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Research calls for teachers to integrate students' funds of knowledge to bridge the gap between students' lived experiences with that of learning science -- that is, to make science relevant for students. Based on this critical practice, this exploratory study focuses on how pre-service science teachers integrate relevance, specifically students' funds of knowledge, within the lessons they intend to implement. Drawing on the literature, this study developed a coding scheme to identify the ways in which pre-service teachers (PSTs) attempted to make science relevant to students. We distinguished between constructed relevance (i.e. relevance that does not consider students' funds of knowledge) and relevance that drew on students' funds of knowledge. Findings indicated that 48% of lessons contained some aspect of attending to students' funds of knowledge highlighting that pre-service science teachers understand the need to make science relevant to students beyond constructed relevance. However, lessons that did attend to funds of knowledge, were most often done through attending to how students understand how knowledge is constructed. Across PSTs, there was a significant difference in the use of relevance over time during the semester. Findings indicated productive beginnings in PSTs' orientations to funds of knowledge without explicit instruction in this area.

Students' opportunities to learn science are shaped by the intellectual work in which they engage in science classrooms. By considering the opportunity to learn as a more nuanced and complex concept than simply as exposure to the subject matter, we argue that the kind of tasks that teachers assign to students presents an important element to understand how students are positioned to learn in science classrooms. Teachers, undoubtedly, play a critical role in the selection of these instructional tasks. This study aims to investigate the cognitive demand of science tasks and teachers' reasoning for what makes these tasks cognitively demanding. Guided by a framework, which was designed to classify science tasks according to cognitive demand and the integration of science content and practices, we analyzed 224 science tasks shared by 125 teachers through a statewide survey. The analyses revealed many of the science tasks, which were identified by teachers as demanding high-level intellectual work from students and were classified into low-level categories of this framework. The qualitative analyses of teachers' responses to survey questions revealed the factors that influenced science teachers' decisions about the cognitive demand of instructional tasks.

Current reform efforts in science place a premium on student sense making and participation in the practices of science. Given the disparity between these activities and current teaching practices, effective means of professional development around such practices must be identified. We use a close examination of 106 science teachers participating in Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) to identify, through structural equation modeling, the essential features in supporting teacher learning from these experiences. Findings suggest that participation in RET shape science teacher practice and beliefs, which in turn influence practice. Essential features of RET include engaging teachers socially in the research context and in research projects that are personally relevant to them. The model suggests ways to maximize the professional development potential of RET intended to support engagement in disciplinary practices.

Implementation of reform curricula requires teachers to adopt new approaches to teaching. Research has provided promising results about the influence of educative curriculum on teachers' learning and instruction. However, this approach generally focuses on teachers as isolated learners. Using a design-based research approach, the authors developed a web-based tool, iPlan, which provides access to educative curriculum materials in an online interactive learning platform. iPlan encourages social interaction among teachers, in particular their modifications and reflections on teaching with the curriculum materials. The authors describe design principles, assessing successful and unsuccessful aspects of the resulting platform through semi-structured interviews with teachers within the context of implementation of a high school biology curriculum. Analysis of the interviews revealed which structures of this online platform were used by the teachers, as well as why and how they were used. The study provides implications for designing educative and online systems for teacher learning.

Attaining the vision for science teaching and learning emphasized in the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the next generation science standards (NGSS) will require major shifts in teaching practices in many science classrooms. As NGSS-inspired cognitively demanding tasks begin to appear in more and more science classrooms, facilitating students' engagement in high-level thinking as they work on these tasks will become an increasingly important instructional challenge to address. This study reports findings from a video-based professional development effort (i.e., professional development [PD] that use video-clips of instruction as the main artifact of practice to support teacher learning) to support teachers' learning to select cognitively demanding tasks and to support students' learning during the enactment of these tasks in ways that are aligned with the NGSS vision. Particularly, we focused on the NGSS's charge to get students to make sense of and deeply think about scientific ideas as students try to explain phenomena. Analyses of teachers' pre- and post-PD instruction indicate that PD-participants began to adopt instructional practices associated with facilitating these kinds of student thinking in their own classrooms. The study has implications for the design of video-based professional development for science teachers who are learning to facilitate the NGSS vision in science classrooms.

