This study seeks to understand how different scientific practices in high school science classrooms are associated with student situational engagement. In this study, situational engagement is conceptualized as the balance between skills, interest, and challenge when the reported experiences are all high. In this study, data on situational…

Energy is a fundamental unifying concept of science, yet common approaches to energy instruction in middle school have shown little success with helping students develop their naive ideas about energy into more sophisticated understandings that are useful for making sense of their experiences. While traditional energy instruction often focuses on…

Reform efforts in science education emphasize the importance of rigorous treatment of science standards and use of innovative pedagogical approaches to make science more meaningful and successful. In this paper, we present a learning-goals-driven design model for developing curriculum materials, which combines national standards and a…

Introduces the idea of usability as a guiding principle for the successful design of sustainable and scalable science curricula. Presents a framework for examining usability in school contexts. (Author/SOE)