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1. Designing for Discourse: Enacting Responsive Teaching through Code Reflections in a Computational Modeling Unit

   https://doi.org/10.22318/icls2025.200377  

   Wagh, Aditi; Rosenbaum, Leah F; Eloy, Adelmo; Fuhrmann, Tamar; Henrique, Brendan; Blikstein, Paulo; Wilkerson, Michelle H (June 2025, International Society of the Learning Sciences)

   Rajala, A; Cortez, A; Hofmann, R; Jornet, A; Lotz-Sisitka, H; Markauskaite, L (Ed.)

   Not AvailableAn emerging body of work in the learning sciences has examined how computational models can support teachers in responding to students' prompts, inquiry, and ideas. This work has highlighted how teachers make discursive moves in relation to computational models to support classroom discussion. In this paper, we focus on a complementary phenomenon: teachers' design of code reflections, or curricular modifications that deepen students' engagement with one another's code for scientific and computational sensemaking. We highlight how these code reflections advanced student discourse and how both the code reflections and discourse became more sophisticated over time, shifting towards making connections across code, behaviors, simulation outcomes, data and the scientific process being represented. We reflect on how this progression was driven by shifts in the teachers’ comfort with code and computational modeling and the resources designers can offer to educators to support the development of code reflections. 

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2. Enacting rigorous lessons: Leveraging students’ ideas for enhancing demand on student thinking

   Akcil-Okan, O. & (January 2021, National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Meeting 2021)

   null (Ed.)

   Recent instructional reforms in science education emphasize rigorous instruction where students’ engage in high-level thinking and sensemaking as they try to explain phenomena or solve problems. This study aims to investigate how students’ intellectual engagement can be promoted through design and implementation of cognitively demanding science tasks. Specifically, we aim to unpack instructional practices that can help to enhance students’ engagement in high-level thinking and sensemaking as they work in science classrooms. In our analysis, we focused on the implementation of five lessons across three different science classrooms that two middle school science teachers collaboratively designed as a part of a professional development about promoting productive student talk in science classrooms. Our analysis revealed the changes in students’ intellectual engagement across the trajectory of these lessons and three instructional practices associated with enhancing opportunities for students’ thinking: (a) Holding students intellectually accountable to develop explanations of how and why a phenomenon occurs through collaborative work, (b) Leveraging students’ ideas to advance their thinking, (c) Initiating just-in-time resources and questions to problematize students’ intellectual engagement. The study findings provide implications for how to generate opportunities to enhance students’ thinking in the service of sensemaking. 

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3. Enacting rigorous lessons: Leveraging students’ ideas for enhancing demand on student thinking

   Akcil-Okan, O. & (January 2021, 2020 Marvalene Hughes Research in Education Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Recent instructional reforms in science education emphasize rigorous instruction where students’ engage in high-level thinking and sensemaking as they try to explain phenomena or solve problems. This study aims to investigate how students’ intellectual engagement can be promoted through design and implementation of cognitively demanding science tasks. Specifically, we aim to unpack instructional practices that can help to enhance students’ engagement in high-level thinking and sensemaking as they work in science classrooms. In our analysis, we focused on the implementation of five lessons across three different science classrooms that two middle school science teachers collaboratively designed as a part of a professional development about promoting productive student talk in science classrooms. Our analysis revealed the changes in students’ intellectual engagement across the trajectory of these lessons and three instructional practices associated with enhancing opportunities for students’ thinking: (a) Holding students intellectually accountable to develop explanations of how and why a phenomenon occurs through collaborative work, (b) Leveraging students’ ideas to advance their thinking, (c) Initiating just-in-time resources and questions to problematize students’ intellectual engagement. The study findings provide implications for how to generate opportunities to enhance students’ thinking in the service of sensemaking. 

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4. A Study of Teacher Sensemaking about Productive Student Talk in Science Classrooms

   Vande Zande, D. & (January 2021, National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Meeting 2021)

   null (Ed.)

   One way to support teachers' learning to facilitate the recent reform vision (NRC, 2012) in their classrooms is through professional development (PD). We explored a biology teacher’s (Monica) sensemaking during the PD that focused on facilitating productive science classroom discourse to understand her responses to the PD in terms of teaching science by engaging students in productive talk in science classrooms. Using both video and interview data, we analyzed the process of her sensemaking about facilitating (productive) talk during the PD and the meaning she was making of productive talk. Our analysis indicated that Monica participated in sensemaking mostly about her students' participation in talk. Throughout the PD conversations, she rarely focused on what she could do (or could have done) to facilitate student talk without the PD facilitators' pressing. This is supported by our analysis of the interviews with Monica, which showed that the sense that she was making about productive talk mostly focuses on students' contributions to the talk and their accountability to reasoning, scientific knowledge, and sensemaking. These findings provide implications for facilitating teachers’ sensemaking around new instructional practices and reforms within PD contexts. 

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5. Scientific Model Evaluation During a Gallery Walk

   Danish, J. (January 2021, Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS))

   null (Ed.)

   Students in science education struggle with creating and iteratively revising models based on evidence. We report on an implementation of a “gallery walk” activity where 5th grade students used the Model and Evidence Mapping Environment (MEME) software tool to develop and then critique each other’s models of an algal bloom. MEME was designed to support students in creating visual models organized around the components and mechanisms of the target phenomena, linking evidence to those models, and then providing and responding to comments on the specific features of the model. Findings illustrate how this was a productive environment for students to make their ideas about modeling criteria visible, and how their ideas cut across normative dimensions of modeling expertise. 

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