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Engaging students in argument from evidence is an essential goal of science education. This is a complex skill to develop; recent research in science education proposed the use of simulated classrooms to facilitate the practice of the skill. We use data from one such simulated environment to explore whether automated analysis of the transcripts of the teacher's interaction with the simulated students using Natural Language Processing techniques could yield an accurate evaluation of the teacher's performance. We are especially interested in explainable models that could also support formative feedback. The results are encouraging: Not only can the models score the transcript as well as humans can, but they can also provide justifications for the scores comparable to those provided by human raters.

PurposeThis paper aims to examine three distinct aspects of authenticity that pre-service teachers (PSTs) experience when they engage with virtual classroom environments to develop their content-intensive instructional practice – task authenticity, student avatar authenticity and performance authenticity – and their perceptions about the usefulness of the simulated teaching experience to support their learning.Design/methodology/approachThis paper explored these conceptions of authenticity and usefulness within a larger research study whose goal was to develop virtual environment tools to help elementary PSTs learn how to engage in one ambitious teaching practice: facilitating discussions that engage students in argumentation. To examine these aspects of authenticity and usefulness, this paper used a general qualitative deductive analysis approach to examine data from 104 interviews with 26 case study teachers and examined patterns in PSTs’ perceptions within and across interviews and authenticity aspects.FindingsWhile these PSTs strongly value the utility of these tools to support their learning, findings point to variation in their perceptions of authenticity. Findings showed that most PSTs perceived the tasks as an authentic representation of the work of teaching. However, their perceptions of task authenticity did not always align with their perceptions of avatar or performance authenticity.Originality/valueThis paper argues that these three aspects of authenticity relate to, but expand upon, the broader notions of presence and plausibility noted in the literature on virtual environments and should be taken up more directly in future studies of users’ perceptions of virtual environments both within and outside of educational contexts.

Human-in-the-loop simulation is a valuable tool that can support novice teachers in learning how to lead classroom discussions. We ground our use of simulation in a theory of practice-based teacher...

To support science teachers in learning how to engage in ambitious teaching practices, teacher educators, professional development facilitators, and researchers need to develop a nuanced understand...

This chapter provides a set of recommendations for teacher educators interested in using simulated teaching experiences to support teacher learning of pedagogical practice in the post-COVID era. Built from existing research, the recommendations from the study come from lessons learned as five elementary mathematics and science teacher educators used a simulated teaching experience to support preservice teacher learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors begin by situating this work in the larger context of practice-based teacher education and then provide an in-depth description of how five teacher educators at different universities integrated a simulated teaching experience into their elementary mathematics or science methods course. The chapter ends with a discussion of lessons learned and how educator preparation programs and teacher educators can leverage the opportunities created by using simulated teaching experiences in the post-COVID era.

The demand for assessments of competencies that require complex human interaction is steadily growing as we move toward a focus on twenty-first century skills. As assessment designers aim to address this demand, we argue for the importance of a common language to understand and attend to the key challenges implicated in designing task situations to assess such competencies. We offer the descriptors coordinated, accumulated, and dynamic (CAD) as a way of understanding the nature of these competencies and the considerations involved in measuring them. We use an example performance task designed to measure teacher competency in leading an argumentation-focused discussion in elementary science to illustrate what we mean by the coordinated, accumulated, and dynamic nature of this construct and the challenges assessment designers face when developing performance tasks to measure this construct. Our work is unique in that we designed these performance tasks to be deployed within a digital simulated classroom env...

In order to create conditions for students’ meaningful and rigorous intellectual engagement in science classrooms, it is critically important to help science teachers learn which strategies and app...

This report describes efforts by a group of science teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and content specialists to conceptualize, develop, and pilot practice-based assessment items designed to measure elementary science teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT). The report documents the framework used to specify the content-specific teaching practices and instructional tools that are critical to the work that elementary science teachers engage in with students, curriculum, and instruction. Drawing on this framework, the report details the development process for practice-based assessment items designed to measure CKT elementary science in three content areas: (a) structure and properties of matter, (b) ecosystems, and (c) Earth's place in the universe. These practice-based assessment items address the various content challenges elementary science teachers face in their work and were designed to be used as a foundation for building large-scale assessments of elementary science teachers' CKT science. This report presents initial validity evidence examining the practice-based CKT science item characteristics using results from online administrations of these items to 250 upper elementary science teachers. Findings reveal that the majority of these new assessment items capture variability in elementary science teachers' performance and that a large proportion of the items differentiate moderately well, supporting a beginning proof-of-concept for the conceptualization and design of these practice-based CKT elementary science assessment items.

Teacher quality is at the center of today’s ardent discussions about the educational system, with calls for the reform and critical review of teacher development programs. There is no lack of activity in response to these calls. There are thousands of teacher education, induction, and professional programs in the U.S. which offer teachers a veritable carnival of options. But these options exist in a (non)system with little coherence or control. In this article, the authors outline the dimensions of the variability of teacher learning opportunities currently available, the unintended consequences of that variability, and the challenges faced by educators as we attempt to reform the system, respond to our critics, and offer teachers coherent learning experiences that lead to high quality teaching.

The elementary science teacher educators in this article set recognize the challenges that new science teachers face when they enter classrooms. They have developed frameworks and strategies aimed at helping the preservice teachers with whom they work become "well-started beginners" who are ready to address problems of science teaching. To do so, these educators purposefully engage the candidates in focused dialogue regarding challenges or problems of practice that they will likely face in their work. These challenges include (1) engaging in science, (2) organizing instruction, and (3) understanding students. The science teacher educators use a dialogic third space to help the preservice teachers reconsider and develop deeper understandings of these problems of practice. In this intro- duction, we point out some of the common themes that tie these articles together, including (a) a focus on problems of practice in elementary science teaching, (b) a focus on dialogue with preservice teachers about these problems of practice, (c) a commitment to developing tools and approaches that support principled reasoning about these problems of practice, and (d) a commitment to shared goals and methods for research on elementary science teacher education. We point to ways that these themes are addressed in the three articles. C � 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 93:678 - 686, 2009

Science education reform has long focused on assessing student inquiry, and there has been progress in developing tools specifically with respect to experimentation and argumentation. We suggest the need for attention to another aspect of inquiry, namely mechanistic reasoning. Scientific inquiry focuses largely on understanding causal mechanisms that underlie natural phenomena. We have adapted an account of mechanism from philosophy of science studies in professional science [Machamer, P., Darden, D., & Craver, C. F., (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67, 1–25] to develop a framework for discourse analysis that aids in identifying and analyzing students' mechanistic reasoning. We analyze a discussion among first-grade students about falling objects (1) to illustrate the generativity of the framework, (2) to demonstrate that mechanistic reasoning is abundantly present even in these young students, and (3) to show that mechanistic reasoning is episodic in their discourse. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed92:499–525, 2008