This article explores how students ’ epistemological ideas about the nature of science interact with their conceptual understanding of a particular domain, as reflected in written explanations for an event of natural selection constructed by groups of high school students through a technology-supported curriculum about evolution. Analyses intended to disentangle conceptual and epistemic aspects of explanation reveal that groups sought plausible causal accounts of observed data, and were sensitive to the need for causal coherence, while articulating explanations consistent with the theory of natural selection. Groups often failed to explicitly cite data to support key claims, however, both because of difficulty in interpreting data and because they did not seem to see explicit evidence as crucial to an explanation. These findings reveal that students have productive epistemic resources to bring to bear during inquiry, but highlight the need for an epistemic discourse around student-generated artifacts to deepen both the conceptual and epistemological understanding students may develop through inquiry. Inquiry-based approaches to science education emphasize processes of inquiry, such as asking questions, generating and interpreting data, and forming conclusions

ABSTRACT: Science education reforms consistently maintain the goal that students develop an understanding of the nature of science, including both the nature of scientific knowledge and methods for making it. This paper articulates a framework for scaffolding epistemic aspects of inquiry that can help students understand inquiry processes in relation to the kinds of knowledge such processes can produce. This framework underlies the design of a technology-supported inquiry curriculum for evolution and natural selection that focuses students on constructing and evaluating scientific explanations for natural phenomena. The design has been refined through cycles of implementation, analysis, and revision that have documented the epistemic practices students engage in during inquiry, indicate ways in which designed tools support students ’ work, and suggest necessary additional social scaffolds. These findings suggest that epistemic tools can play a unique role in supporting students ’ inquiry, and a fruitful means for studying students ’ scientific epistemologies.

This paper presents initial findings from our collaborative effort to understand the roles various kinds of scientific representations play in supporting students' epistemological learning in science, through their development of epistemic practices. We present concrete design principles for the development of representational tools that support students' inquiry and their development of scientific epistemic practices; and we sketch a framework for using such tools to support students' collaborative inquiry, both face-to-face and online. These principles elucidate what we have learned about the ways in which representational tools support students' articulation of their knowledge, evaluation and negotiation of those ideas with their peers, collaboration around the knowledge representations, and instructional practices that support such complex forms of inquiry. We first present a general overview of our meaning of epistemic practices and general design principles to promote them. Subsequent sections briefly describe how our various research efforts instantiate these design principles within knowledge representations and activities designed to guide students' use of these representations. EPISTEMIC PRACTICES IN SCIENCE

In this article, professional development in the context of the current reforms in science education is discussed from the perspective of developing teachers' practical knowledge. It is argued that reform efforts in the past have often been unsuccessful because they failed to take teachers' existing knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes into account. Teachers' practical knowledge is conceptualized as action-oriented and person-bound. As it is constructed by teachers in the context of their work, practical knowledge integrates experiential knowledge, formal knowledge, and personal beliefs. To capture this complex type of knowledge, multimethod designs are necessary. On the basis of a literature review, it is concluded that long-term professional development programs are needed to achieve lasting changes in teachers' practical knowledge. In particular, the following strategies are potentially powerful: (a) learning in networks, (b) peer coaching, (c) collaborative action research, and (d) the use of cases. In any case, it is recommended that teachers' practical knowledge be investigated at the start of a reform project, and that changes in this knowledge be monitored throughout the project. In that way, the reform project may benefit from teachers' expertise. Moreover, this makes it possible to adjust the reform so as to enhance the chances of a successful implementation.

A central goal of scientific explanation is to account for patterns of data. An important way to assess students' abilities to construct scientific explanations is to examine how they use data as evidence. A good deal of cognitive research has explored how students respond to specific pieces of data and evaluate them in terms of a current theory or belief. This work finds that, from a normative view, students often ignore data that they ought to consider when evaluating claims, or assimilate such data in ways that do not damage their current theories. Researchers differ on whether or not such reasoning reflects an epistemological stance that is fundamentally non-scientific, or is essentially reasonable and consistent with scientific practice. This study examines high school students' efforts to use complex, multi-faceted data sets to construct causal explanations of natural selection phenomena, consistent with the theory of natural selection. The study seeks answers to two questions. What data do students select to use as evidence for their explanations? How do they refer to specific data to justify particular causal claims? Content analyses of explanations examined how students referred to data as evidence: the features of inscriptions (e.g., graphs, field notes) they referred to, and the justifications they gave for the importance of specific data. Students largely cited relevant, but insufficient, data for claims, and preferred numerical data over textual field notes. These and other uses of evidence indicate not just students' understanding of what specific data mean, but their ideas about what counts as persuasive evidence. These findings highlight the need for instruction focused on epistemic criteria for good explanations, in addition to the conceptual relations ...

