Journal of Research in Science Teaching最新文献

For students who face marginalization in a discipline, counterspaces are safe spaces of refuge that allow them to express their multiple identities and foster their sense of belonging. While prior qualitative work on counterspaces has highlighted how and why these spaces support marginalized students, there is little quantitative work that provides systemic evidence on broad counterspace initiatives formed to support students' disciplinary sense of belonging. In physics, a discipline that is deeply androcentric, two potential counterspaces have emerged for undergraduate women: the Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) and Women in Physics Groups (WiPG). Drawing on survey data collected from undergraduate women in physics programs across the country who were registering for the 2018 CUWiP (N = 1388), we used structural equation modeling to test the effect of earlier participation in CUWiP and WiPG on students' current sense of belonging and interest in physics. We also tested the mediating effect of believing that there are serious gender issues in physics since these spaces have been found to increase students' consciousness of gender bias. The results revealed a significant positive direct effect of CUWiP and WiPG on sense of belonging. A more complex story emerged for indirect effects where believing in serious gender issues can negatively affect sense of belonging if interest in physics is not positively reinforced. Overall, the findings clearly provide quantitative evidence that broad diversity conference and affinity group initiatives, such as CUWiP and WiPG, can act as counterspaces that bolster belonging for women in disciplines like physics where they are marginalized. However, activities in these spaces should also continue to foster students' unique disciplinary interests.

One reason for the widespread use of the energy concept across the sciences is that energy analysis can be used to interpret the behavior of systems even if one does not know the particular mechanisms that underlie the observed behavior. By providing an approach to interpreting unfamiliar phenomena, energy provides a lens on phenomena that can set the stage for deeper learning about how and why phenomena occur. However, not all energy ideas are equally productive in setting the stage for new learning. In particular, researchers have debated the value of teaching students to interpret phenomena in terms of energy forms and transformations. In this study, we investigated how two different approaches to middle school energy instruction—one emphasizing energy transformations between forms and one emphasizing energy transfers between systems—prepared students to use their existing energy knowledge to engage in new learning about a novel energy-related phenomenon. To do this, we designed a new assessment instrument to elicit student initial ideas about the phenomenon and to compare how effectively students from each approach learned from authentic learning resources. Our results indicate that students who learned to interpret phenomenon in terms of energy transfers between systems learned more effectively from available learning resources than did students who learned to interpret phenomena in terms of energy forms and transformations. This study informs the design of introductory energy instruction and approaches for assessing how students existing knowledge guides new learning about phenomena.

This study examines the often-heard assumption in science teaching that some pedagogies in science classrooms can serve a dual function—improve the student-perceived teacher quality and improve students' affinity to STEM professions. We asked 7507 freshmen from 40 colleges in the United States, selected in a stratified random procedure, to retrospectively report their experiences of a list of 32 pedagogies during high school biology, chemistry, and physics classes. Our survey also asked students to rate each teachers' quality and to report their Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics career interests at the beginning and end of high school. We found that teachers' chosen pedagogies, on the whole, had a stronger impact on how students rated them than on students' career interests. Interestingly, we also found considerable differences between the disciplines.

In teacher professional development (PD), grouping teachers with varying levels of experience can be a productive and empowering way to stimulate the exchange and co-generation of content and pedagogical knowledge. However, less experienced teachers can face socio-emotional risks when engaging in collaborative science content reasoning tasks with more experienced colleagues, and these risks may impact the collaborative experience of both parties and the learning environment in teacher PD. This exploratory case study examines the process of productively navigating socio-emotional risks and interpersonal tensions encountered by a veteran and pre-service physics teacher during one episode of discussing physics content. We use a single term, comfort-building, to encapsulate discursive moves that result in increased feelings of comfort and safety by the participants. Comfort-building includes moves that serve to mitigate social risk, ease tension, and avoid discomfort, as well as those geared toward finding common ground and co-navigating challenges. These moves can carve out conversational space for teachers to more confidently face risks associated with being accountable to the physics content knowledge and engage in discipline-based conversations more deeply. The presented case was followed by video-stimulated individual interviews to determine how consciously the teachers connected their participation to explicit risk and comfort. This case study highlights an affective dimension for consideration in the continued study and facilitation of science teacher PD, especially programs that bring together teachers with a variety of backgrounds and skill sets.

