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Education policy in the U.S. in the last two decades has emphasized large-scale assessment of students, with growing consequences for schools, teachers, and students. Given the high stakes of such tests, it is important to understand the relationships between students' answers to test items and their knowledge and skills in the tested content area. Due to persistent test score gaps, students from historically non-dominant communities, and their teachers and schools, are differentially affected by the consequences of large-scale testing. As a result, it is particularly important to understand how students from historically non-dominant communities interact with test items on large-scale tests. We report on a study in which we interviewed 36 students about their responses to six multiple-choice science test items from the Massachusetts state science assessment for fifth grade. The 36 students included 12 students from low-income households, 12 English Language Learners, and 12 middle-class native English speakers. We found that for five of the six selected test items, students' descriptions of the science content knowledge they used to answer the test items frequently did not match the content knowledge targeted by the items. In addition, students from low-income households and English Language Learners were more likely than middle-class native English speakers to answer incorrectly despite demonstrating knowledge of the targeted science content for the items. We argue that such evidence challenges the expectation that students' answers to individual test items reflect their knowledge of the targeted science content, and that evidence of this kind should be included in investigations of the validity of large-scale tests. (Contains 3 figures, 4 tables, and 8 notes.)

Calls for the improvement of science education in the USA continue unabated, with particular concern for the quality of learning opportunities for students from historically nondominant communities. Despite many and varied efforts, the field continues to struggle to create robust, meaningful forms of science education. We argue that "settled expectations" in schooling function to (a) restrict the content and form of science valued and communicated through science education and (b) locate students, particularly those from nondominant communities, in untenable epistemological positions that work against engagement in meaningful science learning. In this article we examine two episodes with the intention of reimagining the relationship between science learning, classroom teaching, and emerging understandings of grounding concepts in scientific fields--a process we call "desettling." Building from the examples, we draw out some key ways in which desettling and reimagining core relations between nature and culture can shift possibilities in learning and development, particularly for nondominant students.

Examines a beginning elementary teacher's experiences participating in an educational research project and her work in the classroom to bring her students' ideas into contact with accepted scientific ideas and practices. The project explored an approach to professional development that engaged teachers in learning and viewing science as a socially and historically constituted sense-making practice. Contains 68 references. (Author/PVD)

This paper reports a study of the effects of a collaborative inquiry approach to science on language minority students' (middle and high school) learning. This approach emphasizes involiving the students, most of whom have never studied science before and some of whom have had very little schooling of any kind, in "doing science" in ways that practicing scientist do. This study addresses the question: To what extent do students appropriate scientific ways of knowing and reasoning as a result of their participation in collaborative scientific inquiry? We focus our analysis on changes in students, conceptual knowledge and use of hypotheses, experiments, and explanations to organize their reasoning in the context of two think-aloud problems. The findings indicate that at the beginning of the school year the students' reasoning was non-analytic and bound to personal experience. By contrast, at the end of the school year they reasoned in terms of larger explanatory system, used hypothese to organize and give direction to their reasoing, and ddemonstrated and awareness of the function of experimentation in producing evidence to evaluate hypotheses.

