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Science education researchers agree about the importance of evidence in science practices such as argumentation. Yet, disagreements and ambiguities about what counts as "evidence" in science classrooms pervade the literature. We argue that these ambiguities and disagreements can be viewed as falling along three fault lines: (i) the source of evidence, specifically, whether it must be first-hand; (ii) whether "evidence" must always be empirical; and (iii) the extent to which evidence is inferred, and what degree of inference transforms "evidence" into something else. In this paper, after showing how these three fault lines manifest in the literature, we argue that these three dimensions of disagreements and ambiguities are not confined to research and research-based curricula; they are also salient in teachers' classroom practice, as illustrated by a dramatic, multiday debate between a mentor teacher and her teacher intern. After establishing the salience of the three fault lines in both research and practice, we explore whether Next Generation Science Standard (NGSS) can provide a resolution to the teachers' debate and to the disagreements/ambiguities in the literature. Our analysis reveals that NGSS reproduces rather than resolves those three fault lines--but in doing so, it invites a resolution of a different type. Instead of providing a single, precise, context-independent definition of "evidence," NGSS implicitly reflects a defensible view that what counts as "evidence" depends on the epistemic aims of the practices in which the students are engaged. This implied context-dependency of what counts as good evidence use, we argue, could be made explicit in an addendum document clarifying aspects of NGSS. Doing so would provide valuable guidance to teachers, teacher educators, and researchers.

We analyze the identity trajectory of a single case study, Cassidy, within the physics community. We focus our analysis on two settings in the physics community: an undergraduate research experience, and undergraduate coursework. We use video data from three interviews (spanning roughly fifteen months) to longitudinally analyze shifts in participation. We discuss Cassidy's experience through two constructs: "normative identities," Cassidy's sense of the valued roles within physics, as well as "personal identity," who Cassidy is within the physics community and the extent to which she aligns with "normative identities." In attending to shifts in the alignment between personal and normative identities, we identify several "entry points," or salient events that open up new opportunities for participation.

Through analysis of a classroom lesson led by a decorated teacher, we illustrate how instructional practices favor students seeking empirical patterns at the expense of using mechanistic reasoning. In the lesson, when students spontaneously come up with hypothetical mechanisms to explain why a light bulb in an electric circuit does or does not light, the teacher, following the guidance of standardized curricula, redirects them toward pattern-seeking. We argue that this bias toward pattern-seeking in Chinese national standards and curricula, along with ambiguity in those documents on what an "explanation" is, sits in tension with students' productive abilities and propensities for engaging in mechanistic explanation. In discussion, we extend the argument to show a less severe but similar bias toward pattern-seeking in the United States' Next Generation Science Standards.

Among mathematics teacher educators, a consensus has emerged that exemplary teaching involves attention to students' thinking. This consensus stems, in part, from theoretical and empirical work highlighting the importance of teachers' being able to make thoughtful in-the-moment decisions, building on students' ideas to adjust the ongoing lesson. Since this in-the-moment flexibility draws in large part on teachers' noticing capabilities, mathematics education researchers have paid increasing attention over the past decade to key characteristics of teacher noticing and to ways to help teachers develop these skills and inclinations. In this paper, we explore how engaging teachers in annotating videos of mathematics classrooms can provide important insights into teacher noticing of students' mathematical thinking. We argue that, when used in particular ways, video tagging affords researchers and teacher educators the ability to examine the relationship between what grabs a teacher's attention and how teachers interpret the thinking displayed in those moments, and instructionally actionable feedback about how teachers are progressing in their attending to and interpreting of students' thinking, two related skills that may or may not develop in sync.

Mathematics and science education researchers focused on teacher education emphasize attention and responsiveness to student thinking as central to effective classroom practice. Being responsive to student thinking involves attending to the substance of students' ideas--the meaning students are making--and pursuing that thinking, adjusting the flow of instruction as needed. Yet, attention and responsiveness to student thinking is irregular and generally rare among novice teachers. In this theoretical paper, we argue that the irregularity of attention and responsiveness to student thinking, including variability within individual teachers' practice, can be explained by a framework grounded in teachers' localized "framings" of their classroom activity--their sense of "what is it that's going on here." Using analyses of classroom episodes across contexts and timescales to illustrate our claims, we demonstrate how a framing-anchored framework can coordinate and improve upon three common explanations for the irregularity of novice teachers' attention and responsiveness to student thinking: underdeveloped skills and/or knowledge for attending and responding, "transmissionist" beliefs about learning, and institutional constraints (and teachers' perceptions thereof). Building on this argument, we suggest that teacher educators can work with novice teachers' framings of their classroom activities as a generative anchor for supporting attention and responsiveness to student thinking in classroom settings.

