Despite myriad attempts over the years to design curricula with logical ordering and connections, concerns persist that students view science as a body of prescribed information to memorize. In this essay, we argue that attempts to build coherence into the curriculum reflect fundamental and enduring misconceptions about the nature of coherence itself. Using examples of prominent curriculum projects over the past decade, we argue that premeditated coherence, the kind of coherence that is planned and designed for students, may inhibit students’ learning to seek coherence for themselves. We conclude with an approach to curriculum and assessment that emphasizes students’ epistemic agency in seeking coherence.

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A persistent concern within physics education is students' apparent failure to check the reasonableness of their answers. In an effort to better understand how students' capacity for checking solutions develops, this paper examines data on solution checking in an upper-level undergraduate electricity and magnetism course. All students demonstrated the ability to check answers in multiple ways, but showed variability in how they chose to do so, with checking units the most easily activated check, and numerical values strikingly underutilized.

Visions of Next Generation Science Standards‐aligned instruction place high discursive demands on learners. Learners are expected to articulate, develop, and defend their ideas and respond to the ideas of others. Decades of prior research have carefully documented features, processes, and potential benefits and shortcomings of an emphasis on talk in science learning. Yet, the task of documenting change in learners’ talk over time remains a major methodological challenge. To address this challenge, we examine one Korean immigrant girl's (Selena) oral participation during an informal science learning program called Science Club. Quantitative analysis showed that, over time, Selena spoke more often and for longer. However, fine‐grained qualitative analysis of features of her talk (e.g., use of a variety of bids and hedges) demonstrated Selena's persistent desire to share ideas, even though the intellectual merits of those ideas went largely unacknowledged. Methodologically, Selena's case illustrates the importance of considering multiple features of learner talk, understood in the social context, when making claims about changes in oral participation over time. Pedagogically, Selena's case highlights the importance of teachers’ attention to how learners’ ideas are taken up, in addition to how frequently they are speaking in class.