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We examine how a unique professional learning experience for teachers, which consists of an opportunity to (a) co-design a new instructional model intended to give students opportunities to participate in scientific argumentation, (b) develop instructional materials based on the new model, and then (c) use the materials inside their classrooms, is related to changes in teacher beliefs and teaching practices over time. These cases suggest participation in this type of professional learning experience altered these teachers' beliefs and these changes were guided by their experiences inside the classroom when teaching lessons with these new instruction materials. Our findings indicate that teacher reflection on their instructional decisions and the nature of student activity during lessons using the materials had a great influence on the beliefs and practices of these teachers. The implications of this finding suggest that an opportunity to develop instructional materials during a professional learning experience can foster a context for teachers to think about teaching and learning in new ways but any real change in teacher thinking and practices requires teachers to (a) use the materials they develop and then (b) problematise their current instructional practices.

Rarely are scientific phenomena isolated to a single discipline such as biology, chemistry, physics, Earth science, or others. Rather, these phenomena span multiple disciplines and often require bringing together content and understandings from multiple disciplines to engage with or explain the target phenomena. This study uses a model-based explanations framework to explore high school students' abilities to integrate science content from the disciplines of chemistry and Earth science within the context of generating models to explain a local phenomenon--the urban heat island effect. Students experienced a multiweek instructional unit as part of a larger integrated curriculum that brings together chemistry and Earth science content and features local phenomena to engage students in the scientific practice of modeling. Quantitative and qualitative findings from this study demonstrate students' emerging proficiency with integrating science content, practices, and crosscutting concepts to explain a phenomenon. Students' model-based explanations tended to include phenomenon-relevant components (e.g., physical features of the phenomenon) and sequences (e.g., cause--effect relationships), but tended to include relatively fewer explanatory mechanisms. Implications related to the utility of modeling as a practice-based venue for integrating content from diverse science disciplines are also discussed.

This study focuses on how the quality of students' arguments and their conceptions of data and evidence change as a result of experiencing two types of laboratory courses, one employing a scripted inquiry approach and the other employing argument-driven inquiry. The analysis explores the connections between students' conceptions of data and evidence and how the development of those conceptions may be influenced by the nature of the instruction they received, and further explores the connections between students' conceptions of data and evidence and how those ideas manifest in the changes in students' arguments related to socioscientific issues (SSI). Results indicate that students experiencing argument-driven inquiry generated higher quality SSI arguments postintervention when compared to the scripted inquiry group. Additionally, the students' conceptions of data shifted toward more empirical and scientific notions of data being generated through systemic investigation. Students' conceptions of evidence were influenced by the instruction they received, with students in the argument-driven inquiry group developing more nuanced descriptions of evidence as being integral to supporting claims and arguments. Implications related to laboratory instruction and supporting students' development of science literacy are discussed.

Scientific argumentation is an essential activity for the development and refinement of scientific knowledge. Additionally, fostering argumentation related to scientific concepts can help students engage in a variety of essential scientific practices and enhance their science content knowledge. With the increasing prevalence and emphasis on argumentation skills within the current standards movement, i.e. Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards, teachers need access to productive approaches for engaging their students in this essential practice of science in order to promote students' development toward science proficiency. This article provides teachers with one possible instructional model, Argument-Driven Inquiry, that will allow them to structure their laboratory activities to support students' engagement in scientific argumentation while also emphasizing the disciplinary core ideas and cross cutting concepts of science.

Scientific argumentation, as conceptualized in the literature, emphasizes the importance of students' social and epistemic interactions for the purposes of developing and critiquing knowledge. Students, therefore, must understand the scientific criteria for evaluating the quality of argumentative structures and interactions. Yet, a question remains as to how students' knowledge about a science concept influences their ability to productively engage in argumentative discourse about a topic. This study explored several hypotheses related to the interaction between the depth of students' familiarity with content involved in an argumentative interaction and their understanding of the scientific practice itself. Multiple triads of students completed a set of two argumentation tasks at two times during the year, in between which students had the opportunity to learn about scientific argumentation and one of the two chemistry concepts focused on in the tasks. Video records of the students' discussions were analyzed to determine the quality of their argumentation. The results indicate that a positive relationship does exist between content familiarity and high quality argumentation, especially as it relates to students epistemic and social interactions. Additional analyses suggest that students can also take up and use epistemic characteristics of scientific argumentation in contexts where the science content is unfamiliar. Further results and their implications are discussed.

