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Recent instructional reforms in science education aim to change the way students engage in learning in the discipline, as they describe that students are to engage with disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and the practices of science to make sense of phenomena (NRC, 2012). For such sensemaking to become a reality, there is a need to understand the ways in which students' thinking can be maintained throughout the trajectory of science lessons. Past research in this area tends to foreground either the curriculum or teachers' practices. We propose a more comprehensive view of science instruction, one that requires attention to teachers' practice, the instructional task, and students' engagement. In this study, by examining the implementation of the same lesson across three different classrooms, our analysis of classroom videos and artifacts of students' work revealed how the interaction of teachers' practices, students' intellectual engagement, and a cognitively demanding task together support rigorous instruction. Our analyses shed light on their interaction that shapes opportunities for students' thinking and sensemaking throughout the trajectory of a science lesson. The findings provide implications for ways to promote rigorous opportunities for students' learning in science classrooms.

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.

Research has demonstrated that pre-service teachers (PSTs) can learn to notice students' thinking in sophisticated ways by analyzing videos of classroom interactions. What is less clear is how PSTs use what they notice about student thinking to inform how they respond. Secondary math and science PSTs from three teacher preparation programs were invited to analyze a video clip identifying noteworthy moments of student thinking and describing an instructional move they might make and why. A qualitative analysis of their responses indicates that the PSTs overwhelmingly noticed both the substance and the source of students' ideas. However, the patterns in their responses to these moments varied. These findings suggest that PSTs would benefit from spending more time unpacking what it means to respond to students' thinking. The study provides implications for teacher education with respect to the careful selection of classroom clips and tools to support novice teachers developing responsive teaching practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Informed by decades of research and standards-based policies, there has been a growing demand for high-quality teaching and learning in mathematics and science classrooms. Achieving these ambitious goals will not be easy; students' opportunities for learning as shaped by the tasks they are assigned will matter the most. The purpose of this article is to revisit theory and research on tasks, a construct introduced by Walter Doyle nearly 40 years ago. The authors discuss how this construct has been used and expanded in research since then, argue for its applicability to contemporary challenges facing schools and classrooms today, and provide suggestions for future research.

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.

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.

Science education communities around the world have increasingly emphasized engaging students in the disciplinary practices of science as they engage in high levels of reasoning about scientific ideas. Consistently, this is a critical moment in time in the USA as it goes through a new wave of science education reform within the context of Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). We argue that the placement of high demands on students' thinking (i.e., a high level of thinking) in combination with positioning students to use disciplinary practices as they try to make sense of scientific ideas (i.e., a deep kind of thinking) constitute critical aspects of the reform. The main purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the kinds and levels of thinking in which students engage when they are invited to think and reason as demanded by NGSS-aligned curricular tasks. Our analysis of video records of classrooms in which an NGSS-aligned, cognitively demanding task was used, revealed many ways in which the aspirational level and kind of student thinking will not be met in many science classrooms. We propose a way of characterizing and labeling the differences among these kinds and levels of thinking during the implementation of a reform-based biology curriculum. These categories, which focus on two important features emphasized in the NGSS, can help us to better understand, diagnose, and communicate issues during the implementation of high-level tasks in science classrooms.

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.

There is little consensus on the kinds and amounts of teacher support needed to achieve desired student learning outcomes when mathematics is inserted into science classrooms. When supported by educative curriculum materials (ECM) and heavy investment in professional development (PD), teachers implementing a unit designed around mathematical modeling of scientific mechanisms substantially increased students' ability to make both qualitative and quantitative predictions (Schuchardt & Schunn, 2016). Because of concerns about equitable access to support resources, we investigated whether variations in PD support while retaining ECM could differentially affect two student learning outcomes: Quantitative Predictions and Qualitative Predictions. Two contrasts were performed examining: (1) the effect of reducing PD and (2) whether eliminating PD entirely caused further harm to student learning. Reducing and eliminating PD had no significant effect on student gains in Qualitative Predictions, suggesting ECM can be sufficient for teachers to support student learning of conceptual science content. However, student gains in Quantitative Predictions decreased significantly upon reducing PD; eliminating PD did not cause significant additional decreases. Combined, these findings suggest that amount of face-to face PD support necessary to achieve student-learning gains can vary depending on whether the practice requires application of qualitative science content or quantitative reasoning.

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.

Many countries, including the United States, emphasize the importance of developing students' scientific habits of mind and their capacity to think deeply about scientific ideas in an integrated fashion. Recent science education policies in the United States portray a related vision of science teaching and learning that is meant to guide the improvement efforts of science teachers, professional developers, and school leaders, as well as the design efforts of curriculum and assessment developers. To understand the extent to which this vision is being enacted in science classrooms, we consider the tasks to which students are exposed as representative of the types of opportunities that they have to think, reason, and engage in disciplinary ideas and practices in science classrooms. The purpose of this article is to advance a framework to analyze science tasks and instruction in terms of two dimensions that are critical for science learning: (1) cognitive demand; and (2) the integration of scientific content and practices. We present the Task Analysis Guide in Science (TAGS) framework through a detailed description of its categories along with concrete examples of science tasks in each category. We compare it to other frameworks related to cognitive demand. We conclude by discussing various ways in which the TAGS can serve as a helpful analytical tool for educational researchers and practitioners.

Students' opportunities to learn how to think are embedded in the instructional tasks with which they are invited to engage in the classroom. Prior research has revealed that the selection and use of cognitively demanding tasks does not guarantee high-level student thinking during their enactment. To address this challenge, we designed and implemented a professional development (PD) in which participants analyzed video clips of the enactment of cognitively demanding science tasks. Using transcripts of pre-and post-PD interviews during which participants were asked to respond to specially selected video clips, we analyzed what the participants attended to and how they made sense of what they saw. The findings suggested a change in terms of a growing tendency to attend to teaching as constituted in the interaction of the teacher, students, and task and to adopt an interpretive stance while talking about what was seen in the video clip.

The article discusses the significance of the Lesson Planning Project designed for mathematics teachers in the U.S. It states that the project is a collaboration of teachers in which discipline-specific teams conduct weekly professional development activities to improve lesson planning routines and leverage student learning. It also mentions the university researchers involved in the project, as well as its impact on students' learning in the subject.