This study identifies proficiency levels in pre-service physics teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and reveals how teacher education can promote transitions into higher proficiency. Teacher education plays a fundamental role in supporting pre-service teachers' PCK development. Proficiency levels are a powerful source when evaluating…

This article reports on a study investigating how computational essays can be used to help students in higher education STEM take up disciplinary epistemic agency--cognitive control and responsibility over one's own learning within the scientific disciplines. Computational essays are a genre of scientific writing that combine live, executable…

Argumentation as a scientific practice has largely been examined along an epistemic and/or dialogic perspective in science education research. Both perspectives have sidelined the use of real material objects that are indispensable for scientists to construct arguments about the natural world. To address this gap, this article investigates how…

Gender disparities in retention in pathways to science continue to vary widely by course. Undergraduates intending to study prehealth and premedicine often represent a majority of students enrolled in introductory science courses, contribute to a large number of eventual science degree earners, and are a population that typically includes a high…

The mechanical transmission of motion, which is observable in gears' turning direction (TD) and turning speed (TS) can be understood as part of the core concept "force and motion". Previous studies have suggested that most children before the age of nine have naïve concepts of gears' TD and TS. However, these studies relied on children's…

This study examines the sense of agency developed through the hybrid identities of two Chilean educators working across a university physics department (as teacher educators), a secondary school (as part-time teachers), and a self-organized professional community to which they belong. A Freirean conceptualization of agency together with border…

Although promoting student interest is a pivotal educational goal, student interest in science, and particularly in physics, declines substantially during secondary school. This study focused on the long-term development of interest in physics at the lower secondary level (grades 5-7) and examined the role of teaching and teaching quality on the…

It is a widely held view that students' epistemic beliefs influence the way they think and learn in a given context, however, in the science learning context, the relationship between sophisticated epistemic beliefs and success in scientific practice is sometimes ambiguous. Taking this inconsistency as a point of departure, we examined the…

While there is a growing body of work that examines disciplinary identity development, unlike qualitative work in this area, quantitative research has not fully incorporated the importance of different contexts, nor has it uniquely focused on underrepresented groups (in this case, women in physics). This study examines how the constructs posited…

This study explores the role of unconventional forms of classroom assessments in expanding minoritized students' opportunities to learn (OTL) in high school physics classrooms. In this research + practice partnership project, high school physics teachers and researchers co-designed a unit about momentum to expand minoritized students' meaningful…

Framed within intersectionality, this multiple case study explores women's participation in physics through the construct of physics identity and with a focus on recognition. The study is drawn upon an empirical life-history exploration of three women: a native to Northwestern Europe, late-career white woman and two immigrant women to Northwestern…

Professional knowledge is an important source of science teachers' actions in the classroom (e.g., personal professional content knowledge [pedagogical content knowledge, PCK] is the source of enacted PCK in the refined consensus model [RCM] for PCK). However, the evidence for this claim is ambiguous at best. This study applied a cross-lagged…

Embodied cognition theories view sensorimotor activity as fundamental to learning, knowing, and reasoning. To investigate the role of physical movement in conceptual learning, we developed and explored an Embodied Learning Interactive Chemistry environment (ELI-Chem). The ELI-Chem learning environment includes a computer simulation, a device for…

This article concerns a lacuna in chemistry students' reasoning about chemical bonding. Although chemistry students are familiar with the charges that make up the atom--both positive and negative--they refer only to the attraction between unlike charges. Specifically, they ignore the repulsion between the positive nuclei. We named this disregard…

This article discusses a case study of a pair of students mentored by a physics teacher as they engaged in a long-term (15 months) engineering maker-based inquiry (EMBI), a mandatory part of these students' formal learning of physics at the advanced high school level. We conceptualize the students' engagement as participating in a particular…