This study examines what students enrolled in the honors and general sections of a high school biology course offered at the same school learn when they have an opportunity to participate in a broad or narrow range of science practices during their laboratory experiences. The results of our analysis suggest that the students enrolled in the general sections of the course made similar or larger gains than the students enrolled in the honors section of the course in their abilities to plan and carry out an investigation, argue from evidence, and write a science-specific persuasive essay when these students had an opportunity to participate in a broad range of science practices. These findings suggest that laboratory experiences that give students an opportunity to participate in a broad range of science practices, although considered challenging by many teachers, have the potential to help all students become more proficient in science. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study for classroom instruction and educational policy.

Students need to learn how to engage in several scientific practices in order to be considered proficient in science. Many of these practices are needed to evaluate scientific claims made in the popular media. Yet, there are few instruments available that science educators can use to assess whether students can apply what they know about scientific practices in order to critique scientific media reports. In response to the need for valid, reliable, and informative assessments of knowledge of scientific practices that are not embedded in complex scientific content, an instrument was developed and validated over two iterations. This assessment satisfied construct, content, face, concurrent, and discriminant validity checks for different undergraduate student populations, and the item analysis demonstrated that each item was informative for this subset of the general population. This instrument will allow instructors to compare student performance across space and time, promoting and supporting research on the teaching and learning of scientific practices.

This quasi-experimental study uses a pre-/post-intervention approach to investigate the quality of undergraduate students' arguments in the context of socioscientific issues (SSI) based on experiencing a semester of traditional "cookbook" instruction (N?=?79) or a semester of argument-based instruction (N?=?73) in the context of an undergraduate science laboratory course. Findings from this study indicate that the students experiencing the argument-based instruction generated significantly better arguments than students in the traditional course after the intervention. Specifically, the students in the treatment group were better able to include rationales in their arguments supporting their stance on the SSI task. Implications for instruction in undergraduate science laboratory courses, including the use of scientific argumentation as a means of enhancing science proficiency and science literacy, are discussed.

This study examined how students' science-specific argumentative writing skills and understanding of core ideas changed over the course of a school year as they participated in a series of science laboratories designed using the Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI) instructional model. The ADI model is a student-centered and writing-intensive approach to laboratory instruction. The study was conducted in two middle school and two high school courses offered at a university-affiliated laboratory school located in the southeast USA. The intervention took place over two semesters and consisted of at least eight laboratory activities in each course. Student learning gains were measured using a science content assessment and a science-specific argumentative writing assessment that were administered at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year. Changes in student performance on the two assessments over time indicate that the students' science-specific argumentative writing skills and their understanding of core scientific ideas improved over the course of intervention. Furthermore, students who participated in a greater number of ADI activities demonstrated greater and more consistent improvement in their writing. The implications of the study describe ways to enhance students' science proficiencies during school science laboratories and include recommendations for future research.

A "Framework for K-12 Science Education" (NRC 2012) and subsequent "Next Generation Science Standards" (Achieve Inc. 2013) will substantially influence the teaching and learning of science in the United States. The "Framework," for example, calls for students to learn about several practices related to scientific argumentation. These practices--arguing from evidence (practice #6) and obtaining, evaluating,and communicating information (practice #8)--are embedded throughout the "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS"). This article will help teachers understand the nature of scientific argumentation so they can help students reach the new benchmarks. It will also explain challenges students face when they participate in scientific argumentation and will list resources teachers can use to help students learn from and about scientific argumentation in the classroom.

The SCALE-UP studio physics class involves the physical redesign of a classroom to encourage more collaborative interactions and student-centered teaching, an approach shown to increase student learning on several different measures. However, research into the contextual issues involved in implementing a studio course using the SCALE-UP model remains limited. The research presented here explores the impact of situational factors on the implementation and maintenance of a research-based instructional innovation in a large research university. The specific focus of this investigation was the development and implementation of a studio version of an introductory physics course sequence at a large research university in the southeast United States using the SCALE-UP model. Interview, observation, and artifact data (including documents and Email conversations), collected over a period of two years, were analyzed. Using the "Teacher Centered Systemic Reform" framework, the data were analyzed to develop themes describing forces that both encouraged and restricted the growth of this studio course. Influential forces operated at the classroom, department, university, and broad cultural levels. The results demonstrate the importance of considering the specific nature of innovations implemented and their alignment with desired learning goals and outcomes. The importance of faculty collegiality emerges as a critical departmental force, as does administrative intervention at the department and university level. Broader, societal conversations related to improving undergraduate science education also provided important contextual framing for the change effort studied. The findings highlight important factors to contemplate when undertaking similar change efforts and recommendations from this study are offered for consideration. (Contains 2 tables and 7 figures.)

