In the present study, I analyze ethnographic data from a year-long study of two Advanced Placement (AP) Biology classes that enrolled students with diverse racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds. Specifically, I consider participation, positioning, and learning of newcomer Korean students in the focal classes. Building on the notion of figured…

Little research has been conducted on how to address the complex topic of death when teaching science to children. The present paper addresses this issue by examining how three elementary teachers discuss the death of wild animals during science read-aloud sessions. Our findings reveal the variety of ways in which nonhuman death can be…

With applications of Tree of Life data becoming ever more prevalent in everyday contexts, tree thinking has emerged as a vital component of scientific literacy. This article reports a study testing the hypothesis that instruction in natural selection, which is the primary focus of US evolution education at the high school and introductory college…

Learning progressions, or sequences of how ideas and practices develop within domains, are increasingly a focus of science education research. Recently, researchers have called for these progressions to be used as interpretive frameworks for teachers' instructional planning and assessment practices. In this study, we explore data from two…

Texts play an integral role in science research and science classrooms yet biology textbooks have traditionally failed to reflect the epistemic elements of the discipline such as justification of claims and visual representations of empirical data. This study investigates high school biology students' reading experiences when engaging more…

In this work we use research from science education on teacher framing and work from mathematics education on teacher noticing to develop new approaches to modeling teacher cognition. The framing literature proposes a dynamic cognitive model of teaching in which teacher epistemological framing, or moment-to-moment understanding of what is going on…

Video games have become a popular medium in our society, and recent scholarship suggests that games can support substantial learning. This study stems from a project in which we created a video game enabling students to use biotechnology to solve a societal problem. As students engaged in the game, they necessarily interacted with the underlying…

Research in contemporary biology has become increasingly complex and organized around understanding biological processes in the context of systems. To better reflect the ways of thinking required for learning about systems, we developed and implemented a pedagogical approach using box-and-arrow models (similar to concept maps) as a foundational…

In recent years, research on students' scientific argumentation has progressed to a recognition of nascent resources: Students can and do argue when they experience the need and possibility of persuading others who may hold competing views. Our purpose in this article is to contribute to this progress by applying the perspective of framing to the…

This paper analyzes recent research conclusions regarding biology teacher attitudes toward evolution, and the variable implementation of evolution in the high schools nationwide. Berkman and Plutzer (2010. "Evolution, creationism, and the battle to control America's classrooms." New York: Cambridge University Press) conclude that due to a large…

To improve assessments of academic achievement, test developers have been urged to use an "assessment triangle" that starts with research-based models of cognition and learning [NRC (2001) "Knowing what students know: The science and design of educational assessment." Washington, DC: National Academy Press]. This approach has been successful in…

This study explored the nature of the integration of the five components of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK): (a) Orientations toward Teaching Science, (b) Knowledge of Student Understanding, (c) Knowledge of Instructional Strategies and Representations, (d) Knowledge of Science Curriculum, and (e) Knowledge of Assessment of Science Learning.…

This article presents an analysis of the longitudinal consequences of out-of-school science learning with a conceptual framework that connects the intentions of youth to their participation in science. The focus is on one girl's science activities in her home and hobby pursuits from fourth to seventh grade to create an empirical account of how…

An assessment-oriented design-based research model was applied to existing inquiry-oriented multimedia programs in astronomy, biology, and ecology. Building on emerging situative theories of assessment, the model extends prevailing views of formative assessment "for" learning by embedding "discursive" formative assessment more directly into the…

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is a comparative assessment of the achievement of students in many countries. In the present study, a rigorous independent evaluation was conducted of a representative sample of TIMSS science test items because item quality influences the validity of the scores used to inform…