Instructional explanations are sometimes viewed as part of a nonconstructivist, solely teacher-centered learning environment, leading to the perception that they are ineffective or inappropriate for teaching science. Consequently, teacher education programmes seldom focus on preparing teachers to explain scientific concepts effectively.…

Culturally sustaining pedagogies have encouraged scholars to reimagine and rebuild justice-oriented classrooms across context and disciplines and provide opportunities for students to reclaim their ways of knowing and doing in schools. In this study, we seek to contextualize culturally sustaining teaching practices in integrated science and…

This paper explores the relationship between epistemology, sociology, and learning and teaching in physics based on an examination of literature from research in science studies, history and philosophy of science, and physics pedagogic research. It reveals a mismatch between the positivist epistemological foundation which seems to underpin the…

Detailed accounts of teaching can shed light on the nature and prevalence of active learning, yet common approaches reduce teaching to unidimensional descriptors or binary categorizations. In this paper, I use the instructional systems-of-practice framework and the Teaching Dimensions Observation Protocol (TDOP) to advance an approach to thinking…

Many authors stress the importance of basing teaching on students' prior knowledge. To build a bridge between students' everyday knowledge and scientific concepts, the role of metaphors and analogies came into the focus of the science education community during the past two decades. Approaches using metaphor-based teaching strategies often regard…

Lack of time for teaching science in traditional classroom placements in the United States has led some science teacher educators to provide practice teaching time for elementary education students in informal science settings. The purposes of this study were to describe the culture of one science methods course taught in conjunction with a K-7…

Argumentation is a central goal of science education because it engages students in a complex scientific practice in which they construct and justify knowledge claims. Although there is a growing body of research around argumentation, there has been little focus on developing a learning progression for this practice. We describe a learning…

This exploratory study in a classroom setting investigates first graders' (age 7-8 years, N = 25) ability to perform analogical reasoning and create their own analogies for two irreversible natural phenomena: mixing and heat transfer. We found that the children who contributed actively to a full-class discussion were consistently successful at…

Argumentation is a core practice of science and has recently been advocated as an essential goal of science education. Our research focuses on the discourse in urban high school science classrooms in which the teachers used the same global climate change curriculum. We analyzed transcripts from three teachers' classrooms examining both the…

This article explores the relation between how scientific knowledge is created and the reasoning involved in learning content with understanding. Although an asserted parallel between these underpins reform, little is actually known about this relation. This article offers a model of this relation that draws coherent connections between the…

Previous research has established a close link between students' conceptions of learning and approaches to learning. Until recently, only a few quantitative studies have investigated the relationship between high school students' conceptions of learning science and the approaches they adopt to learning science. This study sought to address this…

Two disparate research programs have addressed the challenge of instructional multimedia design. One, based on cognitive load theory, has focused on ways of reducing unnecessary cognitive load during instruction to free up resources for learning. The other, based on constructivism, has centered on interactive multimedia, allowing students to build…

Classrooms across the United States increasingly find White teachers paired with ethnic minority students, but few of these teachers are prepared for the disparities such cultural integration presents. This is particularly true vis-a-vis science education. While classrooms have diversified, science instruction has not necessarily followed suit.…

Analyzes the validity and reliability of the evidence from children's ideas from a constructivist viewpoint and proposes a guiding set of methodological principles for the generation and evaluation of evidence. Uses the guiding principles to make a critical analysis of some well-known research studies in the field of chemistry. Contains 33…

Presents a model of conceptual change from a social constructivist perspective by examining the fallacious argumentation and discourse patterns revealed by students as they form scientific and social judgments. Provides a framework that will allow science educators to examine samples of thought related to social thinking. (Contains 47 references.)…