TEACHING LONG-TERM SCIENCE INVESTIGATIONS:
A MATTER OF TALK, TEXT, AND TIME
By
Patricia Susan Bills

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education Doctor of Philosophy
2013

ABSTRACT
TEACHING LONG-TERM SCIENCE INVESTIGATIONS:
A MATTER OF TALK, TEXT, AND TIME
By
Patricia Susan Bills
Science educators regard long-term investigations as one impactful form of teaching
science through inquiry in K-12 classrooms. While we have idealized notions of what this work
looks like, we have few, if any, descriptive studies about investigations that engage students in
sustained, focused work over a period of time longer than a few days or even weeks. In a policy
context that calls for teachers to develop strategies for engaging students in authentic science
practices, such as those that can come from long-term science investigations, we would do well
to learn from experienced teachers. This study followed three middle school science teachers in
a large U. S. urban school district as they conducted long-term investigations. Using discourse
analysis and taking a sociocultural perspective, this study documented the classroom talk and
interaction of teachers and their students. The study’s goals were to describe how teachers
engage students in long-term investigations and the ways that classroom interaction involved
specific reform-based science practices. Data include field notes and transcripts of audio
recordings from 15 observations of three experienced middle school science teachers, three semistructured interviews with each teacher, curriculum materials, student work, and classroom
demographic data.
Teachers engaged students in whole group, small group, and one-on-one conversations
about several stages of the long-term investigations. Teachers most often discussed two of the
eight science practices: 1) planning and carrying out investigations; and 2) obtaining, evaluating,
and communicating information. The planning discussions involved conversations about

identifying and describing variables, measuring and recording data, and concerns about data
collection procedures. Conversations about using and communicating scientific information
included talk about formal science writing conventions, and using background information to
support all other parts of the investigation process.
In all of the observed lessons, regardless of the practice or types of investigations
students were to engage, teachers used curricular tools to support students' work, scaffolding
students’ introduction to and use of scientific content, practices, and discourse. In these ways,
teachers helped students master a science-specific vocabulary and set of practices that allow for
the authentic exploration of science concepts. This study describes how teachers who generate
opportunities for students to experience two science practices more often than others, which may
have implications for science education and science education research - especially concerning
how science practices are engaged in classrooms - moving forward.

Copyright by
PATRICIA SUSAN BILLS
2013

for my father

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the teachers who opened their
classrooms to me for five months. They graciously wore a microphone during their teaching, a
scary prospect for any teacher. They were generous and flexible with their time, talked with me
as colleagues even after data collection was over, and cheered me on as I reached new
benchmarks in the work. And most importantly, they welcomed me, a total stranger, into their
teaching space. I learned much from their creativity, confidence in their teaching, love of
science, belief in their students, and comfort with the ambiguities of the process - their own, as
well as mine.
My loving friends are who sustained me in this work. I moved my home twice during the
writing of this dissertation. I have met new people and developed a new life twice in the past
two years. And through all of that, it is the people who I respect and love and who respect and
love me in return who kept this process humane, and celebrated with and for me even the
smallest of victories.
For three years, Bill and Leslie Hart-Davidson, and daughter, Lily, literally opened their
home to me. My life "on the compound" is singularly responsible for my getting to the
dissertation stage. They fed me, made me laugh, and made sure I got enough wine and bike
time. Around their kitchen table, Bill counseled me during all stages of graduate school. Leslie
kept me laughing, and hugged me when I needed it. They celebrated with me on the day of my
defense. All of "the HDs" reminded me that life is good - even when it felt very much like it
wasn't - and taught me about giving in ways I have never known.

