pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
The influence of explicit nature of science and argumentation instruction on preservice primary teachers' views of nature of science

There exists a general consensus in the science education literature around the goal of enhancing learners' views of nature of science (NOS). An extensive body of research in the field has highlighted the effectiveness of explicit NOS instructional approaches in improving learners' NOS views. Emerging research has suggested that engaging learners in argumentation may aid in the development of their NOS views, although this claim lacks empirical support. This study assessed the influence of a science content course incorporating explicit NOS and argumentation instruction on five preservice primary teachers' views of NOS  using multiple sources of data including questionnaires and surveys, interviews, audio- and video-taped class sessions, and written artefacts. Results indicated that the science content course was effective in enabling four of the five participants' views of NOS to be improved. A critical analysis of the effectiveness of the various course components led to the identification of three factors that mediated the development of participants' NOS views during the intervention: (a) contextual factors (context of argumentation, mode of argumentation), (b) task-specific factors (argumentation scaffolds, epistemological probes, consideration of alternative data and explanations), and (c) personal factors (perceived previous knowledge about NOS, appreciation of the importance and utility value of NOS, durability and persistence of pre-existing beliefs). The results of this study provide evidence to support the inclusion of explicit NOS and argumentation instruction as a context for learning about NOS, and promote consideration of this instructional approach in future studies which aim to enhance learners' views of NOS.Arts, Education & Law Group, School of Education and Professional StudiesFull Tex
A study of laughter in science lessons

Laughter is a fundamental human phenomenon. Yet there is little educational research on the potential functions of laughter on the enacted (lived) curriculum. In this study, \ud
we identify the functions of laughter in a beginning science teacher’s classroom throughout her first year of \ud
teaching. Our study shows that laughter is more than a gratuitous phenomenon. It is the result of a collective \ud
interactive achievement of the classroom participants that \ud
offsets the seriousness of science as a discipline. Laughter, whereas it challenges the seriousness of science, \ud
also includes the dialectical inversion of the challenge: it simultaneously reinforces the idea of science as serious \ud
business
Globalization of science education : comment and a commentary

The globalized nature of modern society has generated a number of pressures that impact internationally on countries’ policies and practices of science education. Among these pressures are key issues of health and environment confronting global science, global economic control through multinational capitalism, comparative and competitive international testing of student science achievement, and the desire for more humane and secure international society. These are not all one-way pressures and there is evidence of both more conformity in the intentions and practices of science education and of a greater appreciation of how cultural differences, and the needs of students as future citizens can be met. Hence while a case for economic and competitive subservience of science education can be made, the evidence for such narrowing is countered by new initiatives that seek to broaden its vision and practices. The research community of science education has certainly widened internationally and this generates many healthy exchanges, although cultural styles of education other than Western ones are still insufficiently recognized. The dominance of English language within these research exchanges is, however, causing as many problems as it solves. Science education, like education as a whole, is a strongly cultural phenomenon, and this provides a healthy and robust buffer to the more negative effects of globalizatio
Attitudinal impact of hybridized writing about a socioscientific issue

The development of scientifically literate citizens remains an important priority of science education; however, growing evidence of students’ disenchantment with school science continues to challenge the realisation of this aim.  This triangulation mixed methods study investigated the learning experiences of 152 9th grade students as they participated in an online science-writing project on the socioscientific issue of biosecurity. Students wrote a series of hybridized scientific narratives, or BioStories, that integrate scientific information about biosecurity with narrative storylines. The students completed an online Likert-style questionnaire, the BioQuiz, which examined selected aspects of their attitudes toward science and science learning, prior to their participation in the project, and upon completion of the writing tasks. Statistical analyses of these results and interview data obtained from participating students suggest that hybridized writing about a socioscientific issue developed more positive attitudes toward science and science learning, particularly in terms of the students’ interest and enjoyment. Implications for research and teaching are also discussed
Guiding explanation construction by children at the entry points of learning progressions

