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Disagreement is often perceived negatively, yet it can be beneficial for learning and scientific inquiry. However, students tend to avoid engaging in disagreement. Peer critique activities offer a promising way to encourage students to embrace disagreement, which supports learning as students articulate their ideas, making them available for discussion, revision, and refinement. This study aims to better understand how students express disagreement during peer critique within small groups and how that affects moving their inquiry forward. It explores 5th-grade students’ management of disagreement within a computer-supported collaborative modeling environment. Using conversation analysis, we identified various forms of disagreements employed by students when engaging with different audiences. We observed a tendency for students to disagree softly; that is, disagreement was implied and/or mitigated. Students’ resolution of both direct and soft disagreements effectively promoted their collective knowledge advancement, including building shared scientific understanding and improving their models, while maintaining a positive socio-emotional climate. These findings have implications for designing CSCL environments with respect to supporting students in providing and responding to peer critiques at the group level. 

In International Conference of Learning Sciences 2024 Proceedings 

Science skepticism challenges the trustworthiness of scientific knowledge. Researchers suggest that school science curricula should emphasize the epistemic practices realworld scientists use to generate claims, such as actively seeking contradictory evidence for explanatory models and comparing findings with peers. However, empirical evidence supporting the use of epistemic practices, and its potential impact on students’ trustworthiness of science remains limited. This study examines four ninth-grade biology students who designed experiments to understand a fictional viral outbreak using agent-based simulation data. They iteratively refined their designs and discussed with peers. Analysis of student worksheets and discussions reveals that students used three epistemic practices: considering multiple explanations, systematically evaluating evidence, and comparing findings with similar experiments. However, they struggled to revise their initial models when presented with conflicting evidence by their peers. These findings offer insights into how students engage with epistemic practices and their perceptions of science's trustworthiness. 

In International Conference of the Learning Sciences 2024 Proceedings 

Scholars have suggested that one way to promote informed decision making about pressing socioscientific issues is to incorporate epistemic practices in science curricula. However, a key factor in teaching with such curricula is whether and how teachers can adapt instruction from their routine teaching approaches. Through an adaptive expertise lens, in this study, we examine how two teachers, teaching with agent-based computational complex systems models, varied in their implementations of epistemic practices and how consequently students' performance on epistemic practices was impacted. Through qualitative analyses of two teachers’ implementation recordings, this study examines teachers’ adaptive expertise in curricular implementations that aim at promoting student epistemic practices and provides examples of high and low levels of adaptive expertise that result in distinct student classroom experiences. This study carries implications for future teacher professional development geared towards improving students' epistemic practices. 

ABSTRACT Scientific modeling is a core practice of scientific inquiry. Students' engagement in modeling can be enhanced by attending to epistemic criteria, which in science are standards used to evaluate the validity and accuracy of scientific models. While prior research has focused on students' development and use of epistemic criteria in scientific inquiry environments, less is known about students' metacognitive knowledge about why epistemic criteria matter—their metacognitive epistemic justifications. Investigating students' metacognitive knowledge of criteria can reveal their understandings of the criteria guiding scientific practice (such as modeling), their relative value, and their relationship to epistemic products. We present findings from clinical interviews of student dyads conducted at the end of the implementation of a fifth‐grade model‐based inquiry unit in which the class developed and used epistemic criteria for scientific models. Students' justifications of epistemic criteria revealed their metacognitive knowledge about why criteria, such as evidentiary fit, are important in modeling practice. We also identified themes in students' justifications for the relative importance of different epistemic criteria and the role such justifications played in resolving disagreements about epistemic matters. Our findings illustrate the potential value of engaging students in discourse about metacognitive justifications for epistemic criteria. 

An important goal of science education is promoting scientific literacy—the competence to interact with science as laypeople to solve problems and make decisions in their personal and community lives. This is made more challenging in an age of increasing science denialism. In this article, we discuss how to design learning environments for science education that can help students attain scientific literacy. We argue that science curricula should encompass lessons with two distinguishable foci. One focus engages students in understanding the reliability of science. The second focus engages students as laypeople interacting with science in the public sphere. We discuss these two curricular foci, presenting examples from our own work on designing and implementing instruction with the first focus.