vi

My cycling community in West Michigan and across the country - too many to name
here - sustained me in the other part of my life, my bike life. People who know me know that
there is possibly nothing more important to my life outside of academia than cycling. And my
bike family taught me to race cyclocross and mountain bikes, took me all over the country to
accomplish things I would have never imagined - from the desert Southwest to the hills of New
England - to ride and to help others ride. This community made sure that I stayed upright.
Thank you.
Constance Winter, the author of a blog "Lovely Bicycle," said, "There are some people
who help you and you feel grateful, indebted, and then there are others who help you and you
don't even know it. Those people have achieved a state of grace." This line personifies my
dissertation director, mentor, and friend, Suzanne Wilson. She helped me in ways I have very
much noticed, and she helped me in ways that I am sure I have yet to discover. Her infinite gifts,
wisdom and generosity of her heart seep into each day in surprising ways. Her talents have
impacted my thinking and my writing, in how I read, in how I see myself as a teacher, in how I
think about and understand people. With you on my shoulder, I trust the process more, I trust
myself more, and I know I will produce good things. "Grateful" and "indebted" do not
adequately describe my appreciation of your impact. You are grace in my life.
My sister Laurie has been my ground. Through the passing of our father in my second
year of graduate school, to the struggles of doing things that seem impossible, to simply the
everyday concerns of getting through the day, you have always been there to cheer me up, and
cheer me on. You taught me how to be a creative problem solver. Simply put, you are always
there. I could have endured none of the hardships and heartaches of the past two years without
you. I am not sure I could ever repay you adequately.

vii

Ella Gant was the only partner in my life to ever say to me, "Yes. Just go. Go to
graduate school." Even though it was a huge, uncertain undertaking, she always believed in me
and in this. It is because of her uncanny ability to know exactly what I need when I need it, even
before I do, that I have done this thing. She stood by me through the hard first years of graduate
school and traveled with me to New York City during data collection. And even though our
lives went separate ways in my final year of writing, she was still with me, cheering me on from
afar, sitting with me, and listening. Thank you, dear Ella, for your wisdom and charm, your
humor, for sharing your quirks and your heart, and for your deep knowledge and acceptance of
me.
Finally, this is for my father, who passed away in my second year of graduate school.
His pride beamed through his pained and tired eyes even in his last days. I know he's here in
spirit, laughing, and delighting in saying "Dr. Bills" (a play on words he was eager to say).
Thanks, Dad, for raising me to believe that no matter what, I would always "land on my feet."

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES

xii

LIST OF FIGURES

xiii

KEY TO SYMBOLS

xiv

Chapter 1
The Landscape of Talk in Long Term Investigations
Long-Term Investigations and Discourse
Research on Long-Term Investigations
Discourse in Science Classrooms
A Look Forward

1
2
3
10
18

Chapter 2
Method
Background and Context
Sample and Participant Selection
Data Collection
Digital audio recordings of science lessons
Semi-structured teacher interviews
Field notes
Supporting data
School-specific curriculum materials
Urban Advantage science inquiry tools
Student work
Data Analysis
Discourse analysis of classroom talk
Analytic research memos
Summary

21
21
22
23
24
27
30
31
31
32
32
33
34
40
42

Chapter 3
Setting the Stage: Urban Advantage, The Lead Teachers, and Their Classrooms
Urban Advantage
The exit project
Tools
Lead teachers
The Lead Teachers, Their Schools, and Their Students
Diana
Carrie
Marilyn
Summary

44
44
48
49
51
53
53
59
62
65

ix

Chapter 4
Engaging Science Practices in Long Term Investigations
Planning Long-Term Investigations
Understanding the Relationships Between Variables
Considering Data
Decisions about when and how to collect data
Decisions about how many data support a claim
Considering data collection tools
Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information
Opportunities to obtain information
Opportunities to evaluate information
Opportunities to communicate information
Summary

67
69
70
80
80
83
86
92
94
100
104
111

Chapter 5
Language as a Tool
Learning Disciplinary Vocabulary
Getting to "trachea"
My own little language
Weird words
"Food" or "nutrients?"
Talking About Science
Learning LTI conventions
Applying the LTI conventions
Writing Science
The Micro View of Tool Use

116
118
118
121
126
127
130
131
136
144
152

Chapter 6
Warp and Woof: Intertwined Micro and Macro Contexts
A Bakhtinian Conception of Learning the Discourse and Practices of Science
Two Cases
Unpacking Turbidity: Understanding Variables
"Because You Get More Productive Data": Crafting a Plan for Data Collection
Discussion