ABSTRACT: There appears to be an almost universal commitment among science educators to promote the goal of student understanding of the nature of science. Recent disagreements among philosophers of science and between philosophers and other groups such as scientists and science educators about the nature of science, however, leave classroom teachers in a quandry: If experts disagree about the nature of science, how should we decide what to teach students? In this article, the authors first reconsider what level of understanding of the nature of science students should experience so that they can become both intelligent consumers of scientific information and effective local and global citizens. Second, based on an analysis of the literature, it appears that there is a general agreement among science education stakeholders regarding a set of descriptors that can be used to judge which questions or fields of study are more scientific or less scientific than others. Therefore, we propose that most precollege teachers should attempt to teach students how to use these descriptors to judge the relative merits of knowledge claims instead of teaching a set of rules that attempt to demarcate science completely from nonscience. Finally, we suggest two classroom activities based on this proposal and draw some implications for

Conducting observational investigations of behaviors and processes is an important method for gen-erating scientific knowledge. This paper describes a methodology for assisting students in the processes of observational inquiry and theory articulation and its instantiation in a set of digital video tools. We describe a high school biology curriculum where students use these tools to investigate video clips of animal behavior and develop theories about how and why these behaviors evolved. We focus our discus-sion on an investigation model that scaffolds students through the processes of observing and explaining video as data and the computational and curricular supports that were designed to make these processes explicit. We conclude with a presentation of preliminary results to illustrate the types of explanations that emerged from working with the software and curriculum and a discussion of issues that emerged during the course of the research.

A long standing goal of science education in the United States has been that students develop an understanding of the nature of science, of what scientific knowledge is like and how it is constructed. Despite this interest, students continue to leave secondary schools with naïve views of the nature of science. Current science education reforms advocate inquiry as a way for students to learn about the nature of science as well as scientific concepts. Inquiry engages students in their own efforts to construct scientific knowledge, and several efforts to use technology to support inquiry have been effective at helping students understand important scientific concepts and develop certain skills of scientific reasoning. Still, there is no evidence that doing inquiry in school develops students’ understanding of the nature of science. The reason for this is twofold. First, assessments of students ’ ideas of the nature of science universally target professional science, rather than students ’ own efforts to do science. Students’ views on the nature of their own inquiry may be “scientific, ” but not be related to their views of professional science. Second, helping students to draw such relationships may depend upon an explicitly epistemic discourse in the classroom, centered on what students know and how they know it, and that connects their work to professional science. Technology can support such a discourse by helping students to generate artifacts from their inquiry structured to highlight epistemic issues. These epistemic tools should represent important epistemic forms of scientific knowledge that link to practices for making them. Most importantly, research on epistemological development must link students ’ practices of inquiry to their expressed beliefs about professional science.

The 21st century offers both a promise and a challenge. Remarkable advances in electronic technologies in general, and information technologies in particular, hold out the promise of new scientific discoveries, improved living standards, better communication, increased production, greater access to information and significant improvements in health and quality of life. However, many children, possibility the majority, face obstacles that stem from a lack of educational opportunity and quality health care as a result of poverty, overpopulation and violence. They will also bear the brunt of decreasing environmental quality, wider and increasingly brutal armed conflict and unequal opportunities between the sexes. These children, especially girls, will not be able to reach their potential. Consequently, preparing students for the 21st century should be one of the priorities of educational and political leaders around the world. UNESCO underscores the value of scientific and technological literacy as a universal requirement if people are not

� No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. � This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of without the publisher’s consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. � The correct price of this publication is the price printed on this page, Any revised price indicated by a rubber stamp or by a sticker or by any other means is incorrect and should be unacceptable.