Recent trends have shifted the focus of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education onto practice-based learning, to encourage opportunities for students to engage in science and engineering practices (SEPs) with the goal of more meaningful participation and engagement in authentic STEM experiences for all students. However,…

Argumentation, a key epistemic practice in science, engages students in socially constructing knowledge claims using evidence. However, teachers need support in integrating argumentation into classroom instruction. We examined teachers' enactments of an educative science curriculum and their curricular decision making for argumentation. Ten middle…

Science education has long seen an emphasis on supporting students' epistemological understandings of how scientific knowledge is constructed and evaluated with the expectation that these understandings will support the students' own construction and evaluation of scientific knowledge. However, research has shown that this connection does not…

This study investigated children's judgments of the epistemic status of justifications for causal claims. Twenty-six children (14 boys, 12 girls) between the ages of 8 and 10 were asked to help two story characters choose the "best reason" for believing a claim. The reasons included appeals to an authority, to a plausible causal mechanism, or to…

This study aims to test the nature of the assumption that there are relationships between scientific epistemological views (SEVs) and reasoning processes in socioscientific decision making. A mixed methodology that combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches of data collection and analysis was adopted not only to verify the assumption…

Risk has now become a feature of science curricula in many industrialized countries. While risk is conceptualized within a number of different theoretical frameworks, the predominant model used in examination specifications is a utility model in which risk calculations are deemed to be objective through technical expert assessment and where the…