156
157
163
164
177
189

Chapter 7
Language of Science in Long Term Investigations
Lesson 1: Engagement Over Time
Engaging the long-range view
Expectations of language registers shift over time
Lesson 2: Adaptations According to Local Contexts
Textual adaptations
Adaptations concerning sociocultural factors
Lesson 3: Different Views of the Macro and Micro Dialogic
A "Push-Pull" Language: Heteroglossia and Teacher-Student Interactions in Science
Final Thoughts

192
193
194
195
197
198
199
200
202
208

x

APPENDICES
Appendix A: Text Translation for Figure 4.4
Appendix B: Interview 1
Appendix C: Interview 2
Appendix D: Interview 3
Appendix E: Table 1. Interpretive Codes
Appendix F: Table 2. Codes for Literacy in Science Practices
Appendix G: Table 3. Codes for Science Practices

213
214
215
217
218
220
222
223

REFERENCES

224

xi

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Interpretive Codes

219

Table 2. Codes for Literacy in Science Practices

221

Table 3. Codes for Science Practices

222

xii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3.1. Investigation Design Diagram

50

Figure 3.2. The Developing Science Explanations Tool

52

Figure 4.1. Do Now Handout from Diana's Classroom

71

Figure 4.2. A Graph of Chlorophyll Amounts Over Time

77

Figure 4.3. Carrie's Animal Behavior Project Considerations Sheet

93

Figure 4.4. Student Journal Page from Do Now for Peer Review of Lab Report

103

Figure 4.5. Hypothesis Page from Do Now from Diana's Classroom

112

Figure 6.1. The Macro Context of the LTI

158

Figure 6.2. Macro and Micro Contexts of the LTI

161

Figure 6.3. Diana's Do Now Tool

169

Figure 6.4. Marlyse's Response to the Do Now (page 1)

173

Figure 6.5. Marlyse's Hypothesis

176

Figure 6.6. Animal Behavior Considerations Sheet by Maddy, Allison, and Natalie

188

Figure 6.7. Introduction Power Point Slide from Carrie's Gorilla Behavior Group

190

xiii

KEY TO SYMBOLS

Transcription Notation
(Jefferson, 1978, Schegloff, 2007)
Note: punctuation marks are not used grammatically. They indicate intonation. A period
therefore, indicates a falling intonation contour, not necessarily the end of a sentence. A
question mark does the same thing. A comma indicates a pause (or "clause boundary"
Schegloff, 2007).
..

two periods indicate a pause shorter than 2 seconds.

...

three periods indicate a pause that lasts approximately 2 seconds. longer pauses are
indictated by time inside of brackets, as in, [10 seconds].

(( ))

double parentheses mark the transcriber's description of the events.

( )

text between parentheses indicate the transcriber's most likely guess as to what is being
said.

CAP

words or parts of words in all capital letters indicate extra emphasis, not volume

::

double colons after a vowel indicate elongation of the vowel sound. For example,
"goo::d" in transcription stands in for "gooooooood" in speech.

=

equals signs have two functions: 1) to indicate the continuous talk of one speaker, even if
interrupted by another speaker, or 2) if located at the end and begining of two different
speakers' continuous lines, this indicates "latching" or that the second speaker continues,
or latches onto, the first speaker's utterance.

