Katherine L. McNeill

TL;DR: Fading written scaffolds better equipped students to write explanations when they were not provided with support, and showed significant learning gains for students for all components of scientific explanation.

TL;DR: In this paper, a learning progression for scientific argumentation is described to understand both students' work and the ways in which the instructional environment can support students in that practice, and the learning progression describes three dimensions: instructional context, argumentative product, and argumentative process.

TL;DR: A learning-goals-driven design model for developing curriculum materials is presented, which combines national standards and a project-based pedagogical approach, and how these three characteristics help guide curriculum design, identify design issues in curriculum enactments, and guide the development of design solutions.

TL;DR: The authors examined what instructional practices teachers engage in when they introduce scientific explanation and whether these practices influence students' ability to construct scientific explanations during a middle school chemistry unit, and found that teachers' use of instructional practices can influence student learning of scientific explanations and that the effect of these instructional practices depends on the context in terms of what other instructional practices the teacher uses.

TL;DR: This paper analyzed the discourse in urban high school science classrooms in which the teachers used the same global climate change curriculum and found that between 19% and 35% of the discourse focused on scientific argumentation in that students were using evidence and reasoning to justify their claims, while only one teacher's classroom was characterized by student-to-student interactions and students explicitly supporting or refuting the ideas presented by their peers.