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…

This study explores the role of conceptual coherence in science teacher learning of science-specific formative assessment. Conceptual coherence refers to the alignment of ideas about teaching and learning and may be difficult with certain teaching practices, like formative assessment, that have a central role in accountability mechanisms in…

Although adults are known to play an important role in young children's development, little work has focused on the enactive features of scaffolding in informal learning settings, and the embodied dynamics of intergenerational interaction. To address this gap, this paper undertakes a microinteractional analysis to examine intergenerational…

Wide-scale adoption of the "Next Generation Science Standards" has raised new challenges for classroom teachers as they learn not only how to engage students in this new vision of science learning, but also how to assess students' engagement in that learning. This paper introduces a virtual special issue of "Science Education"…

What is engineering? What do engineers do? How is engineering related to, but distinct from, science? These questions all relate to the nature of engineering (NOE), and as engineering is incorporated into K-12 education across the United States, the NOE is becoming increasingly important for students and teachers. While many policy documents call…

Agency has been used as a lens to focus on how educators learn through pedagogical risk-taking, advocacy for curricular reform, and resisting policies that are not focused on the needs of students. We explored the role of agency as 65 preservice science teachers created learning opportunities for themselves during their clinical placements.…

Large investments are made in curriculum materials with the goal of supporting science education reform. However, relatively little evidence is available about what features of curriculum materials really matter to impact student and teacher learning. To address this need, the current study examined curriculum features associated with student and…

Few studies have examined how professional learning communities (PLCs) engage in collaborative inquiry over multiple years. This longitudinal study explored how a team of high school science teachers collaborated with researchers and district-based coaches in a PLC over 4 years. We examined (1) how the PLC, which was situated in a culturally and…

These narratives explore what it might entail to begin school-university partnerships towards the goal of transformative social changes through the voices of two women scholars of color. Using two school-university partnerships as focal cases, we unpack the complexity, tensions, and possibilities that arise through collaborations driven by the…

Science educators are integrating more and more computational thinking (CT) activities into their curricula. Proponents of CT offer two motivations: familiarizing students with a realistic depiction of the computational nature of modern scientific practices and encouraging more students from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue careers in…

As historically construed, both engineering culture and school science culture marginalize girls. With the focus on engineering in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), engineering education researchers have called for a more targeted investigation of how girls at the K-12 level engage in engineering. This study investigates, through…

Representational competence is a primary contributor to student learning in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines and an optimal target for instruction at all educational levels. We describe the design and implementation of a learning activity that uses concrete models to improve students' representational competence and…

Transformative experience refers to learning episodes in which students use ideas from the science classroom to see and experience the world differently in their everyday lives. The construct is defined by three characteristics: (1) motivated use (application of learning in "free-choice" contexts), (2) expansion of perception (seeing…

Individuals are increasingly relying on social media as their primary source of scientific information. Science education needs to adapt. Nature of science (NOS) education is already widely accepted as essential to scientific literacy and to an informed public. We argue that NOS now needs to also include the NOS communication: its mediation,…

Calls for renewal of physics education include more varied learning activities and increased focus on qualitative understanding and history and philosophy of science (HPS) aspects. We have studied an innovative approach implementing such features in quantum physics in traditional upper secondary physics classrooms in Norway. Data consists of 11…