Current science education reform efforts have identified sensemaking as an important goal of science education, and science education researchers have studied what constitutes the sensemaking process in the science classroom. Because the studies of sensemaking are loosely linked to those of scientific reasoning, however, they have provided little…

A key goal of recent reforms in science education has been to support students' collective sensemaking, in which they work together to understand a natural phenomenon. This work is often done during class discussions, but facilitating those discussions is challenging. In this study, we used a framework of three discussion types to investigate how…

Narrative texts have been advocated as tools to tackle science learning challenges, and there is even the proposal of a "narrative effect" on learning. We believe it is necessary to examine previous evidence on this effect, as well as to characterize the process of learning through science narrative texts more broadly. In this article,…

This study explored a middle school science teacher's curricular sensemaking in interaction with their use of an educative storyline curriculum, aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards, that was intentionally designed for more opportunities for students' scientific sensemaking. Using a phenomenological case study methodology, we examined…