In some cases, pronunciation is indicated by spelling as in "gonna" for "going to" or "wanna" for
"want to." This is done to indicate the correct level of formality of a person's speech, and
to differentiate from moments when articulation of each word in a lexical bundle (i.e.,
going to) are pronounced fully.

xiv

Chapter 1
The Landscape of Talk in Long-Term Investigations
Current concerns for improving science education for all students emphasize the need for
student active engagement in science and the need for an inquiry orientation. According to the
National Standards for Science Education, inquiry is:
A multifaceted activity that involves making observations; posing questions; examining
books and other sources of information to see what is already known; planning
investigations; reviewing what is already known in light of experimental evidence; using
tools to gather, analyze, and interpret data; proposing answers, explanations and
predictions; and communicating the results. (NRC, 1996, p. 23)
As researchers, reformers, and teachers have sought to put these ideas into practice, it has
become increasingly clear how difficult it is to move science education away from the didactic
and toward the active. In part, this is due to inquiry being defined in many different ways. In an
effort to move forward, the Next Generation Science Standards (Achieve, Inc., 2013) shifted the
discourse away from “inquiry” toward “practices,” specific actions that are observable like
developing and using models or analyzing and interpreting data.
While this focus on the concrete might help, the rhetoric of reforms like NGSS still hold
considerable challenges for the teachers who are responsible for turning these visions into
realities for U.S. schoolchildren. Shifting to a stance of active engagement for children requires
more interactions between teachers and students, and students and students. This amounts to a
cultural revolution in classrooms, and entails much more science talk in whole and small groups,
as well as one on one. In particular, students need to learn to use the highly specialized language
of science (Lemke, 1990).

1

This is a difficult challenge for most students, even for some who come to school having
mastered the more formal forms of school language. However, for those who speak nondominant forms of language, learning to “talk science” (Lemke, 1990, p. 1) means bridging an
even wider divide between everyday language and the language of science. The purpose of this
study is to describe how three teachers engage students interactionally in science classrooms, the
nature of those interactions, and the specific discourse skills teachers work on with students
across cultural and linguistic boundaries.
Specifically, I explore the role of language (specifically, talk and writing) in long-term
investigations (LTIs), structured projects that take place over several weeks (or more) and
involve inquiry-based practices. While LTIs are not the only form of inquiry-oriented learning
that teachers and students engage in in U.S. science classrooms, they offer a relevant context for
exploring talk and how it unfolds when teachers are aiming to engage their students in inquiry.
Two questions guide my inquiry:
How do experienced teachers enact long-term investigations?
What is the role of language in the long-term investigation?
Long-Term Investigations and Discourse
This study builds on two bodies of research: 1) research on long-term investigations and
scientific inquiry, and 2) research on discourse in science classrooms. Though I separate them in
this review, these are not mutually exclusive bodies of research. Many studies on long-term
investigations involve studies of language and discourse, and reflexively, studies of language and
discourse in classrooms have been conducted in inquiry-based science classrooms where
teachers enacted long-term investigations. I provide a review of literature on long-term
investigations, followed by research on discourse and talk in science classrooms.

2

Research on Long-Term Investigations
Research on LTIs highlights the complexity with inquiry-based teaching. First, the
definition of and research on inquiry is diffuse, which makes it difficult to identify the field's
research goals and visions for classroom practice (Minner & Levy, 2010). While inquiry-based
teaching can include several different strategies, there are few, if any, detailed descriptions of
how teachers enact sustained inquiry projects, or long-term investigations. That is, the field lacks
a detailed portrait of experienced teachers' engagement of long-term inquiry projects
(investigations) that I provide in this study.
I begin with an exemplar of research on one model of an LTI, Project Based Science
(PBS). Project-based science is defined as sustained scientific inquiry situated in real problems
for which students seek answers to their authentic questions using multiple tools and strategies
alongside peers and their teachers. For example, students might explore a “driving question”
such as, “What’s in our water?” and spend extended time – weeks, perhaps even months or the
entire school year – collaboratively researching the answer by exploring a local river and
watershed (Ladewski, Krajcik, & Harvey, 1994; Marx, et al., 1994). In fact, PBS research
represents the closest example of the kind of curriculum I observed teachers using in this study.
In fact, one teacher, Diana, used the Project Based Inquiry Science (PBIS) program materials
(Kolodner, Krajcik, Edelson, Reiser, & Starr, 2009) (see chapter 3 for a fuller description of
Diana's curriculum materials). Because this dissertation primarily concerns teacher practice, I
then present additional studies that illuminate other salient aspects of inquiry-based science, such
as the debate about explicit and implicit approaches to teaching science inquiry practices (NRC,
1996, 2011), and teachers' roles in teaching inquiry-based science.
In their foundational work on project based science, Krajcik and colleagues (Krajcik &

