An official website of the United States government
Abstract This article explores the challenges of enacting reform‐oriented curriculum in science classrooms. We use the concept of figured worlds to analyze a case study of an eighth‐grade science class where the teacher reported that the students were resistant to changes she was trying to make. By examining stimulated recall interviews with the teacher (including the associated classroom episodes) and post‐unit interviews with a subset of the students, we found that the students and the teacher constructed different figured worlds about the science learning in the classroom. These differences centered on the goals that students and teachers had for the class and the roles of the teacher and students in the learning environment. Specifically, we found that there was a lack of alignment around how students and the teacher viewed the purpose of student agency and collaboration and therefore they had different ideas about how they should interact with one another in the classroom. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for science education. We believe that the concept of figured worlds allows researchers and teachers to better understand the challenges of implementing reform‐oriented practices in science classrooms. This understanding can help teachers and professional development providers to create strategies for bridging the gap between different figured worlds and creating more collaborative and productive learning environments for all students.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on June 18, 2026
Developing Science Classroom Expectations That Encourage Risk‐Taking for Learning Science Together
ABSTRACT Reform‐oriented science classrooms encourage environments in which students engage in a collective enterprise of making sense of their science ideas together. Teachers who strive for these sorts of environments support students in collaboratively constructing and answering their own questions about phenomena and making sense of competing ideas together. However, to engage with one another productively, students must ask questions, share incomplete thoughts, and comment on each other's ideas, all of which can be seen as risky and unfamiliar behavior that may result in feelings of uncertainty or other negative classroom consequences. We conduct an explanatory case study using student and teacher interviews, teacher surveys, and classroom video collected over 2 years to investigate how one teacher used classroom norms to establish and maintain a culture in which students appeared committed to taking risks to improve their collective knowledge‐building. We found that norms were one practical tool the teacher used to encourage students to take risks and that also seemed helpful for negotiating individual and group uncertainty. Norms were also tools the teacher used to ensure that she and her students had similar expectations for classroom engagement. This study practically addresses some key challenges teachers face in enacting reform‐oriented science teaching and offers suggestions for how continued research regarding norms and uncertainty can continue to further science reform efforts.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2101377
- PAR ID:
- 10610942
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science Education
- ISSN:
- 0036-8326
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
IntroductionElementary teachers face many challenges when including reform-based science instruction in their classrooms, and some teachers have chosen to enhance their science instruction by introducing students to citizen science (CS) projects. When CS projects are incorporated in formal school settings, students have an opportunity to engage in real-world projects as they collect and make sense of data, yet relatively few CS projects offer substantial guidance for teachers seeking to implement the projects, placing a heavy burden on teacher learning. MethodsFramed in theory on teacher relationships with curricula, we prepared science standards-aligned educative support materials for two CS projects. We present convergent mixed methods research that examines two teachers’ contrasting approaches to including school-based citizen science (SBCS) in their fifth-grade classrooms, each using support materials for one of the two CS projects. Both are veteran teachers at under-resourced Title 1 (an indicator of the high percentage of the students identified as economically disadvantaged) rural schools in the southeastern United States. We document the teachers’ interpretations and use of SBCS materials for the CS projects with data from classroom observations, instructional logs, teacher interviews, and student focus groups. ResultsOne teacher adapted the materials to include scaffolding to position students for success in data collection and analysis. In contrast, the second teacher adapted the SBCS support materials to maintain a teacher-centered approach to instruction, identifying perceptions of students’ limited abilities and limited instructional time as constraining factors. DiscussionWe discuss the intersection of CS projects in formal education and opportunities for engaging students in authentic science data collection, analysis, and sense-making. The two teachers’ stories identify the influences of school context and the need for teacher support to encourage elementary teachers’ use of SBCS instruction to supplement their science instruction.more » « less
-
Instructional shifts required by equitable, reform‐based science instruction are challenging, especially in the elementary context. Such shifts require professional development (PD) that supports teacher internalization of new pedagogical strategies as well as changes in beliefs about how students learn. Because of this complexity, many PD programs struggle to foster lasting pedagogical shifts, necessitating further investigation into why some teachers successfully embrace reform practices while others do not. This qualitative study uses a nonlinear, iterative model of teacher learning (Interconnected Model of Professional Growth; Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002) alongside professional noticing to help understand why elementary teachers in science PD differentially make sense of and internalize new pedagogies. Findings indicate that teachers most likely to adopt reform‐based instructional practices from the PD were those who clearly connected student learning to their instructional moves. In addition, teachers who more actively attended to student sensemaking and productive struggle took up pedagogies from the PD more substantively than did colleagues who attended solely to student engagement and affect. Finally, teachers who attended to and valued novel ideas from students’ lived experiences were more likely to change their beliefs about students’ capacity to learn science, and thus more likely to see the value of instructional practices from the PD. In sum, structuring PD to build on these specific teacher noticing skills can encourage more teachers to move away from traditional, teacher‐directed instructional practice, and more fully support reform‐based instructional practices.more » « less
-
This paper shares results from surveys administered in spring 2018 to a nationally representative sample of nearly 300 U.S. high school computer science teachers. It describes the nature of high school computer science instruction and the extent to which teacher background, classroom factors, and school context predict the type of instruction students experience. Data from the study were analyzed using path modeling-a form of regression analysis that estimates both direct and indirect effects (i.e., through intermediary variables)-to examine relationships between teacher, classroom, and school factors, and the extent to which teachers (1) emphasize reform-oriented instructional objectives (e.g., learning about real-life applications of computer science) and (2) engage students in computer science practices (e.g., recognizing and defining computational problems). Sample findings include that students are most commonly engaged in activities related to testing and refining computational artifacts, but are less often engaged in aspects of computer science related to end users (e.g., create a computational artifact to be used by someone else). The path analysis highlights several factors that are related to greater engagement of students in the computer science practices, including teacher participation in professional development and the use of coherent instructional materials.more » « less
-
Abstract Recent instructional reforms in science education aim to change the way students engage in learning in the discipline, as they describe that students are to engage with disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and the practices of science to make sense of phenomena (NRC, 2012). For such sensemaking to become a reality, there is a need to understand the ways in which students' thinking can be maintained throughout the trajectory of science lessons. Past research in this area tends to foreground either the curriculum or teachers' practices. We propose a more comprehensive view of science instruction, one that requires attention to teachers' practice, the instructional task, and students' engagement. In this study, by examining the implementation of the same lesson across three different classrooms, our analysis of classroom videos and artifacts of students' work revealed how the interaction of teachers' practices, students' intellectual engagement, and a cognitively demanding task together support rigorous instruction. Our analyses shed light on their interaction that shapes opportunities for students' thinking and sensemaking throughout the trajectory of a science lesson. The findings provide implications for ways to promote rigorous opportunities for students' learning in science classrooms.more » « less
