The vision of the Framework and NGSS requires important shifts in teaching approaches and instructional materials. We argue that this commitment to engaging learners in meaningful practice and supporting students' epistemic agency entails that we support coherence from the students' perspective. This coherence arises when students see their science work as making progress on questions and problems their classroom community has committed to address, rather than simply following directions from textbooks or teachers. We present an instructional model, storylines, to support this form of coherence. The storylines approach includes design principles for engaging students with phenomena and problems to elicit their own questions that teachers, with support of curriculum materials, use to guide the trajectory of their sensemaking. We describe how storylines organize cycles of engaging with phenomena, questions, and sensemaking to incrementally build, test, and revise explanatory models and design solutions. Storylines are supported by a collection of instructional routines and norms that provide strategies and tools to guide teachers' work with students around phenomena, questions, and sensemaking. The routines reflect strategies for eliciting questions from anchoring phenomena, navigation to engage students as partners in managing the direction of investigations, problematizing to help students find gaps in their work so far, and putting pieces together to support students in assembling what they have figured out. We present examples from elementary, middle, and high school storyline-based units awarded the NGSS design badge to illustrate the application of these design principles in the design and enactment of storyline-based units.

The vision for science teaching in the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards requires a radical departure from traditional science teaching. Science literacy is defined as three-dimensional (3D), in which students engage in science and engineering practices to develop and apply science disciplinary ideas and crosscutting concepts. This knowledge building presents many challenges for teachers. We describe a two-pronged program for scaling 3D science professional development (PD) across a state: (a) 24 teachers developed expertise in 3D learning and facilitating teacher study groups; (b) these peer facilitators led 22 study groups of teachers in 3D science activities, analyzing student learning, and investigating classroom interactions. We describe design approaches for supporting teacher and facilitator learning. We present analyses of teacher learning, including shifts in 3D science, beliefs, and pedagogical content knowledge that supports 3D science teaching, and consider implications for scalable design approaches for supporting science teacher learning.

OpenSciEd is an ambitious effort to implement the vision of the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards broadly across the United States. The premise of OpenSciEd is that high quality instructional materials can play a critical role in transforming science teaching and learning at a broad scale. To achieve its goal, this collaborative project is developing instructional materials for middle school science that support the shifts in practice required to achieve the outcomes called for by the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards at a large scale. The OpenSciEd Middle School Program development project is addressing the challenge of making large changes in practice at a large scale through attention to (1) who participates in design and development, and how; (2) providing explicit guidance for developers in a comprehensive design framework; and (3) a design and development process that ensures participation from the desired participants and adherence to the guidelines of the design framework. The resulting instructional materials have shown promise in external reviews and field tests, but their success in achieving the project's goals for transforming science will depend on the circumstances in which the program is implemented.

The ability of honey bees to evaluate differences in food type and value is crucial for colony success, but these assessments are made by individuals who bring food to the hive, eating little, if any, of it themselves. We tested the hypothesis that responses to food type (pollen or nectar) and value involve different subsets of brain regions, and genes responsive to food. mRNA in situ hybridization of c-jun revealed that brain regions responsive to differences in food type were mostly different from regions responsive to differences in food value, except those dorsal and lateral to the mushroom body calyces, which responded to all three. Transcriptomic profiles of the mushroom bodies generated by RNA sequencing gave the following results: (1) responses to differences in food type or value included a subset of molecular pathways involved in the response to food reward; (2) genes responsive to food reward, food type and food value were enriched for (the Gene Ontology categories) mitochondrial and endoplasmic reticulum activity; (3) genes responsive to only food and food type were enriched for regulation of transcription and translation; and (4) genes responsive to only food and food value were enriched for regulation of neuronal signaling. These results reveal how activities necessary for colony survival are channeled through the reward system of individual honey bees.

In this conceptual paper, we describe the approach in storylines that builds on principles of project-based learning and focuses on supports for making science learning coherent from the students’ perspective. In storylines, students see their science work as addressing questions and problems their class has identified. We present design principles that guide the teaching and enactment of storyline units and explore the connections of these principles to ideas of project-based science. We illustrate how these design strategies are reflected in a high school biology unit co-developed by teachers and researchers. We present student artifacts that document the agency students take on in this work. We then summarize results from earlier studies examining students’ learning and perceptions of coherence of their learning experiences.