Learning science involves an ongoing process in which learners construct and reconstruct self‐explanations and evaluate their relative soundness. This work coordinates and aligns complementary methodological and theoretical approaches to learning to both unpack sensemaking and better understand the conditions that facilitate it. I conceptualize people's sense of what constitutes a good explanation as taking place along a multidimensional metric and discuss three dimensions of this metric that are central to the evaluation of explanations of phenomena in the physical world: (1) intuitive knowledge, (2) mechanism, and (3) framing. The study operationalizes each dimension in terms that can be empirically tracked in students’ talk, gestures, and social interactions. The power and function of the multidimensional metric is illustrated through its account of the evolution of self‐generated explanations of two seventh‐grade girls who attempt to understand why a plastic bottle shrinks when air is pumped out of it. The analysis demonstrates that the framework can explain conviction in an explanation, preference for one explanation over another, and the complex conditions that facilitate this change. Methodological and practical implications are discussed.

Pursuing both disciplinary authenticity and personal relevance in the teaching and learning of science in school generates tensions that should be acknowledged and resolved. This paper problematizes and explores the conceptualizations of these tensions by considering personal relevance, disciplinary authenticity, and common school science as three perspectives that entail different educational goals. Based on an analysis of the literature, we identify five facets of the tensions: content fidelity, content coverage, language and discursive norms, epistemic structure and standards, and significance. We then explore the manifestations of these facets in two different examples of the instruction and learning of physics at the advanced high school level in Israel and Italy. Our analysis suggests that (1) the manifestations of these tensions and their resolution are highly contextual. (2) While maintaining personal relevance and disciplinary authenticity requires some negotiation, the main tension that needs to be resolved is between personal relevance and common school science. (3) Disciplinary authenticity, when considered in terms of its full depth and scope, can be equipped to resolve this tension within the discipline. (4) To achieve resolution, teachers’ expertise should include not only pedagogical expertise but also a deep and broad disciplinary understanding.

No abstract

Research experience is increasingly considered an important component of science education at the secondary school and undergraduate levels. This paper presents a case study of students learning in a unique apprenticeship model in which students are engaged in long-term (18 month) open-ended research projects in physics that are done at the laboratory in school, and in which the project advisor is a physics teacher supported by a community of teacher-researchers. The goals of the study were to characterize what the students learned, how they perceived their inquiry and their role in it, the features of mentorship they received and the social-infrastructure in which they and their advisor functioned. Qualitative data were collected over a whole school year through interviews, weekly observations, and content analysis of the final research reports. Participants were the focus advisor, and some of his former and current project mentees. Data on the larger educational context were collected from other project advisors and their mentees. The study documented students' learning gains such as learning of scientific content and skills, internalization of scientific habits of thought as well as developing passion, interest, and agency with regard to science. It documented features of students' engagement that reflect deep involvement in the technical and epistemic aspects of the inquiry, and highlighted the specific features of mentorship, and the social infrastructure that fostered this learning and engagement. It concluded with a theoretical examination of the interaction between a cultural discipline (i.e., physics), the social infrastructure in which the advisor and the students function, the advisor's mentorship style, and the students' learning and engagement. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. #

No abstract

This article presents an approach to integrating public e-lectures on contemporary physics into a traditional high-school syllabus. This approach was used in a long-distance professional development course for in-service physics teachers. Each lecture was related to a specific obligatory syllabus chapter, and was accompanied by learner-centred activities. We provide a detailed description of an activity that explicates the scientific arguments that were presented in the lectures. Teachers appreciated the approach and reported that the lectures and activities updated and broadened their knowledge of physics and contributed to their understanding of the nature of science (NOS).

Many large scientific projects and scientific centres incorporate some kind of outreach programme. Almost all of these outreach programmes include public scientific lectures delivered by practising scientists. In this article, we examine such lectures from the perspectives of: (i) lecturers (7) who are practising scientists acknowledged to be good public lecturers and (ii) audiences composed of high-school students (169) and high-school physics teachers (80) who attended these lectures. We identify and discuss the main goals as expressed by the lecturers and the audiences, and the correspondence between these goals. We also discuss how the lecturers' goals impact on the design of their lectures and examine how the lecture affects audiences with different attitudes towards (and interests in) physics. Our findings suggest that the goals of the participating lecturers and the expectations of their audiences were highly congruent. Both believe that a good public scientific lecture must successfully communicate state-of-the-art scientific knowledge to the public, while inspiring interest in and appreciation of science. Our findings also suggest that exemplary public scientific lectures incorporate content, structure and explanatory means that explicitly adhere to the lecturers' goals. We identify and list several design principles.

Students of physics, even at the undergraduate level, often perceive common sense and the use of mathematical formalisms in problem solving as disconnected activities. We present an ethnographic account of a case study, a year-long research apprenticeship of an 11 th grade physics student. The analysis examined the development of the student's understanding a mathematical equation as a model for a physical phenomenon, his use of that mathematization as a tool and as an object for sense making, and how these were nurtured by the mentor. Our analysis suggests that this process can be paralleled to the development of reading comprehension and that it involves the deciphering of the explicit and implicit meaning of the equation. We also show that using physics equations in this manner is not intuitive, and requires an epistemological change that needs to be necessitated for students.