Professional problem-solving practice in physics and engineering relies on mathematical sense making--reasoning that leverages coherence between formal mathematics and conceptual understanding. A key question for physics education is how well current instructional approaches develop students' mathematical sense making. We introduce an assessment paradigm that operationalizes a typically unmeasured dimension of mathematical sense making: use of calculations on qualitative problems and use of conceptual arguments on quantitative problems. Three assessment items embodying this calculation-concept crossover assessment paradigm illustrate how mathematical sense making can positively benefit students' problem solving, leading to more efficient, insightful, and accurate solutions. These three assessment items were used to evaluate the efficacy of an instructional approach focused on developing students' mathematical sense making skills. In a quasi-experimental study, three parallel lecture sections of first-semester, introductory physics were compared: two mathematical sense making sections, one with an experienced instructor and one with a novice instructor, and a traditionally taught section, as a control group. Compared to the control group, mathematical sense making groups used calculation-concept crossover approaches more often and gave more correct answers on the crossover assessment items, but they did not give more correct answers to associated standard problems. In addition, although students' postcourse epistemological views on problem-solving coherence were associated with their crossover use, they did not fully account for the differences in crossover approach use between the mathematical sense making and control groups. These results demonstrate a new assessment paradigm for detecting a typically unmeasured dimension of mathematical sense making and provide evidence that a targeted instructional approach can enhance engagement with mathematical sense making in introductory physics.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] In the "standard" physics education research curriculum-development model, researchers are cast primarily as producers of curricula and instructors are cast primarily consumers, i.e., adopters and adapters. We illustrate a complementary model in which researchers' curricular modules, and also their "pure" research unattached to curriculum development, can serve as instructionally generative fodder that inspires and loosely guides instructors in creating their own curricular materials. Drawing on experiences from our graduate student days, we show how particular curricula and research papers influenced our curriculum development and instruction in particular ways. We then argue that the physics education ecosystem could benefit if researchers were more intentional about creating potential "instructionally generative fodder," and we suggest ways to do so. Although not intended to replace the standard curriculum-development model, which has a history of producing effective tutorials and other curricular modules, our alternative model casts the researcher and instructor as co-equal contributors to the research-based yet creative process of curriculum generation.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] This paper proposes the rethinking of the division of labor between physics education research curriculum developers and classroom instructors. Historically, both curriculum developers and instructors have taken responsibility for fostering students' conceptual development, epistemological development, and other learning goals related to physics content knowledge and practices or process skills. By contrast, responsibility for fostering productive group dynamics has been taken up almost entirely by instructors. Tutorial and lab developers structure their materials to be used in small groups, but have not generally designed, tested, and refined their materials to minimize problematic group dynamics. In this paper, we argue that the written tutorial can and should do more to prevent negative group dynamics from arising. To make this claim plausible, we describe an example from our own experience. While revising a tutorial, we noticed some problematic dynamics emerging; one of the students was unfairly blamed for a simulation-setting mistake and was later left out of a conversation. We came up with hypotheses about factors that might have contributed to those dynamics. A few of those factors, we argue, could be addressed in part through tutorial revision. While acknowledging that instructors will always have more capacity and hence more responsibility than curriculum writers to foster productive group dynamics, we call for tutorial writers, during the testing and revision of their materials, to monitor how the tutorial impacts team dynamics and to be transparent (in publications and presentations) about how they modified the tutorial to address problematic dynamics they observed.

As scientific models of student thinking, learning progressions (LPs) have been evaluated in terms of one important, but limited, criterion: fit to empirical data. We argue that LPs are not empirically adequate, largely because they rely on problematic assumptions of theory-like coherence in students' thinking. Through an empirical investigation of physics teachers' interactions with an LP-based score report, we investigate 2 other criteria of good models: utility and generativity. When interacting with LP-based materials, teachers often adopted finer-grained perspectives (in contrast to the levels-based perspective of the LP itself) and used these finer-grained perspectives to formulate more specific, actionable instructional ideas than when they reasoned in terms of LP levels. However, although teachers did not use the LP-based materials in ways envisioned by LP researchers, the teachers' interactions with the score reports embodied how philosophers envision the fruitful use of good models of dynamic, complex systems. In particular, teachers took a skeptical, inquiring stance toward the LP, using it as an oversimplified starting place for generating and testing hypotheses about student thinking and using concepts from the model in ways that moved beyond the knowledge available in the LP. Thus, despite--and perhaps even because of--their empirical inadequacy, LPs have the potential to serve teachers as productive models in ways not envisioned by LP researchers: as tools for knowledge generation.

