Both professional and classroom-based scientific communities develop and test explanatory models of the natural world. For students to take up models as tools for sensemaking, practice must be agentive (where students use and revise models "for" specific purposes) and conceptually productive (where students make progress on their ideas).…

We describe the development, design, implementation, and preliminary classroom results of an innovative curriculum, "Focus on Energy," that supports learning about energy in Grades 4-5. The curriculum is grounded in the concepts of science as practice, model-based reasoning, and learning progressions, and builds on students' pre-existing…

We previously proposed a hypothetical learning progression around the disciplinary core idea of the Solar System and its formation as a first step in a research program to begin to fill this gap and address questions of student learning in this domain. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of two dimensions within the learning progression,…

Genetics has become increasingly important in everyday life, a fact that is reflected in state and national science education standards. This study examines the relationship between 474 fifth graders' understandings of the core ideas of "inheritance of traits" and "variation of traits". A confirmatory factor analysis,…

This article presents an empirical analysis of conceptual difficulties encountered and ways students made progress in learning at both individual and group levels in a classroom environment in which the students used an embodied modeling activity to make sense of a specific scientific scenario. The theoretical framework, coordination class theory,…

This study examines students' understanding of the normative connections between key concepts of cell division, including both mitosis and meiosis, and underlying biological principles that are critical for an in-depth understanding of genetic inheritance. Using a structural equation modeling method, we examine middle school students'…

Energy is a fundamental unifying concept of science, yet common approaches to energy instruction in middle school have shown little success with helping students develop their naive ideas about energy into more sophisticated understandings that are useful for making sense of their experiences. While traditional energy instruction often focuses on…

The National Research Council ([NRC], 2001) has stated that formative assessment is essential to fulfilling the mission of the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996). This paper explores the relative utility of four different types of formative assessment prompts in eliciting middle school students' ideas about sinking and floating.…

Helping students understand the general nature of scientific models is increasingly regarded as an important goal of the middle and high school science curriculum (e.g., J. K. Gilbert & C. Boutler, 1998. "International Handbook of Science Education"; Kluwer, London; A. G. Harrison & D. F. Treagust, 2000. "Science Education," 352-381). In addition,…