In considering goals for science education, it is conventional to make arguments for the utility of scientific knowledge for a variety of purposes. Less prominent are rationales based on the beauty or truth of science. In this paper, we examine how an approach to science education might be different if we shift the goals of communication to an…

There is now a significant research literature devoted to reconceptualizing scientific activities, such as modeling, explanation, and argumentation, to realize a vision of science-as-practice in classrooms. As yet, however, not all scientific practices have received equal attention. "Planning and Carrying out Investigations" is one of…

Recent emphasis on learning biology through scientific investigations has focused instruction on understanding and using scientific evidence. To unpack the complexities of evidentiary reasoning, here we present a novel laboratory investigation for teaching the Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium (HWE) in an introductory biology laboratory course that was…

This article describes a three-dimensional 5E (Engagement, Exploration, Explanation, Elaboration, Evaluation) lesson that investigates 3-LS4-1: Analyze and interpret data from fossils to provide evidence of the organisms and the environments in which they lived. A phenomena-based approach was used to engage third graders in the story of Maya, who…

Police worldwide regularly review closed-circuit television (CCTV) evidence in investigations. This research found that London "police experts" who work in a full-time "Super-Recogniser Unit" and front line "police identifiers" regularly making suspect identifications from CCTV possessed superior unfamiliar face…

This non-traditional article identifies a series of questions pursued and/or critiqued within inquiries about climate change education (CCE) and research. The questions and clustering format were initially crystallised from summaries and critical discussion with editors, referees, and critical friends of this journal, during the process of…

Argumentation is an important component of scientific education (Osborne, 2010). However, how students create and evaluate competing arguments in scientific investigations is a complex construct, which presents significant challenges for assessment. We engaged 349 middle and high school students in a virtual scientific investigation based on an…

As historians, we are dependent on evidence, which comes in many varieties. Rosalind Stirzaker here introduces a project which she ran two years ago to encourage her students to think about artefacts in a different way. They have examined randomly preserved artefacts such as those of Pompeii, and sets of artefacts which were deliberately chosen,…

This article is concerned with the recent debate about the identity of psychology's lost boy-Little Albert, the infant subject in Watson and Rayner's classic experiment on fear conditioning. For decades, psychologists and psychology students have been intrigued by the mystery of Albert's fate. Now two evidentiary-based solutions to…

Rouder, Morey, and Province (2013) stated that (a) the evidence-based case for psi in Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Risio's (2010) meta-analysis is supported only by a number of studies that used manual randomization, and (b) when these studies are excluded so that only investigations using automatic randomization are evaluated (and some additional…

This article is aimed at teachers already experienced with activities involving small, student-collected data sets and who are now ready to begin working with large, online data sets collected by scientists and engineers. The authors discuss challenges, instructional strategies, and sources of appropriate lesson plans. With guidance, plus online…

A focus of reforms in standards, learning environments, teacher preparation programs and professional development is to support teachers' and students' engagement with scientific practices such as argumentation, modeling and generating explanations for real-world phenomena (NRC, 2011). Engaging in these practices in authentic ways…

This paper reports on the results of a study investigating the potential to embed Informal Statistical Inference in statistical investigations, using TinkerPlots, for assisting 8th grade students' informal inferential reasoning to emerge, particularly their articulations of uncertainty. Data collection included students' written work on a…

Evidence is accumulating that the level of text comprehension is dependent on the situatedness and sensory richness of a child's mental representation formed during reading. This study investigated whether these factors involved in text comprehension also serve a functional role in writing a narrative. Direct influences of situatedness and sensory…

Although students are enthusiastic when engaging in hands-on investigations, they can find it challenging to make sense of their data and to create explanations using evidence from their investigations. The authors spent a year designing and testing strategies in a science classroom to better assist elementary students in constructing and…