Disruptions to education systems (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic) evoke a range of responses from teachers. Teachers are required to learn new skills, attend to students' social emotional needs, modify their instructional approaches, and discover innovative ways to engage their students in science, technology, and engineering courses, all while…

Maintaining a commitment to social justice teaching can be especially challenging when navigating the bureaucratic systems and ever-spiraling responsibilities of the education system. To better understand how social-justice-oriented educators navigate these tensions, this paper uses qualitative methods to investigate the social justice problems of…

In this study, we explore how preservice secondary science teachers articulated their agency and structural awareness within racist-nativist policy and schooling environments that limit emergent bilingual students' opportunities to learn science. Our praxis-oriented analysis led us to characterize novice teacher participants' discursive…

Definitions of modeling competence in science education do not yet include noncognitive factors. However, noncognitive factors are central to competence and might thus substantially improve our understanding of modeling competence. In this article, we analyze volition during preservice science teachers' engagement with a black-box modeling task…

Although visual aids are widely considered a valuable source of scaffolding, the nature and active utilization of these aids in current science classrooms are not well understood. This qualitative study explores interaction in the teaching of concepts related to evolution, with a specific focus on a teacher's use of different visual support…

Professional development (PD) can support science teachers to learn about instructional reforms, but more work needs to be done on broadening our understanding of how specific PD activities support teacher learning. One understudied PD activity is the "student hat": when teachers engage in student learning activities while considering…

Reformed science curricula provide opportunities for students to engage with authentic science practices. However, teacher implementation of such curricula requires teachers to consider their role in the classroom, including realigning instructional decisions with the epistemic aims of science. Guiding newcomers in science can take place in…

Evolution understanding is often positively connected with magnitudes of evolution acceptance, whereas religiosity mostly interferes negatively. However, comparisons between studies and countries must be treated cautiously due to the diversity of used instruments and samples. This study aims to generate new evidence concerning the interplay of…

Lesson planning is a core part of teachers' professional competence. Written lesson plans play a significant role in science teacher education as a preparation for demonstration lessons during the final teacher certification exam. However, the few existing scoring rubrics on lesson plans are not particularly theoretically sound and are barely…

Sensemaking has been advocated as a core practice of science education to support students in constructing their own understanding through a prolonged trajectory. However, the field lacks a discussion of teaching strategies that can better support students as they develop in the trajectory of sensemaking, which includes four phases: initial…

Equity in education has been conceptualized in various ways, which provides different affordances and constraints for policy, research, and teaching decisions. Regarding the latter, there is a dearth of research on how postsecondary science faculty conceptualize equity and whether and how their understandings of equity may be informing their…

Despite the importance of developing elementary science teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT), there are limited assessments that have been designed to measure the full breadth of their CKT at scale. Our overall research project addressed this gap by developing an online assessment to measure elementary preservice teachers' CKT about…

The increasing attention in science education reform documents to language and literacy, coupled with the growing linguistic diversity of United States classrooms, means that science teacher educators and researchers are facing an important task of preparing secondary science preservice teachers (PSTs) to teach a language- and literacy-integrated…

Intercultural teaching practices for science education (ITPSE) are suitable to support science teachers in bringing cultural inclusion into their classrooms. The epistemological bridge is the base of the ITPSE design since this approach describes culturally inclusive teaching of science. There is an ITPSE of planning and one of enactment. With…

To promote a justice-oriented approach to science education, we formed a research-practice partnership between middle school science teachers, their students, curriculum designers, learning scientists, and experts in social justice to co-design and test an environmental justice unit for middle school instruction. We examine teacher perspectives on…