Background: Recent transformative changes in science education require new learning opportunities for teachers--opportunities that include rich images of classroom enactment of the reform vision. One fruitful way for doing that is to use video clips of instruction.Teachers do not, however, learn how to improve their instructional practice from simply watching and reflecting on classroom videos. The videos need to be carefully selected and embedded in professional development in ways that--through facilitator-led, participant-centered discussion--can help teachers to notice and reason about important aspects of instruction and learning that occur in the video. Consistent with the recent efforts to identify planning and facilitation approaches that guide effective professional development (PD) programs, in this paper, we adapted the Five Practices Framework for orchestrating productive classroom discussions to describe how PD facilitators plan for and enact professional learning tasks to help science teachers learn within a video-based PD program. These practices include anticipating, sequencing, monitoring, selecting, connecting and two additional practices that set the stage for the five practices (i.e., setting goals and selecting tasks). Results: Our analyses of the video-based discussions in the PD provide insights into how the facilitators engaged teachers in video-based conversations by using the practices of monitoring, selecting, and connecting. The monitoring moves, such as clarifying, countering, and redirecting, were used by the facilitator in nearly all the PD sessions. Similarly, selecting moves were used and were consistent with the goals of the PD. Finally, analysis of facilitators' and participants' connecting comments indicated their increased capacity to make connections to the bigger ideas of teaching science by maintaining the cognitive demand on students' thinking. Conclusions: This paper provides elaborated descriptions of the five practices for planning and facilitating video-based PD and the ways in which they were enacted in a video-based PD program in science. In so doing, it proposes five practices as a guiding framework to support teachers' learning from videos. Overall, the study's results endorse the promise of a goal-driven, theory-informed design that foregrounds careful attention to teachers' thinking in ways that support their understanding of complex classroom interactions.

Recent instructional reforms in science education bring a new vision that aims to move science teaching away from a focus on discrete facts covered at a superficial level to a focus on a smaller number of disciplinary core ideas that can be explored in depth. The success of these reforms depends on the instructional quality in science classrooms. Our goal in this paper is to introduce an instructional quality assessment tool that can provide a window into the extent to which students learn science through rigorous opportunities as envisioned in these reforms. We present the conceptual grounding of the tool and its development process with findings from a pilot test. Data collection involved in‐class assignments, students' work, and video‐records from nine science teachers' classrooms at a local school. The analysis revealed that the instructional quality assessment tool can reliably capture the variation in rigor in science classrooms. Specifically, the tool has the potential to assess elements of ambitious science teaching focusing on the rigor of tasks and talk that shape students' high‐level thinking and sensemaking in science classrooms. The article concludes by discussing future directions for the further development of this tool and the ways in which it can be used for instructional improvement and teacher learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instructional reforms in science education require changes in the type of intellectual work students are engaging in. This study explored the cognitive demand of tasks pre-service teachers selected during their full time teaching semester. Using the Task Analysis Guide in Science, we analyzed 177 tasks from the lesson plans that seven pre-service science teachers submitted as part of their student teaching requirement. Analysis indicated many of these tasks afforded limited opportunities for high-level thinking. The study provides implications for preparing teachers to design cognitively demanding learning experiences in science classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a larger effort to support pre-service teachers' learning to develop ambitious teaching, we explored how pre-service teachers came to develop teaching practices for promoting demand on student thinking. We focused on five pre-service teachers' lesson planning, implementation of, and reflections on a science lesson in a methods course and the interviews during their internship. Our analysis revealed a variation in pre-service teachers' orientations to students' ideas. These patterns were consistent with how they facilitated demand on student thinking in their teaching and their appropriation of the pedagogical tools for promoting cognitive demand on student thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]