Background: Argumentation, the justification of claims with reasons and/or evidence, has emerged as a significant goal in science education in recent years. Yet, there is limited understanding of secondary students' arguments and particularly their use of warrants in interdisciplinary contexts such as science and religious education. Furthermore,…

This small-scale, qualitative study uses educational design research to explore how focusing on argumentation may contribute to students' learning to engage in inquiry independently. Understanding inquiry as the construction of a scientifically cogent argument in support of a claim may encourage students to develop personal reasons for adhering to…

This article describes the author's experience teaching oral history to seventh, eighth, and ninth graders in Honduras for two weeks in 2017. Students planned and implemented an oral history project to document the local history of the valley and their communities. The author hoped that students would grow in their understanding of history as an…

Purpose: When using embedded, student-centered assessment tools for maker education, understanding the characteristics of a body of evidence can help teachers guide the assessment process. This study aims to examine assessment artifacts from a makerspace program and present a set of qualities that emerged, which researchers and maker educators can…

Secondary school students often only use the rules for doing scientific inquiry when prompted, as if they fail to see the point of doing so. This qualitative design study explores conditions to address this problem in school science inquiry. Dutch students (N = 22, aged 14-15) repeatedly consider the quality of their work: in a conventional,…

Scientific reasoning ability (SRA) is widely recognized as an essential goal for science education. There is much discussion on the design and development of assessment frameworks as viable tools to foster SRA. However, established assessments mostly focus on the level of students reasoning attainment. Student ability to use evidence to support…

Helping students understand that the scientific community's claims change through time, sometimes radically, allows them to develop a well-grounded sense of the "nature of science." Learning to reason about how scientific claims come to be accepted, and later refuted, is important for understanding the tentative nature of scientific…

Intrigued by the wide range of pupils' responses to a sourcebased essay question, Jonathan Sellin decided to investigate why pupils were using sources in such different ways. Probing his own philosophical assumptions about history, and how they have changed over time, prompted Sellin to explore pupils' assumptions about how historians use sources…

Background: The school environment has the potential to influence student body mass index (BMI) through programs and policies. Our objective was to examine the effect of modifying obesity-related school policies and programs on youths' BMI trajectories. Methods: Obesity-related school policies and programs related to physical activity and healthy…

Active teachers noted persistent problems in their classrooms, including low levels of student engagement and gaps in students' use of evidence in forming arguments. Earth Science students provided written responses to two questions using the previously implemented Claim, Evidence, Reasoning (CER) framework. The first question was answered without…

This non-experimental, exploratory and descriptive study, using a qualitative case study approach, aims to investigate whether there is evidence of variance in the quality of school-based assessment (SBA) in Grade 9 mathematics. Participants were purposefully selected from five schools in a district in the Northern Cape in South Africa. After…

An online curriculum about biological evolution was designed according to the "Promoting Evidentiary Reasoning and Self-Regulation Online" (PERSON) theoretical framework to support evidentiary reasoning and self-regulation. An efficacy study was conducted with 83 suburban high school biology students using design-based research methods.…

This article describes how participants in the California Teacher Inquiry Network learn the art of making their invisible thinking processes visible, helping them see more clearly that they have internal resources to help students master similar kinds of thinking processes.

This study investigates if the probability of being graded up in the school leaving certificates increases if the teacher is of the same gender as the student or if the teacher and the student both have a foreign background. The analysis is based on data on grade 9 students in Mathematics from Sweden. I find that female students and non-native…

Supportive teacher-student relationships are associated with increased levels of engagement and higher levels of achievement. Yet, studies also show that higher achieving students typically receive the most encouragement. Moreover, many studies of teacher-student relationships pertain to elementary and middle school students; by the time students…