliefs-based frameworks do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]