Creating learning environments that integrate arts, sciences, and computing in education can improve learning in these disciplines. In particular, transdisciplinary integrations of these disciplines can lead to expansive alterations or dissolutions of epistemological, ideological, and methodological boundaries. We wish to support teachers in the…

Responsive instruction--or instruction that foregrounds and takes up the disciplinary substance of student thinking--is both a hallmark of recent STEM education reforms and challenging to enact. This kind of instruction may be especially challenging in instructional contexts that mandate or rely on curriculum with set, structured learning…

Eliciting, noticing, and responding to students' sense-making is important for advancing students' understanding and fostering meaningful participation in science. By sense-making, we mean wrestling with ideas, language, experiences, and perspectives in a community to figure out how and why the world works. In the bustle of an elementary…

Current research in science education and the cognitive sciences has highlighted the importance of epistemic tools in scaffolding learners to think in ways consistent with scientific practices. However, recent studies on epistemic tool have mainly focused on epistemic cognition, but not epistemic metacognition. Epistemic metacognition, which…

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…

Critical math and science educators have argued for pedagogies that focus on equity, social justice, and the identities of learners. To inform debates about the purposes and values of math and science pedagogy, we need to better understand how different kinds of curriculum and instruction are taken up by learners over time. This study examines the…

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…

Efforts toward improving K-12 science education emphasize teachers noticing students' thinking as they engage in disciplinary practices and reasoning. This noticing requires specialized teacher knowledge and skills as it involves attending to students' ideas, as well as making sense of and responding to those ideas so that the disciplinary…

Students in inquiry science classrooms face an essential tension between sharing new ideas and critically evaluating those ideas. This tension poses affective risks that can discourage further discussion, such as the embarrassment of having an idea rejected. In this article, we analyze the discourse of three groups of undergraduate physics…

Connection-making among multiple representations is a crucial but difficult competence in STEM learning. Prior research has focused on one type of learning process involved in connection-making: sense-making processes leading to conceptual understanding of connections. Yet, other research suggests that a second type of learning process is…

This investigation examined relations between adolescent students' daily and cumulative perceptions of teachers' practice and their experience of autonomy. Two-hundred and eighteen high school science students in 43 classes participated in a 6-week diary study. Multilevel modeling results suggested that perceptions of 8 out of 9 practices…

I investigated how five first-year teachers--all peers from the same science methods class framed around ambitious instruction--used resources to plan and learn in schools that promoted pedagogy anchored around information delivery. The participants engaged in different cycles of resource-driven learning based on the instructional framework they…

This study describes the experiences of two preservice science teachers as they progress through their respective teacher education programs and uses critical race theory to examine the manner in which conceptions about race and its pedagogical implications change over time. Using a longitudinal case study method, participants' conceptual…

This study developed an analytic framework consisting of four patterns of talk and writing that can support students' engagement in construction and critique: "Talk only," "writing only," "use of talk and writing in sequence," and "use of talk and writing simultaneously." This study aimed to examine how each…

This article addresses how we can develop learning environments that establish a need for scientific practices and provide a context for developing content knowledge through practice. It argues that Pickering's (1995) notion of "The Mangle of Practice" informs these efforts by focusing our attention on how resistance, or push-back from…