This article reports on our work of developing a learning progression focusing on K‐12 students' performances of using energy concept in their accounts of carbon‐transforming processes in socio‐ecological systems. Carbon‐transforming processes—the ecological carbon cycle and the combustion of biomass and fossil fuels—provide all of the energy for living systems and almost 90% of the energy for human economic activities. Energy, as a crosscutting concept across major disciplines, is a tool for analysis that uses the principle of energy conservation to constrain and connect accounts of processes and systems. Drawing on ideas from cognitive linguistics, the history of science, and research on students' energy conceptions, we identify two crucial practices that both scientists and students engage in when accounting for carbon‐transforming processes: association and tracing. Using association and tracing as progress variables, we analyzed student accounts of carbon‐transforming processes in 48 clinical interviews and 3,903 written tests administered to students from fourth grade through high school. Based on our analysis we developed a Learning Progression Framework that describes a progression from accounts that use energy as an ephemeral “force” that enables actors to make events happen to energy as a scientific tool for analysis. Successful students developed a sense of necessity with respect to accounts of carbon‐transforming processes—a sense that energy MUST be conserved and degraded in every individual process and in the system as a whole. This level of success was achieved by <3% of the students in our sample. Implications for science standards, curriculum, and instruction are discussed. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 1149–1180, 2012

To evaluate the recent advances in learning progression (LP) research and identify future research directions, we reviewed LP literature from 2006 to 2018. Through a systematic search of Web of Science databases and key journals, we located 130 LP articles published between 2006 and 2018. Among these articles, we reviewed 86 studies. The review was framed around three types of coherence that LPs can provide in a system of curriculum, instruction, and assessment: developmental, vertical, and horizontal coherence. Developmental coherence refers to the idea that LPs, as cognitive models, should describe development in students from intuitive thinking to scientific thinking. It provides a foundation for building the horizontal coherence (the alignment among curriculum, instruction, and assessment) and the vertical coherence (the linkage between classroom and large-scale assessments). The results of our review suggest significant advances in enhancing the developmental coherence. More specifically, existing LPs have captured the mechanisms of knowledge development and integrated knowledge and practice in different ways. Regarding the horizontal coherence, while the methodology for the development and validation of LPs has been established, limited attention has been given to LP-based interventions and teachers' understanding and use of LPs. Only one study explored LP's role in building vertical coherence. The review reveals a great need for future research (a) to develop LPs for scientific reasoning that cut across multiple science topics and disciplines, (b) to use LPs in instructional interventions, teacher education, and professional development, and (c) to use LPs to link classroom assessments with large-scale assessments.

This study examines to what extent elementary students use feedback loop reasoning, a key component of systems thinking, to reason about interactions among organisms in ecosystems. We conducted clinical interviews with 44 elementary students (1st through 4th grades). We asked students to explain how populations change in two contexts: a sustainable ecosystem and an ecosystem that is missing predators. We used an iterative process to develop a learning progression for feedback loop reasoning, and used the learning progression to code interview episodes. The study produces three findings. First, very few students recognised the cyclical relationships among populations in a sustainable ecosystem (Level 7). Second, very few students identified both reproduction and food as the factors affecting population in a context missing predators (Level 4). Finally, students' reasoning was inconsistent across the two contexts. We also discuss the implication of these findings for teaching and learning of food webs at elementary school.

This study developed learning progression-based measures of science teachers' content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The measures focus on an important topic in secondary science curriculum using scientific reasoning (i.e., tracing matter, tracing energy, and connecting scales) to explain plants gaining weight and exchanging gases. Using a design-based research approach, we conducted the research in four cycles. The findings reported in this article were based on the data collected in the last two cycles (year 2011-2012 and year 2012-2013). This study contains two parts. First, 194 teachers participated in professional development workshops and completed a teacher assessment measuring CK and PCK. A learning progression-based scoring system was developed for these measures. Second, a subgroup of 25 teachers participated in a teaching experiment. These teachers taught a learning progression-based unit on plant growth and functioning. Their students took written assessments both before and after the teaching intervention. In this process, validity evidence from multiple sources was obtained and analyzed to evaluate the claim that the assessment scores tell how well teachers understand the knowledge essential for teaching the science topic. This validity argument supports our interpretations that led to three results. First, teachers' overall performance on CK was a bit higher than PCK, but not significantly different. Second, two challenges confronting teachers are adaptively applying scientific principles and understanding students' intuitive ideas. Third, there was a statistically significant relationship between teachers' measured CK and PCK and students' learning from the plant unit. #

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