Despite myriad attempts over the years to design curricula with logical ordering and connections, concerns persist that students view science as a body of prescribed information to memorize. In this essay, we argue that attempts to build coherence into the curriculum reflect fundamental and enduring misconceptions about the nature of coherence…

Studies of learning in school settings indicate that many students frame activities in science classes as the production of answers for the teacher or test, rather than as making new sense of the natural world. A case study of an episode from a class taught by the first author demonstrates what productive and unproductive student framing can look…

When teachers or students assess the quality of ideas in science classes, they do so mostly based on "textbook correctness"; ideas are good to the extent they align with or lead to the content as presented in the textbook or curriculum. Such appeals to authority are at odds with the values and practices within the disciplines of science. There has…

Questions the scientific community's consensus on the epistemological sophistication concerning scientific knowledge. Argues for a distinction between correctness and productivity of an epistemological stance and against certain blanket generalizations about the nature of knowledge and learning that do not attend to context. (Author/MM)

Explores, in the context of a debate about velocity from the author's high school physics class, how a perspective of students as having epistemological beliefs might influence a teacher's perceptions of students and intentions for instruction. (LZ)