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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.

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 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]

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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]