The study of water as a K-12 science idea often divorces its properties from its deeply politicized history as a resource that has been limited, compromised, and intentionally withheld from nondominant communities. Although a robust body of scholarship has aptly critiqued decontextualized and depoliticized pedagogies and called for critical…

This article reports a validity study of History Assessments of Thinking (HATs), which are short, constructed-response assessments of historical thinking. In particular, this study focuses on aspects of cognitive validity, which is an examination of whether assessments tap the intended constructs. Think-aloud interviews with 26 high school…

This article explores how a curricular intervention that merges antiessentialist historical content and historical inquiry plays a role in how students complicate the narrative of racial progress. The 3-day curricular intervention centers on "Mendez v. Westminster," a case about 1940s Mexican American school segregation. The content and…

As scientific models of student thinking, learning progressions (LPs) have been evaluated in terms of one important, but limited, criterion: fit to empirical data. We argue that LPs are not empirically adequate, largely because they rely on problematic assumptions of theory-like coherence in students' thinking. Through an empirical investigation…

Graphs illustrating complex scientific relationships require students to integrate multiple concepts and visual features into a coherent understanding. We investigate ways to support students in integrating their understanding of density concepts through a graph that is linked to a simulation depicting the relationship between mass, volume, and…

We study the case of Marya, a freshman engineering major who showed and spoke of a drastic shift in her feelings and approach to learning physics during an introductory course. For the first several weeks, she was anxiously manipulating equations without considering physical meaning, and she was terribly worried about being correct. By the end of…

This article analyzes an episode of classroom mathematics activity mediated by graphing technology from 3 different theoretical perspectives. An important line of research in the learning sciences focuses on graphs as "inscriptions", foregrounding learners' interactions with and around the material properties of graphical displays.…

Creating explanations is an important process for students, not only to make connections between novel information and background knowledge, but also to be able to communicate their understanding of any given topic. This article explores students' explanations in the context of computational science and engineering, an important interdisciplinary…

To identify expert poets' cognitive processes as they compose poetry, we asked 10 expert poets and 10 novice writers of poetry to think aloud as they composed a poem. Compared to the novices, expert poets revealed an associative playfulness and surrendering of consciousness, similar to that shown in research on general creativity in domains such…

This study examined how middle-grades language arts teachers learned to integrate a small-group collaborative translation activity into their teaching practice. We discuss what we call "pedagogical translation" as an emergent social practice, in which translation routines that are familiar to multilingual students may be leveraged toward…

Though we live in a 4-dimensional universe, our minds and bodies are not particularly good at perceiving and depicting 4 dimensions. This study contributes to our understanding of collaboration with abstract concepts by examining particular activities where bodily and experiential understandings may conflict with the conceptual domain.…

This study compares a problem-solving account of discovery through writing, which attributes discovery to strategic rhetorical planning and assumes discovery is associated with better quality text, to a dual-process account, which attributes discovery to the combined effect of 2 conflicting processes with opposing relationships to text quality.…

This essay examines the role of public education in the process of place-remaking that relies on a false separation between teaching and issues of race, politics, and power. I construct a historical case study of my hometown that presents a counter narrative, presented by students, of race and legacy in the context of a public school and the…

This article elaborates a new direction for studying the construction of novel strategies that enables researchers to model the conceptual underpinnings of students' observable strategic actions during episodes of mathematical problem solving. The nature of the relationship between conceptual and procedural knowledge has been persistently debated…

This article integrates an ecological approach and design-based research in computer science education research by following the simultaneous development of a computer programming environment and curriculum for elementary school age children over 2-1/2 years. We studied the alignment of the affordances provided by the programming environment and…