Background: While there has been increasing recognition of the importance of attending to students' views about what counts as knowing and learning a STEM field, surveys that measure these "epistemological" beliefs are often used in ways that implicitly assume the fields, e.g., "physics," to be a single domain about which students might have sophisticated or naïve beliefs. We demonstrate this is not necessarily the case and argue for attending to possible differences in students' epistemological beliefs across different sub-domains of physics. In modern physics and quantum mechanics courses for engineering and physics students, we administered a set of modified Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) items. Each selected item was turned into two items, with the word "physics" changed to "classical physics" in one and "quantum physics" in the other. Results: We found significant splits between students' survey responses about classical vs. quantum physics on some items, both pre- and post-instruction. In classical physics, as compared to quantum physics, students were more likely to report the salience of real-world connections and the possibility of combining mathematical and conceptual reasoning during problem solving. Conclusions: These findings suggest that attending to sub-domain specificity of students' beliefs about physics can be fruitful and ought to influence our instructional choices.

Problem solving in groups can be rich with tension for students. This tension may arise from conflicting approaches (conceptual and/or epistemological) and/or from conflict emerging in the social relations among group members. Drawing on video records of undergraduate students working collaboratively, we use three cases to illustrate the multifaceted ways in which conflict arises--combining conceptual, epistemological, and socioemotional dynamics--and a specific way of managing the tension that can emerge from the multifaceted conflict, "taking an escape hatch." An escape hatch is a set of discourse moves through which participants close the conversational topic, thereby relieving tension, but before a conceptual resolution is achieved. We describe how epistemological twists and turns can be recruited as a means of managing the strong emotions experienced by the students, showing the coupling of emotion and epistemology in students' conceptual sense making during group work. We help to provide the groundwork necessary for instructors to notice, understand, and respond to one way in which conceptual--epistemological--social--emotional aspects of interaction are coupled in the emergence of tension, rather than narrowly targeting instructional moves based on only conceptual or epistemological considerations. Instead, instructors should often respond to--and help students become aware of--the emotional component of peer interactions and its entanglement with the "cold cognitive" conceptual and epistemological components.

Background: Quantitative researchers have noted the impact of mentoring and support programming for students from underrepresented groups in engineering. Qualitative researchers have also noted the importance of student agency in persistence through marginalization. Nevertheless, challenges and questions remain in identifying practices which are effective in supporting underrepresented students. Purpose: The study applies scholarship from critical theory and narrative as a new resource for approaching and understanding the process of supporting marginalized student agency. Method: A longitudinal interview study with a female undergraduate engineering student, Emilia, developed into a way for her to process marginalizing educational experiences and to develop new narratives that expanded her agency. After an in-depth member check, Emilia became a co-author contributing a post hoc account of the impact of these discussions. Results: Our analysis indicates that naming one's own oppression and creating narratives that repurpose and resituate stereotypical stories of oppression was a liberatory act for Emilia. We trace three marginalizing themes of the participant's experience that are subverted and resisted through the student co-constructed narrative. Conclusions: The paper builds theory for diversity support, suggesting critical theorizing may present a new form of agency not yet represented in the literature. It also points to possible value for student participants from qualitative methodologies exploring student experiences. Finally, it suggests supporting critical theorizing as a potential new orientation for diversity practitioners.

The relationship between ideology and learning remains insufficiently theorized and sparsely investigated in the learning sciences. Drawing on Stuart Hall's theorization of ideology, Judith Butler's notion of the (un)grievability of lives, and Sara Ahmed's construct of stickiness, we illustrate how insights from critical social theory are indispensable to understanding processes of learning and how perspectives from the learning sciences can enrich critical social theory. Through the analysis of a classroom discussion on the use of militarized drones in an undergraduate engineering ethics course, we show how ideological convergence among participants constructed locally significant categories of "civilian," "terrorist," and (un)grievability, which narrowed the possible trajectories for students' disciplinary learning in engineering and engineering ethics. Our analysis also shows that fleeting moments of ideological expansion offered opportunities for new learning; however, most of these instances of possibility were not sustained through the classroom discussion. We explicate how ideological convergences and expansions, as interactional achievements, profoundly matter for disciplinary learning and students' identities. In conclusion, we explore the implications of our findings for broader contexts of learning and for the field of the learning sciences.

Evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that cognition and emotions are coupled. Education researchers have also documented correlations between emotions (such as joy, anxiety, fear, curiosity, boredom) and academic performance. Nonetheless, most research on students' reasoning and conceptual change within the learning sciences and physics and science education research has not attended to the role of learners' emotions in describing or modeling the fine timescale dynamics of their conceptual reasoning. The few studies that integrate emotions into models of learners' cognition have mostly done so at a coarse grain size. In this study, toward the long-term goal of incorporating emotions into models of in-the-moment cognitive dynamics, we present a case study of Judy, an undergraduate electrical engineering and physics major. We show that shifts in the intensity of a fine-grained aspect of Judy's emotions, her annoyance at conceptual homework problems, co-occur with shifts in her epistemological stance toward differentiating knowledge about and the practical utility of real circuits and idealized circuit models. We then argue for the plausibility of a cognitive model in which Judy's emotions and epistemological stances mutually affect each other. We end with discussions on how models of learners' cognition that incorporate their emotions are generative for instructional purposes and research on learning.

Background: To explain educational problems such as student attrition, engineering education literature often focuses on the characteristics of individuals. In 2006, Ray McDermott and Hervé Varenne called for examining the "cultural construction" of educational problems, uncovering how multiple actors create and inscribe meaning to the educational problem. Purpose: We apply the cultural construction framework to examine how the educational problem of a student being "not cut out for engineering" is constructed within the context of a specific electrical engineering course. We focus on culturally taken-for-granted course structures, practices, and interactions, all of which produce the local enactment of this common educational problem. Method: We used ethnographic methods, including field-noted participant observations, one-on-one participant interviews, and video-recorded student work on lab assignments. Coordinating multiple data streams enabled us to question explanations couched in terms of individual ability and background, and to illustrate how ability hierarchies were constructed in the educational context. Results: Our findings illustrate how several mundane and seemingly innocuous aspects of engineering classrooms add up to construct the educational problem of our focal student as "not cut out" for engineering. Contributions to this construction included lecture seating positions, interactional norms in lecture and lab, and labels made meaningful through institutional and interactional processes. Conclusions: The forces at play in constructing educational problems for students are deeply embedded in institutions, disciplines, and society, making it difficult to generate a simple list of instructional interventions. We highlight cultural construction analysis as a potentially fruitful orientation for researchers and practitioners to find the particular sites and tools for local intervention.

Mathematical sense-making--looking for coherence between the structure of the mathematical formalism and causal or functional relations in the world--is a core component of physics expertise. Some physics education research studies have explored what mathematical sense-making looks like at the introductory physics level, while some historians and "science studies" have explored how expert physicists engage in it. What is largely missing, with a few exceptions, is theoretical and empirical work at the intermediate level--upper division physics students--especially when they are learning difficult new mathematical formalism. In this paper, we present analysis of a segment of video-recorded discussion between two students grappling with a quantum mechanics question to illustrate what mathematical sense-making can look like in quantum mechanics. We claim that mathematical sense-making is possible and productive for learning and problem solving in quantum mechanics. Mathematical sense-making in quantum mechanics is continuous in many ways with mathematical sense-making in introductory physics. However, in the context of quantum mechanics, the connections between formalism, intuitive conceptual schema, and the physical world become more compound (nested) and indirect. We illustrate these similarities and differences in part by proposing a new symbolic form, "eigenvector eigenvalue," which is composed of multiple primitive symbolic forms.

