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This article explores heterogeneity as fundamental to learning. Inspired by Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, a design team consisting of an experienced classroom teacher and 2 researchers investigated how a class of 3rd and 4th graders came to understand disciplinary points of view on heat, heat transfer, and the particulate nature of matter. Through a series of planned and unplanned encounters, official versions of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the particulate view of matter were juxtaposed with varied domains of experience of heat transfer and phase change in water. We analyze the children's discourse to examine how they populated these phenomena with meaning and what they learned in the process. We conclude by describing key principles and a conundrum that emerged from this research.

Calls for the improvement of science education in the USA continue unabated, with particular concern for the quality of learning opportunities for students from historically nondominant communities. Despite many and varied efforts, the field continues to struggle to create robust, meaningful forms of science education. We argue that ‘settled expectations’ in schooling function to (a) restrict the content and form of science valued and communicated through science education and (b) locate students, particularly those from nondominant communities, in untenable epistemological positions that work against engagement in meaningful science learning. In this article we examine two episodes with the intention of reimagining the relationship between science learning, classroom teaching, and emerging understandings of grounding concepts in scientific fields – a process we call desettling. Building from the examples, we draw out some key ways in which desettling and reimagining core relations between nature and culture can shift possibilities in learning and development, particularly for nondominant students.

In this experimental study, 20 multiple-choice test items from the Massachusetts Grade 5 science test were linguistically simplified, and original and simplified test items were administered to 310 English learners (ELs) and 1,580 non-ELs in four Massachusetts school districts. This study tested the hypothesis that specific linguistic features of test items contributed to construct-irrelevant variance in science test scores of ELs. Simplifications targeted specific linguistic features, to identify those features with the largest impacts on ELs’ test performance. Of all the linguistic simplifications used in this study, adding visual representations to answer choices had the largest positive effect on ELs’ performance. These findings have significant implications for the design of multiple-choice test items that are fair and valid for ELs.

We report a study of the effects of a collaborative inquiry approach to science on language minority students' (middle and high school) learning. The emphasis in this approach is on involving the students, most of whom have never studied science before and some of whom have had very little schooling of any kind, in \"doing science\" in ways that practicing scientists do. The question addressed in this study is, To what extent do students appropriate scientific ways of knowing and reasoning as a result of their participation in collaborative scientific inquiry? The focus of our analysis was on changes in students' conceptual knowledge and use of hypotheses, experiments, and explanations to organize their reasoning in the context of two think aloud problems. In September the students' reasoning was nonanalytic and bound to personal experience. They responded as if they were being asked to answer questions in a reading comprehension task. In contrast, by June they reasoned in terms of a larger explanatory system, used hypotheses to organize and give direction to their reasoning, and demonstrated an awareness of the function of experimentation in producing evidence to evaluate hypotheses.

This book re-examines the dichotomy between the everyday and the disciplinary in mathematics and science education, and explores alternatives to this opposition from points of view grounded in the close examination of complex classroom events. It makes the case that students' everyday experience and knowledge in their entire manifold forms matter crucially in learning sciences and mathematics. The contributions of 13 research teams are organized around three themes: 1) the experiences of students in encounters with everyday matters of a discipline; 2) the concerns of curriculum designers, including teachers, as they design activities intended to focus on everyday matters of a discipline; and 3) the actions of teachers as they create classroom encounters with everyday matters of a discipline. As a whole the volume reflects the shift in the field of educational research in recent years away from formal, structural models of learning toward emphasizing its situated nature and the sociocultural bases of teaching and learning. At least two trends--increasing awareness that formal theories can be useful guides but are always partial and provisional in how they disclose classroom experiences, and the widespread availability of video and audio equipment that enables effortless recording of classroom interactions--have reoriented the field by allowing researchers and teachers to look at learning starting with complex classroom events rather than formal theories of learning. Such examinations are not meant to replace the work on general theoretical frameworks, but to ground them in actual complex events. This reorientation means that researchers and teachers can now encounter the complexity of learning and teaching as lived, human meaning-making experiences. Immersion in this complexity compels rethinking assumptions about the dichotomies that have traditionally organized the field's thinking about learning. Further, it has important implications for how the relationship between theory and practice in understanding teaching and learning is viewed. Everyday Matters in Science and Mathematics: Studies of Complex Classroom Events is an important resource for researchers, teacher educators, and graduate students in mathematics and science education, and a strong supplemental text for courses in these areas and also in cognition and instruction and instructional design. Contents: Preface. Introduction. Part I: Experiences of Students in Encounters With Everyday Matters of Science and Mathematics. S. Monk, \"Why Would Run Be in Speed?\" Artifacts and Situated Actions in a Curricular Plan. R. Nemirovsky, Mathematical Places. C. Valentine, T.P. Carpenter, M. Pligge, Developing Concepts of Justification and Proof in a Sixth-Grade Classroom. B. Warren, M. Ogonowski, S. Pothier, \"Everyday\" and \"Scientific\": Rethinking Dichotomies in Modes of Thinking in Science Learning. Part II: Actions of Teachers as They Participate in the Creation of Classroom Encounters With Everyday Matters of Science and Mathematics. K. McClain, The Mathematics Behind the Graph: Discussions of Data. E. Forman, E. Ansell, Creating Mathematics Stories: Learning to Explain in a Third-Grade Classroom. M.L. Blanton, J.J. Kaput, Instructional Contexts That Support Students' Transition From Arithmetic to Algebraic Reasoning: Elements of Tasks and Culture. Part III: Concerns of Curriculum Designers as They Develop Activities Intended to Focus on Everyday Matters of Science and Mathematics. E. Feijs, Constructing a Learning Environment That Promotes Reinvention. J.L. Cartier, C.M. Passmore, J. Stewart, J.P. Willauer, Involving Students in Realistic Scientific Practice: Strategies for Laying Epistemological Groundwork. A.S. Rosebery, \"What Are We Going to Do Next?\": Lesson Planning as a Resource for Teaching. B.L. Sherin, F.S. Azevedo, A.A. diSessa, Exploration Zones: A Framework for Describing the Emergent Structure of Learning Activities.

