Collaborative design (co-design) involving practitioners and researchers is emerging as a productive context for addressing theoretical as well as practical issues of teaching and learning. Co-design affords learning opportunities for "all" participants, although the focus has typically been on teachers. In this study, the Interconnected…

Scientific observation is central to classroom inquiry and children's investigations and explanations in science. Young children can struggle with observation, and research has shown that professional scientists who engage in complex observation tasks, observe detailed patterns when they have well-developed disciplinary knowledge. However, fewer…

Peer argumentation, especially the discussion of contrary points of view, has experimentally been found to be effective in promoting science content knowledge, but how this occurs is still unknown. The available explanations are insufficient because they do not account for the evidence showing that gains in content knowledge are unrelated to group…

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…