3

Blumenfeld, 2006; Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, Bass & Fredericks, 1998; Krajcik, Czerniak, &
Berger, 1999) report on students’ engagement in PBS units. A typical PBS unit - such as the
"What's in Our Water?" (Ladewski, Krajcik, & Harvey, 1994) or "Why Do I Have to Wear a
Bike Helmet?" (Schneider, Krajcik, & Blumenfeld, 2004) units - involves students in several
different kinds of experiences wherein they work collaboratively to answer the guiding question.
In "What's in Our Water?" students study a local river, collect data, conduct background
research, and communicate with local community members who can provide assistance with the
project. Students work in small groups throughout the project, and in regular classroom
discussion opportunities, they practice reasoning and argumentation skills as they report findings
to other groups, and make decisions about proceding to the next part of the project -- gathering
more information to support or refute claims, to test accuracy of data collection, to redesign the
study, or further test a particular conjecture, etc.
Researchers have pursued a number of questions concerning PBS, including questions
about teacher enactment of PBS curriculum materials (Marx, et a.l, 1994), motivational factors
for engaging in project-based work (Blumenfeld, et al., 1991), teacher learning (Ladewski,
Krajcik, & Harvey, 1994), student learning (Krajcik, et al., 1998), as well as the affordances and
constraints of PBS curriculum materials on teacher enactment of classroom discussions (Alozie,
Moje, & Krajcik, 2009). Most of this work comprises implementation studies conducted with
teachers who have a range of years of experience and knowledge of inquiry-based teaching. The
research follows a research and development tradition, using design studies, which were
typically conducted over the course of a school year. The major interest of these researchers are
the influences of teacher knowledge and practice on the extent to which they have success
implementing PBS in their classrooms as the researchers intended. The researchers -- who are

4

also the curriculum developers in most cases -- then use findings to revise curriculum materials
and to provide ongoing professional development support for the teachers using PBS materials.
This body of research is relevant to this study because it provides a comprehensive view of
teachers’ and students' practices during sustained long-term classroom science inquiry.
Blumenfeld, et al. (1991) reported that project design was an influential factor in the
success of project-based learning. They argue that “student interest and perceived value are
enhanced when, 1) tasks are varied and include novel elements, 2) the problem is authentic and
has value, 3) the problem is challenging, 4) there is closure, an artifact is created, 5) there is
choice about how the work is done, and 6) there are opportunities to work with others” (p. 375).
Teachers using PBS for the first time face many challenges to their own knowledge and
learning about inquiry based teaching. PBS research suggests that teachers’ roles involve, “1)
creating a classroom community that is conducive to collaborative work, 2) scaffold student
learning and help students create manageable tasks, 3) support students’ metacognitive
development, and 4) assess progress and provide feedback” (Blumenfeld, et al., 1991, p. 381).
Additionally, successful enactment of PBS requires teachers to be especially skilled at
management of classroom behaviors and tools, as well as able to deal with the ambiguity of the
work and be able to adjust accordingly. In short, “teachers play a critical role” (Blumenfeld, et
al., p. 381).
Marx et al. (1999) discuss several challenges that teachers face when learning to conduct
PBS projects. These challenges reflect those reported in studies on other inquiry based teaching
strategies more generally (Crawford, 2000, 2007; DeLisi, McNeil, Minner, 2011; Minner, Levy,
& Century, 2010). In a case study of four middle grades teachers, Marx and his colleagues found
that developing an appropriate research question– one that is authentic, and generates motivation