Policy documents in science education suggest that even at the earliest years of formal schooling, students are capable of constructing scientific explanations about focal content. Nonetheless, few research studies provide insights into how to effectively provide scaffolds appropriate for late elementary‐age students' fruitful creation of scientific explanations. This article describes two research studies to address the question, what makes explanation construction difficult for elementary students? The studies were conducted in urban fourth, fifth, and sixth grade classrooms where students were learning science through curricular units that contained 8 weeks of scaffold‐rich activities focused on explanation construction. The first study focused on the kind and amount of information scaffold‐rich assessments provided about young students' abilities to construct explanations under a range of scaffold conditions. Results demonstrated that fifth and sixth grade tests provided strong information about a range of students' abilities to construct explanations under a range of supported conditions. On balance, the fourth grade test did not provide as much information, nor was this test curricular‐sensitive. The second study provided information on pre–post test achievement relative to the amount of curricular intervention utilized over the 8‐week time period with each cohort. Results demonstrated that when taking the amount of the intervention into account, there were strong learning gains in all three grade‐level cohorts. In conjunction with the pre–post study, a type‐of‐error analysis was conducted to better understand the nature of errors among younger students. This analysis revealed that our youngest students generated the most incomplete responses and struggled in particular ways with generating valid evidence. Conclusions emphasize the synergistic value of research studies on scaffold‐rich assessments, curricular scaffolds, and teacher guidance toward a more complete understanding of how to support young students' explanation construction. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 141–165, 201
The impact of an integrated approach to science and literacy in elementary school classrooms

This study investigates the efficacy of an integrated science and literacy approach at the upper‐elementary level. Teachers in 94 fourth grade classrooms in one Southern state participated. Half of the teachers taught the treatment unit, an integrated science–literacy unit on light and energy designed using a curriculum model that engages students in reading text, writing notes and reports, conducting firsthand investigations, and frequent discussion of key concepts and processes to acquire inquiry skills and knowledge about science concepts, while the other half of the teachers taught a content‐comparable science‐only unit on light and energy (using materials provided by their districts) and provided their regular literacy instruction. Students in the treatment group made significantly greater gains on measures of science understanding, science vocabulary, and science writing. Students in both groups made comparable gains in science reading comprehension. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 631–658, 201
Concurrent enrollment in lecture and laboratory enhances student performance and retention

Laboratories have been a cornerstone in teaching and learning across multiple scientific disciplines for more than 100 years. At the collegiate level, science laboratories and their corresponding lectures are often offered as separate courses, and students may not be required to concurrently enroll in both. In this study, we provide evidence that enrolling in an introductory laboratory concurrently with the corresponding lecture course enhances learning gains and retention in comparison to students who enroll in the lecture alone. We examined the impact of concurrent versus nonconcurrent enrollment on 9,438 students' withdrawal rates from and final grades in the general chemistry lecture at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor using multiple linear and binary logistic regression analyses, respectively, at a significance level of 0.05. We found that concurrent enrollment in the lecture and laboratory positively impacts (1) the odds of retention in the lecture by 2.2 times on average and (2) final lecture grades by up to 0.19 grade points on a 4.0 scale for the lowest‐scoring students according to university‐level mathematics and chemistry placement exam scores. These data provide important results for consideration by curriculum advisors and course planners at universities that do not require concurrent enrollment in general chemistry as well as other science courses. In the face of current budget cuts that threaten to shorten or eliminate laboratory experiences altogether at multiple educational levels, this study demonstrates the value of laboratories in promoting science learning and retention. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 659–682, 201
Emotional arousal of beginning physics teachers during extended experimental investigations

Teachers often have difficulty implementing inquiry-based activities, leading to the arousal of negative emotions. In this multicase study of beginning physics teachers in Australia, we were interested in the extent to which their expectations were realized and how their classroom experiences while implementing extended experimental investigations (EEIs) produced emotional states that mediated their teaching practices. Against rhetoric of fear expressed by their senior colleagues, three of the four teachers were surprised by the positive outcomes from their supervision of EEIs for the first time. Two of these teachers experienced high intensity positive emotions in response to their students’ success. When student actions / outcomes did not meet their teachers’ expectations, frustration, anger, and disappointment were experienced by the teachers, as predicted by a sociological theory of human emotions (Turner, 2007). Over the course of the EEI projects, the teachers’ practices changed along with their emotional states and their students’ achievements. We account for similarities and differences in the teachers’ emotional experiences in terms of context, prior experience, and expectations. The findings from this study provide insights into effective supervision practices that can be used to inform new and experienced teachers alike
Validity Evidence for Learning Progression‐Based Assessment Items That Fuse Core Disciplinary Ideas and Science Practices

