Journal of Research in Science Teaching最新文献

Science standards have played an increasingly central role in shaping the landscape of school science over the past several decades, as societies have endeavored to better educate scientifically literate citizens and prepare a technically capable workforce. Yet, evidence that standards have driven improvements in either the quality of instruction or student learning is scarce. We argue that the construction of science standards may unintentionally promote instruction that does not align with learning theory, and this may limit the potential impact of science standards on science teaching and learning. Using the lenses of constructivism, motivation, and situated cognition, we review and discuss the construction of science standards using the US Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) as an example. Based upon this review, we propose a path forward for reinventing science standards that organizes standards according to contemporary issues and contexts rather than disciplinary content ideas and prioritizes students' “informed agency” over “competence.” We argue that such an approach to constructing standards is more likely to promote instruction that aligns with learning theory and that more effectively supports instruction that reaches the societal and workforce goals espoused by current standards documents.

Our study explores how US science education has evaluated multilingual students' languages as deficits and/or assets by comparing them against normative ideals. As a raciolinguistic genealogy, the study situates current premises of language in science education (e.g., as problem versus resource) within epistemological practices shaping the field's own histories of colonial and segregated schooling. We examine key moments when US science education research marked students as Spanish-speaking, specifically within early 1900s segregated and colonial science instruction and mid-1900s compensatory and bilingual science education programs. Across these timepoints, we analyze how research positioned the Spanish of target students as a problem but also sometimes a strategic resource—one deemed useful in bringing them closer to universalized norms of productive citizenship. Extending prior scholarship, we historically trace four mechanisms distinguishing some students' language as already valuable versus others' as raw resources needing refinement toward a homogenized scientific ideal. This helps us consider the extent to which recent reforms are disrupting or maintaining these refinery mechanisms inherited from our segregated, colonial past. We amplify prior cautions by identifying how efforts to prove the utility of students' linguistic resources within existing principles of valuation may reject certain hierarchies or norms while inadvertently reinstating others—what we call the refinery paradox. Building on concerns raised in this journal's recent special issue, our discussion supports further deliberation into roles translanguaging might play in dismantling raciolinguistic hierarchies in science education within and beyond the United States.

Existing tools for measuring scientific curiosity often fail to capture its multifaceted, dynamic nature—particularly in early childhood, where behaviors are context-dependent, non-verbal, and emergent. These challenges limit our ability to understand and support young children's scientific engagement. Drawing upon two complementary theoretical frameworks, Loewenstein's information gap theory of curiosity and Gibson's affordance theory, this study sheds light on young children's scientific curiosity and inquiry capabilities by exploring their verbal (e.g., describing a phenomenon; asking questions) and non-verbal (e.g., moving closer, touching, smelling; exploring) behavioral responses in the course of their engagement in the Integrated Science Engagement Responsive Tasks (ISERT). The ISERT provides children with an authentic scientific environment that helps identify and assess the cognitive, emotional, and sensorimotor indications of children's scientific curiosity and inquiry capabilities. This study applied a mixed-method approach, analyzing quantitative and qualitative data gathered from 64 preschoolers (aged 4–6.5 years). The ISERT activities thrilled the children and provided an ecologically validated setting. The findings indicate that most participants exhibited rich repertoires of verbal and behavioral responses. The cognitive indications elicited from the children's ISERT responses were significant and varied. These results serve as additional evidence of the young participants' scientific curiosity and inquiry capabilities. However, the participants differed in their emotional and sensorimotor responses while executing the various scientific tasks. We propose the Exploration Qualities of Objects (EQO) concept. Gibson's theory explains how environments and objects invite action, while EQO shows how objects spark scientific inquiry to reduce information gaps. Items with higher EQO were selected more frequently, perceived as curiosity-arousing, and led to increased exploratory behaviors. An object's EQO can thus reflect the level of curiosity it generates. This paper discusses the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical implications for fostering young children's scientific curiosity and enhancing their inquiry capabilities.

