Classroom Practice

Controversial topics that arise in science classrooms, especially those of social relevance (e.g., the climate crisis), provide opportunities to help students learn about and discuss contradictory ideas they may encounter in their everyday experiences. Such topics may also be challenging to teach, but scaffolding may facilitate effective instruction. We describe one type of instructional scaffolding, the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) activity, that supports students’ reasoning when evaluating connections between lines of evidence and competing explanations about phenomena.

This paper explores the transformative impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on teachers’ roles and agencies in education, presenting a comprehensive framework that addresses teachers’ perceptions, knowledge, acceptance, and practices of GenAI. As GenAI technologies, such as ChatGPT, become increasingly integrated into educational settings, both in-service and future teachers are required to adapt to evolving classroom dynamics, where AI plays a significant role in content creation, personalized learning, and student engagement.

Computational modeling tools present unique opportunities and challenges for student learning. Each tool has a representational system that impacts the kinds of explorations students engage in. Inquiry aligned with a tool’s representational system can support more productive engagement toward target learning goals. However, little research has examined how teachers can make visible the ways students’ ideas about a phenomenon can be expressed and explored within a tool’s representational system.

In this article, we present a framework of culturally relevant science and mathematics pedagogy (CRSMP), which is grounded in the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy. It delineates practices ranging from the most accessible and easy-to-implement, to the most challenging and often contentious ways to teach mathematics and science. We provide examples of CRSMP that re-position marginalized learners in relation to science and mathematics.

Building on the literature, we designed a practical framework to support attention to equity and justice in science teacher education coursework. This framework presents four approaches for including justice moves in elementary science lessons, from increasing opportunity and access in science, to increasing identity and representation in science, to expanding what counts as science, to seeing science as a part of justice movements.

Research incorporating either eye-tracking technology or immersive technology (virtual reality and 360 video) into studying teachers’ professional noticing is recent. Yet, such technologies allow a better understanding of the embodied nature of professional noticing. Thus, the goal of the current study is to examine how teachers’ eye-gaze in immersive representations of practice correspond to their attending to children’s mathematics.

A classroom study was conducted to understand how to engage in responsive teaching with 18 seventh grade students at three stages of units coordination during a unit on proportional reasoning co-taught by the first author and classroom teacher. In the unit, students worked on making two cars travel the same speed. Students at all three stages of units coordination learned to do so, as reported elsewhere (Hackenberg et al., 2023). This paper focuses on the practice of inquiring responsively in small groups.

In this study, we used Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) to represent data generated by Natural Language Processing (NLP) analytics during an activity based on the Knowledge Integration (KI) framework. The activity features a web-based adaptive dialog about energy transfer in photosynthesis and cellular respiration. Students write an initial explanation, respond to two adaptive prompts in the dialog, and write a revised explanation. The NLP models score the KI level of the initial and revised explanations. They also detect the ideas in the explanations and the dialog responses.

In this article, we describe how we use classroom phenomena to help fifth grade students develop testable questions and productive investigations. Engaging students in observing and seeking to explain a classroom decomposition chamber has helped them to engage more successfully in the science and engineering practices (SEPs) of asking questions, planning and carrying out investigations, and constructing explanations.

Despite a growing effort to integrate students’ civic action projects into science and engineering curricula that address climate change and environmental justice, there are few frameworks that guide teachers and students to make well-informed decisions and actions towards a more just and sustainable future. This article presents a tool, Civic Action Matrix, that characterizes different types of students’ civic action projects.