Recent reforms in K-12 science education call for curricular materials that are designed to be "coherent for students." This form of coherence arises when the classroom community sees their science work as addressing their questions and problems. In enactment, the teacher sometimes has to improvise from the planned trajectory of the…

This paper discusses how primary school students, who are writing together in the context of inquiry learning, explicitly orient to knowing of oneself and others within the peer group. Using Conversation Analysis, we disclose the conversational functions of assertions holding 'I know', 'you know' and 'we know'. First, students position themselves…

Writing teachers play an extraordinarily important role in their students' writing development. Teachers' motivational beliefs, such as attitudes toward writing, perceptions of their efficacy to teach writing, or preparation to use evidence-based instructional practices, impact their writing instruction, which directly affects the advancement of…

Background: A reformed view of science education positions argumentation as a central epistemic discourse practice in the science classroom, however, science education researchers have found that typical norms of classroom discourse fall short of promoting argumentation. Recent scholarship on teachers' personal epistemologies has suggested that…

In "Small Teaching K-8," a team of veteran educators bridges the gap between cognitive theory and the K-8 classroom environment, applying the same foundational research found in author James Lang's bestselling "Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning" to the elementary and middle school setting. Via clear…

The vision of the Framework and NGSS requires important shifts in teaching approaches and instructional materials. We argue that this commitment to engaging learners in meaningful practice and supporting students' epistemic agency entails that we support "coherence from the students' perspective." This coherence arises when students see…