Multiple external representations (MERs) are useful for teaching complex content in science education. An open question is whether there is an especially effective way to sequence MERs. On the one hand, the so-called concreteness fading approach suggests starting instruction with more concrete representations and proceeding stepwise to more idealized representations. The effectiveness of this fading approach is, however, supported mainly by studies in mathematics education, while the results in physics are equivocal. On the other hand, presenting different representations simultaneously may support linking, that is, the comparison and contrast of representations, which may benefit learning. In an experimental classroom study (N = 187), we compared concreteness fading and simultaneous presentation of MERs for learning a challenging physics content in high school, namely, Faraday's law. We found no significant differences between conditions in posttest performance, and an equivalence test with bounds d = −0.5 to 0.5 showed that both approaches performed equally. The results align with previous findings questioning the superiority of concreteness fading over other ways of sequencing MERs. Therefore, facilitating students' understanding of a complex physics content may involve more than determining the optimal order of presenting MERs. We discuss limitations of the present study and implications for future research and practice.

The Framework for K-12 Science Education set an ambitious goal of broadening participation in science learning for all students. Meeting this vision will involve supporting teachers in making meaningful connections with the cultural and linguistic resources their students bring to school; in essence, developing pedagogies that frame these resources as assets important to learning. In this manuscript, we present a qualitative case study of one community of high school science teachers who participated in a year-long professional learning focused on formative assessment co-design related to natural selection. Findings show that the process of formative assessment co-design surfaced both deficit- and asset-based statements about students' contributions. Teachers were more likely to share deficit-based statements as compared to facilitators, whose statements were more asset-based. This was particularly true with reference to students' prior knowledge and linguistic resources. At the same time, our analysis suggests that teachers were more likely to share more asset-based framings of learners when practicing for and reflecting on enactment of formative assessment tasks. These findings suggest that supportive co-design environments can encourage teachers to take more asset-oriented views of learners. We discuss the implications of these findings for professional learning and science classroom practice.

This is a study intended to address white supremacy in science education. To accomplish this, we describe how one White intern, Boaz, learned to teach science in anti-racist ways. By detailing how whiteness mattered in his learning to teach, we demonstrate that whiteness is potentially constant in White peoples' learning to teach science in anti-racist ways. However, we conclude by suggesting that critical whiteness ambitious science teacher education, a merging of critical whiteness pedagogy with practice-based science teacher education provides a potential way to address the presence of whiteness in science teacher education.

This article examines two teachers' efforts to re-organize their science teaching around issues of environmental and food justice in the urban community where they teach through the pedagogical approach of community-oriented framing. We introduce this approach to teachers' framing of phenomena in community as supporting students' framing of phenomena as personally and locally relevant. Drawing on classroom observations of remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, we took an analytic approach that characterized features of classroom discourse to rate community-oriented framing at the lesson level. Results show that teachers framed phenomena as both social and scientific, and as rooted in students' lived experiences, with classroom activities designed to gather localized and personalized evidence needed to explain or model phenomena. We also share examples of how Black and Latinx students took up this framing of phenomena in their classroom work. By providing a detailed description of the launch and implementation of activities, findings illustrate how community-oriented framing supported teachers in posing local questions of equity and justice as simultaneously social and scientific, and helping students perceive science learning as meaningful to their everyday lives. Community-oriented framing offers a practical means of designing locally and socially relevant instruction. We contribute to justice-centered science pedagogies by conceptualizing transformative science learning environments as those in which students understand their goal in science class as understanding, and later addressing, inequities in how socioscientific issues manifest in their community.