1 On behalf of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, this lesson was prepared by Arizona State University’s Mars Education Program, under contract to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology. These materials may be distributed freely for non-commercial purposes. Copyright 2014; 2012; 2010; 2000. Last edited: April 24, 2014 Marsbound! Mission to the Red Planet

A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas

Engineering education research (EER) has been on the fast track since 2004 with an exponential rise in the number of Ph.D.s awarded and the establishment of new programs, even entire EER departments. The National Research Council’s Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER) report (National Research Council, 2012) captures the state-of-the-art advances in our understanding of engineering and science student learning and highlights commonalities with other science-based education research programs. The DBER report is the consensus analysis of experts in undergraduate education research in physics, chemistry, biology, geosciences, astronomy, and engineering. The study committee, chaired by Susan Singer, also included higher education researchers, learning scientists, and cognitive psychologists. A central aspect of the DBER report is the focus on and application of research in the education, learning, and social-behavioral sciences to science and engineering curricula design and teaching methods. Froyd, Wankat, and Smith (2012) identified five major shifts in engineering education in the past 100 years: 1. A shift from hands-on and practical emphasis to engineering science and analytical emphasis 2. A shift to outcomes-based education and accreditation 3. A shift to emphasizing engineering design 4. A shift to applying education, learning, and social-behavioral sciences research 5. A shift to integrating information, computational, and communications technology in education

Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in

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Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering.

Argumentation is a central goal of science education because it engages students in a complex scientific practice in which they construct and justify knowledge claims. Although there is a growing body of research around argumentation, there has been little focus on developing a learning progression for this practice. We describe a learning progression to understand both students' work in scientific argumentation and the ways in which the instructional environment can support students in that practice. This learning progression describes three dimensions: (1) instructional context, (2) argumentative product, and (3) argumentative process. In this paper, we compare four examples from elementary, middle, and high school science classrooms to explore the ways in which students' arguments vary in complexity across grade level and instructional contexts. Our comparisons suggest that simplifying the instructional context may facilitate students in engaging in other aspects of argumentation in more complex ways. The instructional context may also be used as a tool to support students in argumentation in new content areas and to increase the complexity of their written arguments, which may be weaker than their oral arguments. Furthermore, classroom norms play an important role in supporting students of all ages, including elementary students, in argumentation. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed94:765–793, 2010

A learning progression for scientific argumentation: Understanding student work and designing supportive instructional contexts

∗The book reviewed is Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Project 2061, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford (1993), pp. 448, $21‐95 (pbk), ISBN 0‐19‐508986‐3.

Benchmarks for Science Literacy: a review symposium∗

Understanding students' epistemologies of science have become a primary focus for scientific literacy. We want students to be able to reason about evidence and evaluate knowledge claims. This requires an understanding about the epistemology of science and inquiry practices. In this paper, we propose a functional approach for using students' epistemologies to guide inquiry practices. In our design, students use a set of criteria that reflects epistemologies of science and guides construction and evaluation of explanations in their scientific investigations. We use argumentation to create a need for students to use these criteria to compare and evaluate one another's explanations. This study takes place in a 7th grade project-based ecology unit. Our analysis shows that these criteria guide students as they construct and evaluate explanations. During this process, students enhance their epistemologies of science and the quality of their scientific work products.

Using students' epistemologies of science to guide the practice of argumentation

The Benefits of Scientific Modeling: Constructing, Using, Evaluating, and Revising Scientific Models Helps Students Advance Their Scientific Ideas, Learn to Think Critically, and Understand the Nature of Science

How Do Siamese Cats Get Their Color

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Using Learning Progressions to Map High School Student Understandings of Molecular Genetics

Science practices play a central role in meaningful learning. We transformed a college introductory biology course to more practice-based learning environment, in which students constructed knowledge about evolution through explanation and argumentation. These practices, also known as mechanistic reasoning, are a form of scientific inquiry characterized in part by a shift toward reasoning about causal mechanisms. We posit that engaging in these practices may promote a cognitive and social approach to evolution, thereby engaging affective and logic-driven pathways to students’ evolution acceptance. In the intervention, we integrated multiple activities and technological tools to foster students’ explanatory, mechanistic reasoning. This approach was inspired in part by Robbins and Roy’s (2007) inquiry-based teaching unit that yielded improvements in college students’ explanations and acceptance of evolution. In particular, our investigation promoted sense making, evaluating, argumentation, and consensus building while providing rich, meaningful learning about natural selection. This data-driven strategy engaged students in evolutionary phenomena directly, another avenue to promoting conceptual change. This chapter presents results across a spectrum of evolution literacy components, including (1) conceptual change around natural selection, (2) mechanistic reasoning related to natural selection, and (3) engagement in argumentation around data.

Lisa Kenyon

Papers

Using students' epistemologies of science to guide the practice of argumentation

The Benefits of Scientific Modeling: Constructing, Using, Evaluating, and Revising Scientific Models Helps Students Advance Their Scientific Ideas, Learn to Think Critically, and Understand the Nature of Science

How Do Siamese Cats Get Their Color

Using Learning Progressions to Map High School Student Understandings of Molecular Genetics

Transforming a College Biology Course to Engage Students: Exploring Shifts in Evolution Knowledge and Mechanistic Reasoning