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1. Small Teacher Moves with Big Impacts in Shaping Students’ Sensemaking and Intellectual Authority in Science

   Schellinger, J.; Morandi, S.; Southerland, S.A.; Jaber, L.Z.; Tekkumru-Kisa, M.; & Krishnan, H. (January 2021, National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Meeting 2021)

   null (Ed.)

   This study explores the epistemological framing dynamics in one middle school biology classroom and how those dynamics shape students’ collaborative sensemaking in science. We trace how the teacher’s instructional moves shaped students’ framing, and the ways in which that framing influenced students’ learning. Our analysis shows that while the teacher framed small group argumentation activities as spaces for students to generate and negotiate ideas, brief but influential moves at the end of the lesson, which emphasized the correct answer, undermined students’ sensemaking and intellectual authority. These findings have implications for the design of teacher education highlighting the need to promote teachers’ awareness of the impact of their instructional moves in terms of how students frame their efforts in the classroom. 

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2. What Epistemological Resources Affect Chemistry Teachers’ Sense of "What Worked"

   Schafer, AGL; Stowe, RL. (January 2021, 2021 NARST International Meeting)

   null (Ed.)

   Teachers’ sense of “what is taking place with respect to knowledge” drives their perspective on “what works” and “what is likely to work” in their classroom context. Scholarship by Hammer, Russ and many others indicates that this “sense” is very often context-sensitive and may be productively modeled as a local coalescence of small-grained epistemological resources. Presented here is an investigation of the epistemological resources contributing to high school chemistry teachers’ framing of “what works” in their learning environment. Teacher reflections are unpacked and characterized for classroom information noticed and responded to when considering “what worked” during the 2019-2020 school year. Preliminary findings suggest epistemological resources guiding “what worked” often align with a view of knowledge as propagated stuff. Thus, implying that teachers’ reasoning about “what works” is guided by how well knowledge is transferred to students. Also present was evidence that epistemological resources aligned to views of knowledge as fabricated stuff were activated. The perspective that knowledge is inferred or developed from other knowledge, rather than passed from an authority figure, aligns well with reform efforts that emphasize student sensemaking. This study is part of a larger program in which a teacher-researcher collaborative adapts and refines evidence-based curricular materials for an undergraduate chemistry course for use in high school. These materials are structured around scaffolded progressions of big ideas (e.g., energy, electrostatic and bonding interactions) that build in complexity as students make sense of increasingly complex phenomena. Ongoing improvement of transformed materials is dependent upon the ability to initiate and stabilize a sense of “what works” consistent with sensemaking aims. 

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3. Reinterpreting Lamarckianism as Generative Mechanistic Reasoning about Natural Selection

   https://doi.org/10.22318/icls2025.742614  

   Svoboda, Julia; Dabholkar, Sugat; Wang, Yiru; Benjamin, Scott (June 2025, International Society of the Learning Sciences)

   Students often express Lamarckian ideas—that changes acquired during an organism’s lifetime can be inherited—when reasoning about natural selection. Researchers have described this reasoning as arising from incorrect and unproductive misconceptions. Using the theoretical tools of resource theory and data from interviews with college students, we argue that an alternative explanation for students’ apparent Lamarckian reasoning is that they are seeking to provide mechanisms that can account for trait change. Unlike canonical populationlevel mechanisms, organism-level mechanisms are grounded in plausible changes to organismal forms, physiologies, or behaviors. We found that organism-level mechanistic reasoning arose in interviews when students recognized a need for a mechanistic explanation and shifted into an epistemological framing of in-the-moment knowledge construction. Rather than interpret Lamarckian ideas as misconceptions, we argue that they can be viewed as evidence of students' generative epistemological resources for seeking and providing mechanisms. 

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4. Finding Alignment in Framing: Dynamics of Collaborative Disciplinary Engagement in Science

   Krishnan, H.; Jaber, L. Z.; Schellinger, J.; & Southerland, S. A. (January 2021, National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Meeting 2021)

   null (Ed.)

   Recent educational reforms conceptualize science classrooms as spaces where students collaboratively engage in disciplinary practices to construct and evaluate scientific explanations of phenomena. For students to effectively collaborate with each other, they need to develop a shared framing of the nature of the science activity and the expectations surrounding their engagement in it. Such framing does not only pertain to the conceptual work but also involves myriad epistemological, social, and affective dimensions. We conceptualize collaborative disciplinary engagement as the process of aligning the group’s framing along these dimensions and, we argue, student negotiations to achieve this alignment are in part what initiate and sustain collaborative disciplinary engagement in the science classroom. By focusing on student negotiations, this study builds on existing research on group dynamics involved in science learning and contributes nuanced empirical insights on the nature of student negotiations along the conceptual, epistemological, social, and affective dimensions of argumentation in science. Moreover, the findings provide a proof of concept regarding the key role that student negotiations of framing have in driving collaborative disciplinary engagement. The study findings have implications for research and practice to support learners’ productive disciplinary engagement in group work in the science classroom and beyond. 

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5. The Ripple Effect of Epistemological Framing: Linking Epistemology, Teacher Moves, and Student Learning

   Southerland, S. A.; Schellinger, J.; Jaber, L.Z.; Morandi, S.; Krishnan, H.; & Tekkumru-Kisa, M. (January 2021, Annual meeting program American Educational Research Association)

   null (Ed.)

   This work explores epistemological framing dynamics in a middle school biology classroom and how such dynamics shape student engagement and learning opportunities. Our data sources include student and teacher interviews, classroom videos of three multi-day lessons with a focus on argumentation, and work products collected across one academic year. Our analysis reveals that while the teacher made room for students to generate and negotiate ideas, brief but influential moves emphasizing single correct answers undermined students’ sensemaking. These instructional moves, while only occupying a small amount of instructional time, framed students’ sensemaking efforts not as a process to seek the strongest explanation from a number of possibilities, but rather to wait for the correct explanation to be revealed from an authority. 

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