The purpose of this study was to describe how teachers used and adapted a set of curriculum materials that included opportunities for students to engage in scientific practices. Two-fourth-grade teachers in the same school were observed and interviewed. Findings revealed that teachers enacted almost every type of scientific practice in the…

Engaging children in scientific practices is hard for beginning teachers. One such scientific practice with which beginning teachers may have limited experience is scientific modeling. We have iteratively designed preservice teacher learning experiences and materials intended to help teachers achieve learning goals associated with scientific…

Critiquing and adapting curriculum materials are essential teaching practices but challenging for many preservice teachers. This study explores the use of educative curriculum materials--materials intended to support both teacher and student learning--to help preservice elementary teachers develop their pedagogical design capacity for critiquing…

Preservice elementary teachers face challenges in learning to teach science. Educative curriculum materials, designed to promote teacher learning, can provide support for overcoming these challenges. The educative curriculum materials used in this study provide narrative vignettes describing a teacher's decision making with regard to lesson plans.…

This paper explores new elementary teachers' instructional representations and how these are related to their science subject matter knowledge. One pair of prospective elementary teachers studied here exhibited a well-integrated, principled, and scientifically accurate understanding of the science they were teaching. The other pair exhibited less…