This session includes five projects engaged in design research to develop learning progression–based frameworks, assessments, and teaching practices/materials. The session focuses on five problems of practice that all of the projects face—where learning progression research creates new possibilities for improving current teaching practice while creating new challenges.

1. Framing scientific knowledge and goals for teaching
2. Formative and summative assessment
3. Scaffolding students’ scientific practices fused to core science content
4. Issues of equity and diversity
5. Contributing to the research knowledge base and supporting tools and resources

Each of these issues provides challenges as well as new possibilities—learning progression–based teaching practices can be more complex and difficult to enact; they can be at odds with current practice; they can require teachers to take new and difficult perspectives. Each participating project chooses one or two issues that they consider especially challenging and discuss the challenges that they face in the context of their project, including specific examples of more and less successful efforts.