Pedagogy

Teachers face challenges when building the concept of substance with students because tensions of meanings emerge from students’ daily life and canonical ideas developed in classrooms. A powerful tool to address learning, pedagogical, and research challenges is the conceptual profile theory. According to this theory, people employ various ways of conceptualizing the world to signify experiences. Conceptual profiles are models of the heterogeneity of modes of thinking and speaking about a given scientific concept which are used in a variety of contexts. To better understand the heterogeneity of thinking/speaking about substance, the present study aimed to answer: (1) What are the zones that constitute the conceptual profile of substance?; and (2) What ways of thinking and speaking about substance do teachers and students exhibit when engaged in a classroom formative assessment activity?

This study examines technology-enhanced teacher responses and students’ written mathematical explanations to understand how to support effective teacher responding and the centering of students’ mathematical ideas. Although prior research has focused on teacher noticing and responding to students’ mathematical ideas, few studies have explored the revisions that students make to their written explanations after teacher responding and very few explore this in authentic classroom contexts.

This study examines technology-enhanced teacher responses and students’ written mathematical explanations to understand how to support effective teacher responding and the centering of students’ mathematical ideas. Although prior research has focused on teacher noticing and responding to students’ mathematical ideas, few studies have explored the revisions that students make to their written explanations after teacher responding and very few explore this in authentic classroom contexts.

In this study, we investigated how an experienced fourth-grade teacher responded to her students’ thinking as part of her teacher noticing practice in a formative assessment context. Our primary purpose in doing this work was to decompose the responding component of teacher noticing and use our findings to present an emerging framework characterizing the multidimensional nature of this practice.

The rapid and unexpected nature of the move to online instruction has meant that the content presented to students has been primarily static and linear. Thus, there is a need for creative pedagogical approaches that re-create some level of the laboratory experience. One economical and accessible approach to building an interactive lab experience is making web-based interactive slides. In the virtual spaces created by this approach, students can explore different modalities of content in a nonlinear and asynchronous manner.

In this mixed method study, we analyse the effectiveness of two pedagogical approaches – one model-based and another non-model-based – for developing secondary students’ understanding of the phenomenon of increase in Earth’s average surface temperatures, a core dimension of global climate change (GCC).

We present findings from an online course designed to support teachers to frame video discussions as making sense of student thinking. In an engineering pedagogy course designed to emphasize responsiveness to students’ thinking, we documented shifts in teachers’ framing, with teachers more frequently making sense of, rather than evaluating, student thinking later in the course. These findings show that it is possible to design an asynchronous online course to productively engage teachers in video discussions and inform theory development in online teacher education.

This study illustrates how two secondary mathematics teachers used students’ incorrect answers as they supported students’ engagement in collective argumentation.

School science continues to alienate students identifying with nondominant, non-western cultures, and learners of color, and considers science as an enterprise where success necessitates divorcing the self and corporeal body from ideas and the mind. Resisting the colonizing pedagogy of the mind–body divide, we aimed at creating pedagogical spaces and places in science classes that sustain equitable opportunities for engagement and meaning making where body and mind are enmeshed. In the context of a partnership between school- and university-based educators and researchers, we explored how multimodal literacies cultivated through the performing arts, provide students from minoritized communities opportunities to both create knowledge and to position themselves as science experts and brilliant and creative meaning makers.

Socially relevant and controversial topics, such as the climate crisis, are subject to differences in the explanations that scientists and the public find plausible. Scaffolds can help students be evaluative of the validity of explanations based on evidence when addressing such topics and support knowledge gains. This study compared two scaffolds in which students weighed connections between lines of evidence and explanations for the topics of climate change and extreme weather events.