Colonial monolingual norms are a present oppressive force within schooling spaces, with a direct assimilative target on the linguistic practices of historically marginalized peoples, histories, and knowledge systems. For racially minoritized multilingual refugee learners, the space of in-school science learning can be experienced as an involuntary detachment from linguistic wholeness, intergenerational ways of knowing, and community practices. Our work offers a disruption of the deficit-based narratives that leave the brilliances associated with multilingualism invisibilized. Based on facilitator reflections and video-based interaction analyses, our findings shed light on the pedagogy of whole languaging hearts that actively resist colonial and racialized linguistic norms and center social interactions and relations transcending divides across languages, geopolitical locations, and species. The pedagogy of whole languaging hearts was enacted to embrace how children and teachers located themselves within land-based networks of interrelated communities. We offer to look at this network intersectionally, lovingly, and relationally to imagine otherwise, refusing the predefined disciplinary possibilities for eco- and socially just science futures together. Extending further the literature on translanguaging, our article focuses on the transformative possibilities of languaging emerging from our work with diasporic refugee children hailing from the “Middle East,” which transcends the borders of the named languages of Arabic, Kurmanji, and English. With the pedagogical enactment of languaging with whole hearts, we demonstrate how teachers can open space for science teaching grounded in the lives and worlds of multilingual refugee children and in embodied interactions on the land. We argue that ways of coming to know sciences are inseparable from our sense of community, stories, and relations.

Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) is an approach to teaching that challenges the inequitable structures that create an education debt for minoritized students. Many studies of CRP in science education focus on teachers' philosophies and dispositions; fewer studies have focused on enacted teaching practice, such as the use of curricular resources. CRP requires that teachers take an oppositional stance toward curricula and actively reconstruct them to center the cultures of their students. In this study, we use ethnographic methods informed by Ladson-Billings' original work to investigate one teacher's implementation of a large-scale science curriculum in a Spanish-English dual-language immersion class that serves Latine students. We illustrate the teacher's enactment of the conceptions of CRP, showing how she drew from the curricular resources and also diverged from them at different grain sizes, including (a) in-the-moment divergence from prescribed teacher moves, (b) lesson-level divergence from curricular activities, and (c) unit-level divergence from curricular goals. These divergences reveal how the teacher translated her culturally relevant philosophies into unique classroom practices that she coconstructed with her students. In contrast to other approaches in science education that position curriculum as authoritative and ask teachers to implement it, often with fidelity, we instead argue that teachers should be supported to take a critical stance toward curriculum and diverge from it in ways that reflect their justice-oriented philosophies, like CRP.

We present a study that documented the participation of two high school Arab students in Israel in an extended (2-year) authentic physics inquiry that took place in a regional program located in a Hebrew-speaking kibbutz high school. The students' first language is Arabic, but they are fluent in Hebrew, and their inquiry was mentored by a Hebrew-speaking teacher-research-mentor (TRM) who speaks very little Arabic. None of the other students in the classroom spoke Arabic. The situational features of this case reflect the complex structure of uneven power relations between Hebrew and Arabic, between kibbutz and Arab schooling in Israel, and between teachers and students. Within this complex structure of uneven power relations, this study aimed to uncover the functions the deployment of Hebrew and Arabic fulfilled for these students during their engagement in the epistemic practices related to their scientific inquiry. The research approach combined ethnography with sociolinguistic discourse analysis of selected episodes. The findings suggest that the students' spontaneous shifts from Hebrew to Arabic while engaged in scientific epistemic practices often reflected challenges that are more sociocultural than linguistic. They imply that merely legitimizing multilingual discourse in monolingual classrooms may not be enough to support equitable science education, particularly when the students are members of a minoritized group. Teachers should be supported in becoming more attentive to their minoritized students' frames of participation, and researchers should be wary of automatically interpreting minoritized students' deployment of their minority language as merely indicating a difficulty expressing their thoughts in the majority language.