Stage-based views of teacher development hold that novice teachers are unable to attend to students' thinking until they have begun to identify themselves as teachers and mastered classroom routines, and so the first emphases in learning to teach should be on forming routines and identity. The authors challenge those views, as others have done, with evidence of novices attending to students' thinking early in their teaching and offer framing as an alternative perspective on whether and how teachers attend to student thinking. By this account, most teachers work in professional contexts that focus their attention on curriculum, classroom routines, and their own behavior, rather than on student thinking. An account of framing suggests an early, strong emphasis on attention to student thinking in teacher education.

We raise concerns about the current state of research and development in formative assessment, specifically to argue that in its concentration on strategies for the teacher, the literature overlooks the disciplinary substance of what teachers and students assess. Our argument requires analysis of specific instances in the literature, and so we have selected four prominent publications for consideration as examples. These, we show, pay little attention to the student reasoning they depict, presume traditional notions of ''content'' as correct information, and treat assessment as distinct from other activities of learning and teaching, even when they claim the contrary. We then offer an alternative image of formative assessment centered on attention to disciplinary substance, which we illustrate with an example from a high school biology class. Assessment, we contend, should be understood and presented as genuine engagement with ideas, continuous with the disciplinary practices science teaching should be working to cultivate. ß

ABSTRACT:When teachers or students assess the quality of ideas in science classes, they do so mostly based on textbook correctness; ideas are good to the extent they align with or lead to the content as presented in the textbook or curriculum. Such appeals to authority are at odds with the values and practices within the disciplines of science. There has been significant amount of attention to this mismatch in the science education research literature, primarily with respect to experimentation and argumentation as core disciplinary means of assessing ideas. In this article, we call attention to another aspect of scientific reasoning: a focus on causal mechanisms in explaining natural phenomena. We highlight examples and research from the history and philosophy of science to clarify what scientists mean by "mechanism" and to make the case for its centrality. We then present an excerpt from a second-grade class in which a student provides an incorrect mechanistic explanation, and the teacher gives priority to textbook correctness. As the conversation proceeds, the student shifts from mechanistic sensemaking to quoting terminology she does not understand. We argue that attention to mechanism in the classroom would better support student reasoning and better reflect disciplinary epistemology.

Typically, the scientiÞc method in science classrooms takes the form of discrete, ordered steps meant to guide students' inquiry. In this paper, we examine how focusing on the scientiÞc method as discrete steps affects students' inquiry and teachers' perceptions thereof. To do so, we study a ninth-grade environmental science class in which students Þrst reviewed a typical version of the scientiÞc method, then brainstormed about which sites on school grounds could be good earthworm habitats and how to test their ideas. Our discourse analysis explores the dynamics between the "steps" of the scientiÞc method and students' engagement in more authentic scientiÞc inquiry. We argue that focusing on the scientiÞc method as discrete steps can distract students from their ongoing, productive

Educators and policy makers have advocated for reform of undergraduate biology education, calling for greater integration of mathematics and physics in the biology curriculum. While these calls reflect the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of biology research, crossing disciplinary boundaries in the classroom carries epistemological challenges for both instructors and students. In this paper we expand on the construct of authenticity to better describe and understand disciplinary practices, in particular, to examine those used in undergraduate physics and biology courses. We then apply these ideas to examine an introductory biology course that incorporates physics and mathematics. We characterize how instructors asked students to use interdisciplinary tools in this biology course and contrast them with the typical uses of these tools in physics courses. Finally, we examine student responses to the use of mathematics and physics in this course, to better understand the challenges and consequences of using interdisciplinary tools in introductory courses. We link these results to the reform initiatives of introductory physics courses for life-science students.