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ABSTRACT Although there is a push to provide more student agency in science classrooms, teachers and students may become frustrated when inquiry activities and equipment do not work as planned—teachers because of the time crunch to “cover” topics and students because of the perceived lack of value in activities that are “off task.” In classroom implementations of a data‐rich high school physics activity sequence as part of the InquirySpace 2 (IS2) project, numerous episodes of equipment troubleshooting were observed. Teachers questioned whether the time spent had disciplinary value. Students expressed concern regarding what, if anything, they were learning. This qualitative case study of one such episode considers students' activity in terms of their engagement with the “mangle of practice” and misalignments between their conceptual and material worlds, their exercise of epistemic agency in recognizing and repairing those misalignments, and their epistemic affect during and after the activity. Video analysis revealed all three aspects deeply intertwined with evidence of student engagement in multiple science practices. The students expressed their feelings about the episode immediately afterward and the teacher and IS2 observer when interviewed much later, at the end of the project. One reason for the negative perceptions of teacher and students may be that the alignments being explored were related to the instrumentation more than to the target phenomenon. This study argues that in such situations, students may not recognize or value science practices that emerge, and may need explicit support to reframe their activity as valid scientific practice. 

Abstract It is widely recognized that we need to prepare students to think with data. This study investigates student interactions with digital data graphs and seeks to identify what might prompt them to shift toward using their graphs as thinking tools in the authentic activity of doing science. Drawing from video screencast data of three small groups engaged in sensor‐based and computer simulation‐based experiments in high school physics classes, exploratory qualitative methods are used to identify the student interactions with their graphs and what appeared to prompt shifts in those interactions. Analysis of the groups, one from a 9th grade class and two from 11th/12th grade combined classes, revealed that unexpected data patterns and graphical anomalies sometimes, but not always, preceded deeper engagement with the graphs. When shifts toward deeper engagement did occur, transcripts revealed that the students perceived the graphical patterns to be misaligned with the actions they had taken to produce those data. Misalignments between the physical, digital, and conceptual worlds of the investigations played an important role in these episodes, appearing to motivate students to revise either their experimental procedures or their conceptions of the phenomena being explored. If real‐time graphs can help foster a sense in students that there should be alignments between their data production and data representations, it is suggested that pedagogy leverage this as a way to support deeper student engagement with graphs. 

We investigated whether and how learning of experimental inquiry can be facilitated with computer simulations. As a theoretical framework, we built upon Dewey’s concept of the continuum of inquiry and identified three types of requisite knowledge that provide support for, and evolve with, experimental inquiry. Preliminary findings from two teachers’ classrooms indicate that teacher framing styles identified in the classroom discourse may be a factor in explaining contrasting student experimentation behaviors. 

InquirySpace, a National Science Foundation funded project at the Concord Consortium brings independent experimentation and data analysis using sensors and free software into high school science classrooms. The project is in one classroom that practices full inclusion for ninth grade physics. Last year, nearly half of the students (9 of 20) were on IEPs for a variety of learning disabilities, including dyslexia, autism, and other health-related impairments. Two additional students also faced learning challenges but were not on individualized plans. The reading level of these students ranged from second grade to seventh grade. Effective accommodations are shared.