This article evaluates a validity argument for the degree to which assessment tasks are able to provide evidence about knowledge that fuses information from a progression of core disciplinary ideas in ecology and a progression for the scientific practice of developing evidence‐based explanations. The article describes the interpretive framework for the argument, including evidence for how well the assessment tasks are matched to the learning progressions and the methods for interpreting students' responses to the tasks. Findings from a dual‐pronged validity study that includes a think‐aloud analysis and an item difficulty analysis are presented as evidence. The findings suggest that the tasks provide opportunities for students at multiple ability levels to show evidence of both successes and struggles with the development of knowledge that fuses core disciplinary ideas with the scientific practice of developing evidence‐based explanations. In addition, these tasks are generally able to distinguish between different ability‐level students. However, some of the assumptions in the interpretive argument are not supported, such as the inability of the data to provide evidence that might neatly place students at a given level on our progressions. Implications for the assessment system, specifically, how responses are elicited from students, are discussed. In addition, we discuss the implications of our findings for defining and redesigning learning progressions. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 50: 597–626, 2013
Establishing assessment scales using a novel disciplinary rationale for scientific reasoning.

The article argues that science assessment should change from an item-driven to a construct-driven practice and pay more attention to disciplinary scientific reasoning. It investigates assessment scales developed from a novel theoretical rationale, describing scientific reasoning as three fundamental practices (hypothesizing, experimenting, and evidence evaluation) and building on three types of knowledge (science content knowledge, procedural knowledge, and epistemic knowledge). The scale development follows a construct-driven approach by, first, detailing the knowledge involved and explaining progression; and second, operationalizing the theoretical construct into items and score criteria. The scales are trialled in a small-scale study. The outcome is a coherent and supportive validity argument for two sub-scales, but with a suggestion that merging these into one scale has higher validity. The main implication is rewriting rationales for many science assessments, including TIMSS, which emphasises domain-general reasoning, and NAEP and PISA, which pay attention to domain-specific reasoning but are unclear about the knowledge involved
“What comes to mind when you think of science? The perfumery!”: Documenting science‐related cultural learning pathways across contexts and timescales

In this paper, we explore the details of one youth's science‐related learning in‐ and out‐of‐school at the time of her participation in an ethnography of youth science and technology learning across contexts and over time. We use the Cultural Learning Pathways Framework to analyze the youth's interests, and the related sociocultural, historical, material, and affect‐laden practices in which she and her family participated. The following question guided our analysis: How do everyday moments—experienced across settings, pursuits, social groups, and time—result in scientific learning, expertise development, and identification? We found that this youth's interest in various aspects of the sciences was years in the making, embedded in situated events that were part of a space–time continuum bound by passion for the practices involved, influenced by specific cultural practices, and explored with the help of close family collaborators. We also found that school science activity in which the youth in question participated both supported and could have potentially constrained her science‐related cultural learning pathways. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 51: 260–285, 201
Science language Wanted Alive: Through the dialectical/dialogical lens of Vygotsky and the Bakhtin circle

Over the past two decades, science educators increasingly have become interested in the role of language in the learning of science and have drawn on the work of Bakhtin, among others, for understanding the dialogical nature of knowledge in a sociocultural framework. However, the nature of language and its relation to thinking have not substantially changed and, in many ways, are incommensurable with the cultural-historical, materialist dialectical underpinning of the original framing of the sociocultural and dialogical approaches in the theories of L. S. Vygotsky and M. M. Bakhtin and his circle (e.g., V. N. Voloꩮov). Most importantly, currently available analyses of science classroom talk do not appear to exhibit sufficient appreciation of the fact that words, statements, and language are living phenomena, that is, they inherently change in speaking. In this paper, I begin by working out the premise that language is a living phenomenon that changes in use. I then present two key insights on language-in-use that derive from the works of Vygotsky and the Bakhtin circle, which are used to develop a theoretical and methodological frame. These key insights and the theoretical aspects of this paper are exemplified with materials from a concept mapping session in a 12th-grade physics course. The proposed model has considerable implications for theorizing the relation between classroom talk and formal written genres of expression, and gives rise to many new research questions. 頲014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 51: 1049-1083, 2014Arts, Education & Law Group, School of Education and Professional StudiesFull Tex
Emotional climate and high quality learning experiences in science teacher education