This study investigates how elite Turkish high school physics students claim to approach learning physics when they are simultaneously (i) engaged in a curriculum that led to significant gains in their epistemological sophistication and (ii) subject to a high-stakes college entrance exam. Students reported taking surface (rote) approaches to learning physics, largely driven by college entrance exam preparation and therefore focused on algorithmic problem solving at the expense of exploring concepts and real-life examples more deeply. By contrast, in recommending study strategies to "Arzu," a hypothetical student who doesn't need to take a college entrance exam and just wants to understand physics deeply, the students focused more on linking concepts and real-life examples and on making sense of the formulas and concepts--deep approaches to learning that reflect somewhat sophisticated epistemologies. These results illustrate how students can epistemically compartmentalize, consciously taking different epistemic stances--different views of what counts as knowing and learning--in different contexts even within the same discipline.

Undergraduate research can support students' more central participation in physics. We analyze markers of two coupled shifts in participation: changes in students' views about the nature of science coupled to shifts in self-efficacy toward physics research. Students in the study worked with faculty and graduate student mentors on research projects while also participating in a seminar where they learned about research and reflected on their experiences. In classroom discussions and in clinical interviews, students described gaining more nuanced views about the nature of science, specifically related to who can participate in research and what participation in research looks like. This shift was coupled to gains in self-efficacy toward their ability to contribute to research; they felt like their contributions as novices mattered. We present two case studies of students who experienced coupled shifts in self-efficacy and views about nature-of-science shifts, and a case study of a student for whom we did not see either shift, to illustrate both the existence of the coupling and the different ways it can play out. After making the case that this coupling occurs, we discuss some potential underlying mechanisms. Finally, we use these results to argue for more nuanced interpretations of self-efficacy measurements.

Many science education researchers have argued that learners' commitment to a substance (matter-based) ontology impedes the learning of scientific concepts that scientists typically conceptualize as processes or interactions, such as force, electric current, and heat. By this account, students' tendency to classify these entities as substances or properties of substances leads to robust misconceptions, and instruction should steer novices away from substance-based reasoning. We argue that substance-based reasoning can contribute to the learning and understanding of these very same physics concepts. Our case study focuses on a group of elementary school science teachers in our professional development program. Starting from substance-based metaphors for gravity, the teachers build a sophisticated explanation for why objects of different masses fall with the same acceleration. We argue that, for conceptual, epistemological, and affective reasons, instructional interventions should focus on tapping these productive substance-based resources when they arise rather than attempting to suppress them.

Background: Students' identities and sense of belonging in a program affect whether they stay in engineering. Research suggests that students' ways of knowing and beliefs about what counts as knowing and learning -- their personal epistemologies -- can be aspects of their identities, or sense of self as knowers and learners. Purpose/Hypothesis: Combining personal epistemology and identity theories suggests epistemological aspects of students' identities can influence whether they feel they belong in their engineering program. We have two research questions: Can a high-achieving engineering student be in danger of leaving a program because of a mismatch between epistemological aspects of his identity and his perceptions of the intellectual climate of their program? How does such a mismatch affect the student's day-to-day academic experiences? Design/Method: For three years, we followed Michael, an electrical engineering student, through interviews and in-class observations. From more than 12 hours of semistructured clinical interviews, more than 10 hours of videotaped discussion sections, and two in-class observations in lectures, we produced a case study to characterize epistemological aspects of Michael's identity and how they influenced his perception of his program. Results: Michael expressed and enacted a sense-making epistemology that is a fundamental aspect of his identity as a learner. Due to this sense-making aspect of Michael's identity, he often felt alienated from the intellectual climate of his program, and he considered leaving engineering. Conclusion: Researchers focused on student retention should attend to epistemological aspects of student identities. Instructors and administrators focused on retention should attend to the epistemological messages students hear from their programs.

Students' epistemological views about biology--their ideas about what "counts" as learning and understanding biology--play a role in how they approach their courses and respond to reforms. As introductory biology courses incorporate more physics and quantitative reasoning, student attitudes about the role of equations in biology become especially relevant. However, as documented in research in physics education, students' epistemologies are not always stable and fixed entities; they can be dynamic and context-dependent. In this paper, we examine an interview with an introductory student in which she discusses the use of equations in her reformed biology course. In one part of the interview, she expresses what sounds like an entrenched negative stance toward the role equations can play in understanding biology. However, later in the interview, when discussing a different biology topic, she takes a more positive stance toward the value of equations. These results highlight how a given student can have diverse ways of thinking about the value of bringing physics and math into biology. By highlighting how attitudes can shift in response to different tasks, instructional environments, and contextual cues, we emphasize the need to attend to these factors, rather than treating students' beliefs as fixed and stable. (Contains 2 figures and 2 footnotes.)