Guiding Students’ Scientific Practice

Many science education programs involve scientists in K-12education to support students’ engagement in scientific practices and learning scienceprocess skills and scientific epistemologies. Little research has studied the actions ofscientists in classrooms or how scientists’ actions may (or may not) supplement orcomplement the actions of teachers. In this descriptive study, we explore how teachersand scientists, working in pairs, guide high school students in the practice ofscientific experimentation. In particular, we study the ways by which teachers andscientists act independently and in concert to guide students in designing andconducting biology experiments with unknown outcomes. We analyzed video recordings ofclassroom instruction in two different school settings, focusing on teachers’ andscientists’ acts as they are manifested through their language-in-use duringface-to-face interactions with students. We argue that scientists and teachers act tosupport students in scientific experimentation in both distinct and common waysinfluenced by the particular teaching acts they perform and distinct authority rolesthey possess in the classroom (e.g., classroom authority vs. scientificauthority)