The role of emotion during learning encounters in science teacher education is under-researched and under-theorized. In this case study we explore the emotional climates, that is, the collective states of emotional arousal, of a preservice secondary science education class to illuminate practice for producing and reproducing high quality learning experiences for preservice science teachers. Theories related to the sociology of emotions informed our analyses from data sources such as preservice teachers’ perceptions of the emotional climate of their class, emotional facial expressions, classroom conversations, and cogenerative dialogue. The major outcome from our analyses was that even though preservice teachers reported high positive emotional climate during the professor’s science demonstrations, they also valued the professor’s in the moment reflections on her teaching that were associated with low emotional climate ratings. We co-relate emotional climate data and preservice teachers’ comments during cogenerative dialogue to expand our understanding of high quality experiences and emotional climate in science teacher education. Our study also contributes refinements to research perspectives on emotional climate
Secondary School Students’ Reasoning About Evolution

This study examined age differences in young people’s understanding of evolution theory in secondary school. A second aim of this study was to propose a new coding scheme that more accurately described students’ conceptual understanding about evolutionary theory. We argue that coding schemes adopted in previous research may have overestimated students’ grasp of evolutionary concepts.Atotal of 106 students aged 12, 14, and 16 took part in individual interviews investigating their understanding of evolution. Using the newcoding scheme, wefound that while 16-year olds were more likely than 12-year olds to endorse scientific concepts when answering a question about finches, their understanding of natural selection, however, did not generalize to the other four questions. Furthermore, students began to incorporate relevant terminology (e.g., adapt, evolve, etc.) and structure their explanations using relevant language at around age 14. Students often used relevant terminology without having a more advanced understanding of evolutionary theory. Instead, they used the relevant terms in a colloquial rather than a scientific sense. Implications of the current findings for teaching and theory are discussed
Children's application of simultaneous and successive processing in inductive and deductive reasoning problems :  implications for developing scientific reasoning skills

The research reported in this paper was undertaken to obtain a better understanding of problem solving and scientific reasoning in 10-year-old children.  The study involved measuring children's competence at syllogistic reasoning and in solving a series of problems requiring inductive reasoning.  Children were also categorized on the basis of levels of simultaneous and successive synthesis.  Simultaneous and successive synthesis represent two dimensions of information processing identified by Luria in a program of neuro-psychological research.  Simultaneous synthesis involves integration of information in a holistic or spatial fashion whereas successive synthesis involves processing information sequentially with temporal links between stimuli.   Analysis of the data generated in the study indicated that syllogistic reasoning and inductive reasoning were significantly correlated with both simultaneous and successive synthesis.  However, the strongest correlation was found between simultaneous synthesis and inductive reasoning.  These findings provide a basis for understanding the roles of spatial and verbal-logical ability as defined by Luria's neuropsychological theory in scientific problem solving.  The results also highlight the need for teachers to provide experiences which are compatible with individual students' information processing styles
Orogenic plateau growth : expansion of the Turkish-Iranian Plateau across the Zagros fold-and-thrust belt.

[1] This paper shows how the Turkish-Iranian Plateau grows laterally by incrementally incorporating adjacent parts of the Zagros fold-and-thrust belt. The limit of significant, seismogenic, thrusting in the Zagros (Mw > 5) occurs close to the regional 1250 m elevation contour. The seismicity cutoff is not a significant bedrock geology boundary. Elevations increase northward, toward regional plateau elevations of ~2 km, implying that another process produced the extra elevation. Between the seismogenic limit of thrusting and the suture, this process is a plausibly ductile thickening of the basement, suggesting depth-dependent strain during compression. Similar depth-dependant crustal strain may explain why the Tibetan plateau has regional elevations ~1500 m greater than the elevation limit of seismogenic thrusting at its margins. We estimate ~68 km shortening across the Zagros Simply Folded Belt in the Fars region, and ~120 km total shortening of the Arabian plate. The Dezful Embayment is a low strain zone in the western Zagros. Deformation is more intense to its northeast, in the Bakhtyari Culmination. The orogenic taper (across strike topographic gradient) across the Dezful Embayment is 0.0004, and across the Bakhtyari Culmination, 0.022. Lateral plateau growth is more pronounced farther east (Fars), where a more uniform structure has a taper of ~0.010 up to elevations of ~1750 m. A >100 km wide region of the Zagros further northeast has a taper of 0.002 and is effectively part of the Turkish-Iranian Plateau. Internal drainage enhances plateau development but is not a pre-requisite. Aspects of the seismicity, structure, and geomorphology of the Zagros do not support critical taper models for fold-and-thrust belts