Research is urgently needed to learn how to improve the emotional climate of science learning by ameliorating excesses of negative emotions, which may lead to students dropping out of school, teachers burning out, and health problems for both groups. This is especially true when teachers and students are situated in highly challenging environments…

Science internships where students work with scientists have been suggested to have many positive impacts on students' science learning. However, little research has been conducted to investigate the types of interactions that are beneficial for the development of science knowledge through an authentic internship experience. The purpose of this…

Working with scientists has been suggested as an effective way for high school students to learn science more authentically. However, several challenges hinder partnerships between students and scientists, such as intimidation issues, the complexity of scientific language, and communication barriers. The purpose of this phenomenographic study was…

Internships in science research settings have received increasing attention as a means of helping students construct appropriate understandings, practices, tools, and language in scientific activities. To advance student-scientist partnerships beyond the status quo, the study aimed to investigate how cogenerative dialogs (cogens) may help high…

In the literature on the situated and distributed nature of cognition, the coordination of spatial organization and the structure of human practices and relations is accepted as a fact. To date, science educators have yet to build on such research. Drawing on an ethnographic study of high school students during an internship in a scientific…

Project-based learning has been suggested as an effective student-centered practice to teach science. However, how to assess students' learning in project-based learning activities remains challenging because of its open-ended nature. In this study of high school students' science internships, we demonstrated that "cogenerative dialogs"…

Research in science education has shown that one's identities as science learner and teacher can mediate their pedagogical practices. Grounded in the perspective that language is a resource for identity (re)construction (Gee, 2000), the present study sought to understand how preservice science teachers' identities were manifested in their…

Working with scientists has been suggested as an effective way for high-school students to learn authentic science. However, little research has involved students' perceptions of science learning environments in a university internship. This study drew on the theoretical framework of community of practice with cogenerative dialogues to design an…

The high attrition rate of new science teachers demonstrates the urgent need to incorporate effective practices in teacher preparation programs to better equip preservice science teachers. The purpose of the study is to demonstrate a way to enrich preservice science teachers' preparation by incorporating informal science teaching practice into…

Tao, Oliver, and Venville's paper addresses a debate between two hypotheses of children's development of conceptual understandings of the Earth. The authors aim to investigate whether culture influences students' conceptions of the Earth. However, one questionable assumption shared among conception and conceptual change studies is that researchers…

Learning science interpreted in existing theoretical frameworks often means that students are assimilated, accommodated or enculturated from the entity of the vernacular world to the entity of the scientific world. However, there are some unsolved questions as to how students can best learn purely a new language or new knowledge of science. The…

Science educators often suggest that students should learn science in ways and settings that bear family resemblance with "the real thing." Internship in science laboratories constitutes one such way in which students may learn science and learn about science. However, very little is known about "how" participants experience a…

Many science educators encourage student experiences of "authentic" science by means of student participation in science-related workplaces. Little research has been done, however, to investigate how "teaching" naturally occurs in such settings, where scientists or technicians normally do not have pedagogical training and generally do not have…

This commentary dialogues with three articles that analyze the same database about science and religion discourse produced 17 years ago. Dialogues in these three articles and this commentary across space and time allow us to develop new and different understandings of the same database and situation. As part of this commentary, I discuss topics…

I respond to Baron and Chen's article on creative cultural divergence, which they describe as the novel pedagogy of diverging from culturally generated educational expectations. Their article provides an analysis on how an experienced Taiwanese teacher drew on different forms of creative cultural divergence to facilitate students' critical…