5

to study a topic relevant to students’ lives over a long period of time – is challenging, especially
in a science reform context. Also, teachers felt that releasing some of the responsibility for the
direction of a project was a concern – that is, it was sometimes impossible to balance curricular
and standards requirements while supporting the natural directions that students’ own authentic
questions take. Time was also an issue, as the development of a project takes several weeks,
which can lead to marginalizing other curricular content. The researchers also noe that ongoing
formal professional development or participation in a community of learners is essential for
teacher support.
Some common challenges in implementing PBS teaching entail time, behavior
management, covering the content, teachers' abilities to embrace project goals, and
understanding the tools (especially technological ones). For example, Moje, Collazo, Carillo,
and Marx (2001) studied the enactment of a long-term project with a high school life sciences
teacher in a Spanish immersion classroom in Detroit. They found that the local school district
policies and teachers’ stance about constructivist teaching presented considerable challenges for
PBS implementation. For example, the researchers found that "competing d/Discourses" in the
classroom impacted the ways that the teacher implemented PBS. For example, the teacher was
unfamiliar with some of the pedagogical strategies in projects, such as coordinating student-lead
investigations based in their own questions. The process of incorporating new strategies was
difficult for this teacher, and helped to contribute to competing discourses. The researchers state,
... project-based pedagogy with its emphasis on authenticity, sustained inquiry, and
collaboration introduces a classroom Discourse that may be unfamiliar or even
contradictory to the Discourses to which students have become accustomed or which
students believe will afford them opportunities for future success in the ``culture of

6

power'' (Delpit, 1988, p. 122).
That is, in this classroom, a largely Latino, Spanish-speaking classroom in a large urban school
district presented considerable challenges for both the teacher and his students to bridge these
discourses, that of school, of the teacher's own ideas about teaching science, and the students'
ideas about language and culture in the midst of learning academic language.
Research on PBS has also illuminated importance of students' appropriation of science
discourse – central to the PBS vision for high quality teaching and learning -- is paramount to
their learning. In a more recent study, Alozie, Moje, and Krajcik (2009) explored how the PBS
curriculum materials supported teachers' efforts to develop dialogic interaction between teachers
and students. Using a mixed methods approach, and based on data from classroom observations,
teacher interviews, and pre- post- student achievement scores along with extensive discourse
analysis of observation data, the researchers were interested in whether the curriculum supports
they created would enable dialogic discussion.
The researchers found that the curriculum supports -- lesson discussion rationales and
enactment strategies -- did not support teachers' development of dialogic interactions as
expected. Teachers still struggled to limit their central roles in conversations and sustain student
interactions; their interactions still largely followed the IRE format. The researchers concluded
that their materials would need to be revised to include a rationale for the discussion, higherlevel questions that simulate discussion, strategies for teaching students to engage in dialogic
discussions, and strategies for helping the teacher to guide discussions. This work echoes the
common refrain in the research literature on inquiry-based teaching, that it is difficult to enact
and to affect change in teaching practice (Minner, Levy, & Century, 2010).

7

Another prevalent question in the literature on inquiry-based teaching is the relative of
effectiveness of using explicit or implicit approaches to teach science practices. Some teachers
keenly feel a tension between of constrained instructional time and mandates to cover the
curriculum with creating sustained attention to science practices and processes (NRC, 2012).
Fradd and Lee (1998) investigated different teachers’ personal positions in regard to inquiry by
examining their roles during instruction. The authors position their study in the long-standing
debate about how to balance science instruction between approaches that are “explicit, with
teachers leading students through predetermined lessons and activities, or exploratory, with
teachers guiding children to consider their own questions and interests” (p. 15, italics in
original).
Similar to the PBS work, Fradd and Lee conducted professional development programs
with teachers who shared languages and cultures with their students, who were either monolingual or bilingual Spanish or Haitian Creole speakers. They found that teachers enacted
instructional stances that the researchers labeled as “teacher-as-transmitter” or “teacher-asfacilitator.” They found that transmitters embraced an explicit approach (i.e., direct instruction)
to teaching, and facilitators embraced strategies more aligned with inquiry-based strategies as
discussed in the NSES (author?, 1996). Moroever, teachers tended to choose the roles that felt
the most comfortable to them, based on a number of factors – some cultural, some pedagogical,
some contextual – and many steadfastly believed that “the explicit approach was essential until
students acquired the basic concepts and skills for engaging in science inquiry” (p. 19).
Researchers are also concerned with how inquiry-based teaching impacts student
learning. Though the research on the achievement gains is relatively sparse, I elected one recent
study to present here because it explores how teacher discourse moves as well as more macro-

