Stage-based views of teacher development hold that novice teachers are unable to attend to students' thinking until they have begun to identify themselves as teachers and mastered classroom routines, and so the first emphases in learning to teach should be on forming routines and identity. The authors challenge those views, as others have done, with evidence of novices attending to students' thinking early in their teaching and offer framing as an alternative perspective on whether and how teachers attend to student thinking. By this account, most teachers work in professional contexts that focus their attention on curriculum, classroom routines, and their own behavior, rather than on student thinking. An account of framing suggests an early, strong emphasis on attention to student thinking in teacher education.

We raise concerns about the current state of research and development in formative assessment, specifically to argue that in its concentration on strategies for the teacher, the literature overlooks the disciplinary substance of what teachers and students assess. Our argument requires analysis of specific instances in the literature, and so we have selected four prominent publications for consideration as examples. These, we show, pay little attention to the student reasoning they depict, presume traditional notions of ''content'' as correct information, and treat assessment as distinct from other activities of learning and teaching, even when they claim the contrary. We then offer an alternative image of formative assessment centered on attention to disciplinary substance, which we illustrate with an example from a high school biology class. Assessment, we contend, should be understood and presented as genuine engagement with ideas, continuous with the disciplinary practices science teaching should be working to cultivate. ß

ABSTRACT:When teachers or students assess the quality of ideas in science classes, they do so mostly based on textbook correctness; ideas are good to the extent they align with or lead to the content as presented in the textbook or curriculum. Such appeals to authority are at odds with the values and practices within the disciplines of science. There has been significant amount of attention to this mismatch in the science education research literature, primarily with respect to experimentation and argumentation as core disciplinary means of assessing ideas. In this article, we call attention to another aspect of scientific reasoning: a focus on causal mechanisms in explaining natural phenomena. We highlight examples and research from the history and philosophy of science to clarify what scientists mean by "mechanism" and to make the case for its centrality. We then present an excerpt from a second-grade class in which a student provides an incorrect mechanistic explanation, and the teacher gives priority to textbook correctness. As the conversation proceeds, the student shifts from mechanistic sensemaking to quoting terminology she does not understand. We argue that attention to mechanism in the classroom would better support student reasoning and better reflect disciplinary epistemology.

Typically, the scientiÞc method in science classrooms takes the form of discrete, ordered steps meant to guide students' inquiry. In this paper, we examine how focusing on the scientiÞc method as discrete steps affects students' inquiry and teachers' perceptions thereof. To do so, we study a ninth-grade environmental science class in which students Þrst reviewed a typical version of the scientiÞc method, then brainstormed about which sites on school grounds could be good earthworm habitats and how to test their ideas. Our discourse analysis explores the dynamics between the "steps" of the scientiÞc method and students' engagement in more authentic scientiÞc inquiry. We argue that focusing on the scientiÞc method as discrete steps can distract students from their ongoing, productive

Educators and policy makers have advocated for reform of undergraduate biology education, calling for greater integration of mathematics and physics in the biology curriculum. While these calls reflect the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of biology research, crossing disciplinary boundaries in the classroom carries epistemological challenges for both instructors and students. In this paper we expand on the construct of authenticity to better describe and understand disciplinary practices, in particular, to examine those used in undergraduate physics and biology courses. We then apply these ideas to examine an introductory biology course that incorporates physics and mathematics. We characterize how instructors asked students to use interdisciplinary tools in this biology course and contrast them with the typical uses of these tools in physics courses. Finally, we examine student responses to the use of mathematics and physics in this course, to better understand the challenges and consequences of using interdisciplinary tools in introductory courses. We link these results to the reform initiatives of introductory physics courses for life-science students.

The Classroom Assessment Project to Improve Teaching and Learning (CAPITAL) set out to understand how teachers attempt to modify their classroom practices as they grapple with new ideas about using assessment in their own classrooms to improve learning. CAPITAL documented the classroom activities and discussions among groups of middle school science teachers over four years. Through the stories of two of the teachers in the project, this article describes some of the variations in how the teachers in the project integrated, adapted and incorporated assessment for learning into their everyday teaching practice. We see Louise draw upon her background as a scientist to use student work as data that drive her teaching decisions, and we see Anthony approach his assessment work within a curricular framework with the ultimate goal of influencing his colleagues in the school district. The variations between the two teachers are significant, emphasizing the highly contextualized and personal nature of change for teachers.

The rapid development of highly effective vaccines against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was a monumental achievement, yet a large fraction of the public rejected this means of defense, resulting in far too many preventable deaths. This response reflects a shocking failure of science to produce citizens who understand and respect scientific evidence, and it demands a rethinking of science education goals.

Scoring rubrics are widely employed across content areas and grade levels, including in high school biology classes. Besides regular external use within accountability systems, educators also have advanced their instructional use inside classrooms. In recent years, a consensus appears to be emerging in the educational literature that instructional use of rubrics is beneficial for student learning, and numerous examples in the research and practitioner literature establish their importance in teachers’ planning, instruction, and assessment. We examine this assumption through close analysis of students’ use of a scoring rubric in a high school biology classroom. We explore how instructional use of a scoring rubric influences biology teaching and learning activities, what messages about knowledge and learning such use conveys to students, and what influence such use may have on students’ emergent understandings of what constitutes quality in biological thinking and practice. Our analysis suggests that instructional use of scoring rubrics can actually undermine the very learning it is intended to support. We discuss an alternative way to help students understand what constitutes high-quality work, and we draw implications for science teacher education.