We examine science learning and teaching as intercultural processes taking place at powered boundaries of race, culture, language, and subject matter. Through close analysis of a classroom event, we describe the ways in which a group of teachers and researchers came to understand the experience of an African American male student in a 7th grade science class. The group developed a layered interpretation by unpacking subtle ways in which subject matter, student sense-making, and implicit structures of race, culture, and language based in Whiteness as privilege interacted to shape unfolding interactions. Building from their analyses, they also imagined pedagogical practices for disrupting racialized orders of inequality in the science classroom. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Learning sciences is an interdisciplinary field that studies teaching and learning. The sciences of learning include cognitive science, educational psychology, computer science, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, and other fields. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, first published in 2006, shows how educators can use the learning sciences to design more effective learning environments - including school classrooms and also informal settings such as science centers or after-school clubs, on-line distance learning, and computer-based tutoring software. The chapters in this handbook each describe exciting new classroom environments, based on the latest science about how children learn. CHLS is a true handbook in that readers can use it to design the schools of the future - schools that will prepare graduates to participate in a global society that is increasingly based on knowledge and innovation.

A set of three component-specific instructional systems for improving critical reading skills was developed and evaluated. The skill components that were the focus of training had been shown in prior research to represent particular sources of processing difficulty for young adult, poor readers and, based on a model of component interaction, were predicted to have a potentially strong impact on the performance of other component processes. Each instructional system focused on developing automaticity in the performance of a particular skill: (a) perceptual encoding of multiletter units appearing within words (SPEED); (b) phonological decoding of orthographic information in words (RACER); and (c) use of context frames in retrieving and integrating word meanings (SKIJUMP). The SPEED evaluation study is described in Part 1. All subjects reached high levels of performance in perceptual encoding skills. In addition, improvements in perceptual encoding skills led to improvements in decoding and word recognition, following predicted patterns of component interaction.

This is the second of two articles that describe the development and evaluation of three component-specific instructional systems for improving critical reading skills. The skill components that were the focus of training have been shown in prior research to represent particular sources of processing difficulty for young adult, poor readers and, based on a model of component interaction, were predicted to have a potentially strong impact on the performance of other component processes. Part 1 presented the evaluation of SPEED, a system designed to develop automaticity in the ability to perceptually encode multiletter units that appear in words. Part 2 describes the evaluation of the RACER and SKI JUMP systems, which focus respectively on developing automaticity in phonological decoding of orthographic information in words and the use of context frames in retrieving and integrating word meanings. In both the RACER and SKI JUMP training studies, all subjects achieved highly accurate and efficient levels of performance in the skill that was the focus of training. Furthermore, SKI JUMP training had an impact on word analysis components and on a measure of inferential comprehension. An analysis of the patterns of transfer of skills acquired in training is presented, and conditions for optimizing skill integration are discussed.

In this chapter, we argue that learning and teaching are fundamentally cultural processes (Cole, 1996; Erickson, 2002; Lee, Spencer, & Harpalani, 2003; Rogoff, 2003). The learning sciences have not yet adequately addressed the ways that culture is integral to learning. By “culture,” we mean the constellations of practices historically developed and dynamically shaped by communities in order to accomplish the purposes they value. Such practices are constituted by the tools they use, the social networks with which they are connected, the ways they organize joint activity, the discourses they use and value (i.e., specific ways of conceptualizing, representing, evaluating and engaging with the world). On this view, learning and development can be seen as the acquisition throughout the life course of diverse repertoires of overlapping, complementary, or even conflicting cultural practices.Through participation in varied communities of practice, individuals appropriate, over time, varied repertoires of cultural practices. As youth make their rounds through the varied settings of their everyday lives – from home to school, mathematics class to English literature class, basketball team to workplace or church youth group – they encounter, engage, and negotiate various situated repertoires of practices. Each repertoire represents a particular point of view on the world, characterized by its own objects, meanings, purposes, symbols, and values (Bakhtin, 1981; Gee, 1990). Navigation among these repertoires can be problematic at any time in any place for any human being.