8

level activities – both concerns of this dissertation – play a role in inquiry-based teaching and
learning. DeLisi, McNeill, and Minner (2011) conducted case studies of three high school
science teachers as they taught an urban ecology curriculum for which they received professional
development. One goal of the research was to provide microanalyses of the nature of teachers'
verbal practices and the types of activities teachers use" in inquiry based teaching (p. 1). The
researchers video recorded classroom observations and analyzed the recordings according to
teachers’ behaviors, which included larger activities (e.g., whole group v. small group
configurations, or writing v. reading) as well as smaller, micro- “verbal practices” such as
rephrasing, eliciting student responses, asking a fact-based question, or giving a scientific
explanation, among several others. The research team also developed and conducted a pre- postassessment on student knowledge that covered materials from three modules in the curriculum,
and included a combination of open-ended and multiple choice questions. They found that one
teacher taught primarily with teacher-directed activities as opposed to student-directed activities;
while the other two teachers balanced these two activity types. All three teachers spent more
time on instruction (e.g., directed teaching), writing, and reading. And in all three teachers’
classrooms, students spent more time in whole class instruction than in smaller groups or
working as individuals.
Two of the three case study teachers taught with the greatest proportion of studentcentered practices and had the highest student outcomes. The teacher who used more teacherdirected activities had lower student achievement. As the authors state, “These findings align
with previous research which suggests that inquiry-based instruction that emphasizes student
active thinking results in greater student science conceptual learning.”

9

Researchers define teachers' roles in inquiry-based classrooms in general, and in longterm investigations in particular, as to design meaningful, student-centered investigation
experiences for students that engage active thinking and sensemaking around various texts in
collaboration with others. But teachers are challenged with balancing their responsibilities
toward achievement based in state and national standards with the time required to develop
student-centered and meaningful long-term science investigation experiences. Teachers still
grapple with the demands of process skills to make meaningful content connections during
inquiry based instruction, which means that they also must ask their students to produce artifacts
of their knowledge that can be evaluated based on state standards (Alozie, Moje, & Krajcik,
2009; Schneider & Krajcik, 2002). However, oftentimes, the artifacts of inquiry-based work
demand more time and resources than available to teachers -- whether in project-based work, or
through other sustained inquiry experiences.
In general, there is still much that we do not know about how experienced teachers
conduct LTIs. In particular, we lack careful descriptions of what it takes for teachers to enact
long-term investigations. And central to those investigations is engaging students in classroom
conversations, either as a whole group or in smaller grouping. I now turn to the literature on
discourse in science classrooms, as it bears directly on understanding teachers’ practices when
helping their students pursue LTIs.
Discourse in Science Classrooms
The literature on discourse in science classrooms is similarly broad. Much of this
research was in response to the NRC (1996) call for inquiry based teaching in K-12 classrooms,
which emphasized constructivist-based learning and greater attention to developing teachers’

