Eliciting student thinking as resources for learning is central to productive sense making. Educators use pedagogical tools such as talk moves to direct classroom conversations toward and sometimes away from student learning. This mixed methods study describes how teaching assistants (TAs) use talk moves as pedagogical tools to elicit and work…

Engagement with socioscientific issues (SSI) has emerged as an important focus for science education. SSI have been successfully used to teach science concepts, but they also serve a role in helping learners develop a capacity to engage with science in everyday life. Here we present an epistemic framework for characterizing socioscientific…

Embodied cognition has been a useful means to support learning in science education. In this article, we describe a model of embodied cognition through analogical mapping that is supported through the participatory simulation and mathematical description of a link and pivot system. We look at the propensity for this model of embodied cognition to…

In recent years, science education researchers have increasingly studied the ways in which students "make sense" of science. However, although researchers might all agree intuitively on what it looks like, the literature on sensemaking is theoretically fragmented. In this paper, we address this fragmentation by proposing a coherent…

In this qualitative case study, we purposively selected a passive student in elementary science class from a small group and examined what factors contributed to her socially and momentarily construction of epistemic emotions. We used various data such as emotion diaries, transcripts of the video recordings, postlesson interviews, and field notes…

Research on science teacher cognition is important as findings from this research can be used to improve teacher training, leading to improved classroom practice. Previous research has often relied on two underlying assumptions: Cognition is an individual process, and these processes are detailed and introspective. In this paper, we put forth a…

Science centers such as museums and planetariums have used stereoscopic ("three-dimensional") films to draw interest from and educate their visitors for decades. Despite the fact that most adults who are finished with their formal education get their science knowledge from such free-choice learning settings very little is known about the…

Within the increasing body of research that examines students' reasoning on socioscientific issues, we consider in particular student reasoning concerning acute, open-ended questions that bring out the complexities and uncertainties embedded in ill-structured problems. In this paper, we propose a socioscientific sustainability reasoning…

Darwinian evolution is difficult to understand because of conceptual barriers stemming from intuitive ideas. This study examined understanding of evolution in 52 students (M = 14.48 years, SD = 0.89) before and after a guided field trip to a natural history museum and in a comparison group of 18 students (M = 14.17 years, SD = 0.79) who did not…

This exploratory analysis of student attendance at science museums finds that student achievement in science and mathematics is somewhat higher for those students who visited science museums frequently during the school year or summer. The strength of the association with cognitive achievement is sufficiently noteworthy to encourage further…

Researchers in the science education community make extensive use of cognitive clinical interviews as windows into student knowledge and thinking. Despite our familiarity with the interviews, there has been very limited research addressing the ways that students understand these interactions. In this work, we examine students' behaviors and speech…

While the opportunity to engage in scientific reasoning has been identified as an important aspect of informal science learning (National Research Council, 2009), most studies have examined this strand of science learning within the context of physics-based science exhibits. Few have examined the presence of such activity in conjunction with live…

Imagistic reasoning appears to be a critical strategy for learning and problem solving in the sciences, particularly chemistry; however, little is known about how students use imagistic reasoning on genuine assessment tasks in chemistry. The present study employed a think-aloud protocol to explore when and how students use imagistic reasoning for…

This study first used a new approach, combining students' ontological beliefs and process explanations, to represent students' mental models of heat conduction and then examined the relationships between their mental models and their predictions. Clinical interviews were conducted to probe 30 undergraduate physics students' mental models and their…

This study investigated children's judgments of the epistemic status of justifications for causal claims. Twenty-six children (14 boys, 12 girls) between the ages of 8 and 10 were asked to help two story characters choose the "best reason" for believing a claim. The reasons included appeals to an authority, to a plausible causal mechanism, or to…