Supporting Reform-Oriented Secondary Science Teaching Through the Use of a Framework to Analyze Construction of Scientific Explanations

Abstract

The Next-Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for a different approach to learning science. They promote three-dimensional (3D) learning that blends disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts and scientific practices. In this study, we examined explanations constructed by secondary science teacher candidates (TCs) as a scientific practice outlined in the NGSS necessary for supporting students' learning of science in this 3D way. We examined TCs' ability to give explanations that include explicit statements of underlying reasons for natural phenomena, as opposed to simply describing patterns or laws. In their methods courses, TCs were taught to organize explanations into a what/how/why framework, where what refers to what happens in specific cases (data or observations); how refers to how things usually happen and is equivalent to patterns or laws; and why refers to causal explanations or models. We examined TCs' ability to do this spontaneously and in a resource-rich environment as a first step in gauging their preparedness for NGSS-aligned teaching. We found that (1) the ability of TCs to articulate complete and accurate causal scientific explanations for phenomena exists along a continuum; (2) TCs in our sample whose explanations fell on the upper end of this continuum were more likely to provide complete and accurate explanations even in the absence of support from explicit standards; and (3) teacher candidate's ability to construct complete and accurate explanations did not correlate with Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (

A review of literature that uses the lens of the next generation science crosscutting concepts: 2012–2019

“…An example of an article that did make the CCCs explicit to students is Leckie and Wall (2017), who described how one teacher made the connections between CE explicit to students in their academic writing. Some articles did describe explicitly supporting preservice (e.g., Richmond et al, 2016) or in‐service teachers (e.g., Criswell et al, 2018; Roseman et al, 2017) with using the CCCs. However, the articles often did not describe how these same concepts would be made explicit to their students.…”

“…Through analyses of performance tasks, Peters and Songer (2013) found that students' difficulties with the CCC of SPQ created struggles in their ability to use technology to model climate change, suggesting that the CCCs were an important place to develop scaffolding. In their work with a science methods course, Richmond et al (2016) found that many preservice teachers, regardless of major, struggled to provide causal explanations of science concepts. These researchers found relationships between struggles with the CCCs and a lack of depth in content understanding or learning.…”

“…The authors discussed how the use of CCCs allows for the generalizability of an explanation, an important feature of this scientific practice. In an empirical study of secondary preservice teachers' explanations, Richmond et al (2016) found that many in their methods course, regardless of major, struggled to provide causal explanations, connecting specifically to CE. Similar to Papadouris et al's (2018) discussion of the need for CCCs in constructing causal explanations, Richmond et al (2016) suggested beginning with CCCs for providing needed scaffolding.…”

Science Teachers' Gaps in Knowledge and Perceptions of Next Generation Science Standards Science Practices as Epistemic Acts

“…American science education has been criticized for focusing on transmission of scientific facts and implementation of "cookbook" labs (Osborn, 2014;Richmond, Parker, & Kaldaras, 2016). With the inception of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013), reform initiatives seek to move American, science education away from final-form science and toward engaging students in scientific practice.…”

The Journal of Science Teacher Education on the European Stage

“…The third paper, presented by Richmond et al (2016), was concerned with supporting reform-based secondary science teaching. In particular, this support was in the form of developing and using a framework for analyzing the construction of scientific explanations.…”