Mendel is an icon in the history of genetics and part of our common culture and modern biology instruction. The aim of this paper is to summarize the place of Mendel in the modern biology classroom. In the present article we will identify key issues that make Mendel relevant in the classroom today. First, we recount some of the historical…

This historical narrative describes the foundation of education as established by J. A. Comenius (1592-1670). It explores the transfer of Comenius' tenets, utilized and modified through the years, up to their impact upon the ground-breaking experiments of G. Mendel (1822-1884), "the father of genetics". It explores the questions of…

The purpose of this study was to analyze seven widely used high school biology textbooks in order to assess the nature of science knowledge (NOS) and scientific inquiry (SI) aspects they, explicitly or implicitly, conveyed in the Mendelian genetics sections. Textbook excerpts that directly and/or fully matched our statements about NOS and SI were…

This study examines six Korean transnational girls enrolled in two advanced placement (AP) biology classes to understand their experiences in science classrooms at the intersection of race, language, and gender. Confronting the model minority stereotype for Asian students, which is particularly salient in science, technology, engineering, and…

Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for integrating knowledge and practice in learning experiences in K-12 science education. "PlantingScience" (PS), an ideal curriculum for use as an NGSS model, is a computer-mediated collaborative learning environment intertwining scientific inquiry, classroom instruction, and online…

There are widespread policy concerns to improve (widen and increase) science, technology, engineering, and mathematics participation, which remains stratified by ethnicity, gender, and social class. Despite being interested in and highly valuing science, Black students tend to express limited aspirations to careers in science and remain…

Science education has a central role to play in preparing a scientifically literate citizenry that is capable of understanding complex environmental challenges facing human societies and making well-informed and evidence-based decisions that help resolve these challenges. However, evidence suggests that most Americans are poorly equipped with the…

The Next Generation Science Standards call for the adoption of many aspects of scientific inquiry in the classroom. The ways in which classroom talk and classroom environment change as students and teachers learn to utilize inquiry approaches are underexplored. This study examines the frequency with which linguistic markers related to access and…

The aim of this study was to examine how students used evidence in argumentation while they engaged in argumentive and reflective activities in the context of a designed learning environment. A Web-based learning environment, SOCRATES, was developed, which included a rich data base on the topic of climate change. Sixteen 11th graders, working with…

The aim of this study is to advance current understanding of the transactional processes that characterize students' sense-making practices when they are confronted with multiple representations of scientific phenomena. Data for the study are derived from a design experiment that involves a technology-rich, inquiry-based sequence of…

The Next Generation Science Standards and other reforms call for students to learn science-as-practice, which I argue requires students to become epistemic agents--shaping the knowledge and practice of a science community. I examined a framework for teaching--ambitious instruction--that scaffolds students' learning of science-as-practice as…

Researchers and policy makers often use the metaphor of an ever-narrowing pipeline to describe the trajectory to a science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) degree or career. This study interrogates the appropriateness of the STEM pipeline as the dominant frame for understanding and making policies related to STEM career trajectories.…

An overlooked feature in astronomy education is the need for students to learn to extrapolate three-dimensionality and the challenges that this may involve. Discerning critical features in the night sky that are embedded in dimensionality is a long-term learning process. Several articles have addressed the usefulness of three-dimensional (3D)…

This paper is concerned with the conceptualization of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for teaching about the nature of science. In contrast to the view that science teachers need to develop a specific "PCK for nature of science," an alternative, more comprehensive notion of PCK for science teaching is suggested. The point of…

Within the increasing body of research that examines students' reasoning on socioscientific issues, we consider in particular student reasoning concerning acute, open-ended questions that bring out the complexities and uncertainties embedded in ill-structured problems. In this paper, we propose a socioscientific sustainability reasoning…