Early career teachers rarely receive sustained support for addressing issues of diversity and equity in their science teaching. This paper reports on design research to create a 30 hour professional development seminar focused on cultivating the interpretive power of early career teachers who teach science to students from historically non-dominant communities. Interpretive power refers to teachers' attunement to (a) students' diverse sense-making repertoires as intellectually generative in science and (b) expansive pedagogical practices that encourage, make visible, and intentionally build on students' ideas, experiences, and perspectives on scientific phenomena. The seminar sought to integrate student sense-making, scientific subject matter, teaching practice, and matters of equity and diversity on the same plane of professional inquiry by engaging participants in: (a) learning plant science; (b) analyzing classroom cases; (c) experimenting with expansive discourse practices in their classrooms; and (d) analyzing their classroom experiments in relation to student sense-making and expansive pedagogy. Twenty-eight teachers participated in two cycles of design research. An interview-based transcript analysis task captured shifts in teachers' interpretive power through their participation in the seminar. Findings showed that the teachers developed greater attunement to: complexity in students' scientific ideas; the intellectual generativity of students' sense-making; student talk as evidence of in-process, emergent thinking; and co-construction of meaning in classroom discussions. Findings also showed that participants developed deeper understanding of the functions of expansive teaching practices in fostering student sense-making in science and greater commitment to engaging in expansive practices in their classroom science discussions. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 53: 1571-1600, 2016 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calls for the improvement of science education in the USA continue unabated, with particular concern for the quality of learning opportunities for students from historically nondominant communities. Despite many and varied efforts, the field continues to struggle to create robust, meaningful forms of science education. We argue that 'settled expectations' in schooling function to (a) restrict the content and form of science valued and communicated through science education and (b) locate students, particularly those from nondominant communities, in untenable epistemological positions that work against engagement in meaningful science learning. In this article we examine two episodes with the intention of reimagining the relationship between science learning, classroom teaching, and emerging understandings of grounding concepts in scientific fields - a process we call desettling. Building from the examples, we draw out some key ways in which desettling and reimagining core relations between nature and culture can shift possibilities in learning and development, particularly for nondominant students. Copyright © 2013 S. Karger AG, Basel [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education policy in the U.S. in the last two decades has emphasized large-scale assessment of students, with growing consequences for schools, teachers, and students. Given the high stakes of such tests, it is important to understand the relationships between students' answers to test items and their knowledge and skills in the tested content area. Due to persistent test score gaps, students from historically non-dominant communities, and their teachers and schools, are differentially affected by the consequences of large-scale testing. As a result, it is particularly important to understand how students from historically non-dominant communities interact with test items on large-scale tests. We report on a study in which we interviewed 36 students about their responses to six multiple-choice science test items from the Massachusetts state science assessment for fifth grade. The 36 students included 12 students from low-income households, 12 English Language Learners, and 12 middle-class native English speakers. We found that for five of the six selected test items, students' descriptions of the science content knowledge they used to answer the test items frequently did not match the content knowledge targeted by the items. In addition, students from low-income households and English Language Learners were more likely than middle-class native English speakers to answer incorrectly despite demonstrating knowledge of the targeted science content for the items. We argue that such evidence challenges the expectation that students' answers to individual test items reflect their knowledge of the targeted science content, and that evidence of this kind should be included in investigations of the validity of large-scale tests. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 778-803, 2012 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine science learning and teaching as intercultural processes taking place at powered boundaries of race, culture, language, and subject matter. Through close analysis of a classroom event, we describe the ways in which a group of teachers and researchers came to understand the experience of an African American male student in a 7th grade science class. The group developed a layered interpretation by unpacking subtle ways in which subject matter, student sense-making, and implicit structures of race, culture, and language based in Whiteness as privilege interacted to shape unfolding interactions. Building from their analyses, they also imagined pedagogical practices for disrupting racialized orders of inequality in the science classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on understand the gap in science learning. National standards and goals for reforming science education have asked for more and more academic rigor in learning and teaching complex subject matter. Embedded in the science education community's reform efforts is a belief that rigorous standards backed by quality curricula and effective teaching--often identified as a form of inquiry will translate into robust learning and high levels of achievement for all students. Yet it is not at all clear how this goal-to eliminate the achievement gap separating low-income, linguistic, racial, and ethnic minority students from more economically privileged students will be accomplished. Within the field of science education, different traditions have emerged that revolve around the examination of the relationship between everyday and scientific knowledge and knowing. In one tradition, the relationship is viewed as descriptive of differences in the knowledge, knowing, and language use characteristic of ordinary people and of scientists. In a second tradition, the dichotomy gives way to an articulation of dimensions of continuity between ordinary people and expert scientists.

Examines an approach to the professional development of teachers, which engaged them in learning and viewing science as a socially and historically constituted sense-making practice. How teachers bring their students' ideas into contact with accepted scientific ideas and practices; Methodology used in the study; Results of the study.