This article describes the development and the initial validation of an instrument that can be used to assess teachers' beliefs about science teaching and learning. The instrument, which is called the Beliefs About Reformed Science Teaching and Learning (BARSTL) questionnaire, draws on the current national science education reform efforts in order to define a traditional-reformed teaching and learning belief continuum that can be used to map teachers' beliefs. The reliability and validity of the instrument were examined using a multiple perspective approach. The psychometric properties of the BARSTL suggest that it is a valid and reliable instrument for measuring prospective elementary teachers' beliefs about science education.(Contains 5 tables and 1 figure.)

This article describes a new instructional model called Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI). This model is designed to promote student engagement in processes of investigation design and scientific argumentation. In this study, the ADI instructional model is compared with a more traditional approach to instruction across 16 laboratory sections of introductory college chemistry. Data was collected pre- and post-intervention to address students' conceptual understanding of chemistry, ability to use evidence and reasoning to support a conclusion, and attitude toward chemistry. Results indicated significant differences between instructional approaches on measures of students' abilities to use evidence and reasoning while no significant differences in conceptual understanding were observed. Students in the ADI sections, particularly females, had a significantly more positive attitude toward chemistry, according to postcourse measures. Implications for the use of the ADI instructional model are discussed. (Contains 2 figures and 3 tables.)

This unit is a different and fun way to engage students with an extremely important topic, climate change, which cuts across scientific and nonscientific disciplines. While climate change itself may not be listed in the curriculum of every science class, the authors contend that such a unit is appropriate for virtually any science curriculum. Classes that focus on Earth/space science and physical science lend themselves naturally to such a unit, due to the focus on big ideas that appear in each, such as radiation, temperature, phases, phase changes, and so on. Courses with a life science emphasis could easily incorporate a climate change unit with perhaps a change in emphasis to that of biogeographic distribution (e.g., polar bears). Also, this exploration into climate change emphasizes many of the scientific practices and crosscutting concepts stressed in the National Research Council's (NRC's) "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" (2011). The authors also suggest that the incorporation of an activity that lends itself to modeling the greenhouse effect may prove useful, particularly in stressing the scientific practice and crosscutting concept of scientific modeling. (Contains 12 figures.)

This exploratory study examines how a series of laboratory activities designed using a new instructional model, called Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI), influences the ways students participate in scientific argumentation and the quality of the scientific arguments they craft as part of this process. The two outcomes of interest were assessed with a performance task that required small groups of students to explain a discrepant event and then generate a scientific argument. Student performance on this task was compared before and after an 18-week intervention that included 15 ADI laboratory activities. The results of this study suggest that the students had better disciplinary engagement and produced better arguments after the intervention although some learning issues arose that seemed to hinder the students' overall improvement. The conclusions and implications of this research include several recommendations for improving the nature of laboratory-based instruction to help cultivate the knowledge and skills students need to participate in scientific argumentation and to craft written arguments. (Contains 4 tables and 8 figures.)

The Generate an Argument instructional model was designed to engage students in scientific argumentation. By using this model, students develop complex reasoning and critical-thinking skills, understand the nature and development of scientific knowledge, and improve their communication skills (Duschl and Osborne 2002). This article describes the focus and purpose of each step of the model, the nature of classroom activity during each step, and how to support and guide students as they work. (Contains 3 figures and 1 online resource.)

Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI) is an instructional model that enables science teachers to transform a traditional laboratory activity into a short integrated instructional unit. To illustrate how the ADI instructional model works, this article describes an ADI lesson developed for a 10th-grade chemistry class. This example lesson was designed to help students understand the nature of chemical reactions and develop the abilities needed to do scientific inquiry. The lesson also gives students an opportunity to improve their writing and verbal communication skills, their understanding of the writing process, and their ability to interpret evidence and reason in a scientific manner. (Contains 3 figures and 1 online resource.)

This article describes an instructional model that science teachers can use to promote and support student engagement in scientific argumentation. This model is called the evaluate-alternatives instructional model and it is grounded in current research on argumentation in science education (e.g., Berland and Reiser 2009; McNeill and Krajcik 2006; Osborne, Erduran, and Simon 2004; Sampson and Clark 2009; Sandoval and Reiser 2004). To illustrate how this model works inside the classroom, a lesson that was developed for an eighth-grade integrated science course is described. This lesson was designed to help students understand the transfer of energy and develop the abilities to do scientific inquiry. (Contains 7 figures.)

A lesson plan is presented for middle school science and cross-disciplinary writing based on the Argument Driven Inquiry (ADI) instructional model and the U.S. Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which includes group work on studying pill bugs.

The article offers step-by-step instructions for using the Generate an Argument instructional model designed for science classes.