10

skills in conducting productive discourse with students (Driver, et al., 1994; Engle & Conant,
2002; Lave & Wenger, 1998). What is the connection between these two paragraphs?
As interest in creating more classroom conversations has risen, so too has researchers’
awareness of the need to help students from minority cultural and language communities with
respect to science learning (Calabrese Barton, 2001; Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2009; Fradd &
Lee, 1999; Moje, Collazo, Carillo, & Marx, 2011; Lee, Fradd, & Sutman, 1995; Lee & Fradd,
1998; Rosebery & Warren, 2000; Rosebery, Warren, & Conant, 1992). Most of these studies,
centered in sociocultural theory and cultural learning theory, aim to bridge the distance between
students’ everyday discourses and experiences with the world with formal science D/discourse
(Gee, 2008a, 2008b).
One assumption researchers make is that in the normative discourse space of the science
classroom – with its attendant expectations about formal language, specificity, and formalized
processes of knowledge construction (Driver et al., 1998; Lemke, 1990) – students from minority
language groups use their diverse funds of knowledge as resources for meaning making
(Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2009; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992; Moje et al., 2004;
Rosebery & Warren, 2000). As Calabrese Barton and Tan (2009) state, “valuing diverse funds
of knowledge and Discourse as legitimate science classroom resources positions minority
students as rightful experts of certain knowledges directly related and applicable to school
science” (p. 52).
Thus the job of the teacher is to recognize and build upon those funds. The funds of
knowledge – defined here as cultural ways of doing, being, acting, speaking, and knowing the
world (citations) -- are brought to bear in classrooms where teachers open up spaces for joint
negotiation around compelling science ideas. When teachers create equitable discourse spaces,

11

inclusive of the heterogeneity of students’ ideas, all students benefit (Rosebery, Ogonowski,
DiShino, & Warren, 2010).
In demonstrating what inclusive science discourse looks like, Rosebery et al. (2010)
conducted a design study in which they specifically designed lessons that “broadened the
Discourse space beyond what is ordinarily sanctioned in school science” (p. 330). That is, they
collaborated with the classroom teacher to develop science talk, or an interactive discourse space
in which all students explored questions in an open-ended, student-lead discussion about some
phenomenon. In a unit about thermodynamics in a third grade classroom, students participated
in a science talk on the second law of thermodynamics (e.g., heat moves from objects of higher
temperatures to lower temperatures). They found that students’ conceptualizations of heat –
prompted by the authentic question “why do we wear a coat in the winter?” – became much
more dynamic and animated, after students were surprised by a serendipitous fire drill which sent
them out into the cold air without their coats. The experience of seeing thermodynamics in
action – students saw “steam” rising from one of the researcher's heads as they stood in the cold
– prompted the students to “interanimate” their ideas and experience with the phenomenon. That
is, the students physically represented their ideas using their bodies and their voices to illustrate
concepts they described using their everyday language repertoires. The discourse that resulted
taught the researchers that “children are always making sense, even when teachers and
researchers do not understand them” (p. 351), and that students drove the “analytic work” of the
authentic inquiry about heat because their teacher (and the researchers) set up opportunities, in
the form of the science talk, for students to do so.
Calabrese Barton and Tan (2009) report on a project in which students helped in planning
a project about nutrition. The researchers asked four girls in a middle school science classroom

12

in an underserved urban community to help them develop ideas for a project that was designed to
open up the discursive space for more active student talk and engagement. Calabrese Barton and
Tan found out that increased student participation in all aspects of the project were partially
contingent on these students’ perspectives, the project’s design, and the teacher’s ability to
directly allow time and space for students to present their ideas freely, sometimes veering from
the original intent of the discussion – especially those that connected directly to their own lives.
For example, an activity called “The Healthiest Snack Contest,” challenged students, within a
given budget, to purchase snacks at a local bodega near their school. Upon returning to class,
they then calculated and compared their snacks’ nutritional information to other groups’ snacks.
But, students were reluctant to share their findings aloud in a formal report. However, when the
teacher asked them about what they ate over the weekend, and to tell about its nutritional value
(involving several scientific concepts they had studied in the unit), participation markedly rose.
With this simple shift in bridging discourses -- between those of the students and that of school
science -- students were compelled to share.
In these examples, studies in urban science classrooms with students from minority
cultural and linguistic communities we have seen that: 1) allowing for more open-ended student
talk takes more than just an ideological interest in that stance, teachers must make pointedly
strategic shifts in the structures of the discourse space – as in a science talk that shifted how
students were expected to talk to one another, to getting students involved in planning the unit, or
a teacher’s willingness to follow a student’s ideas (like the heat exchange example where the
students made observations about standing out in the cold), and 2) ongoing reflection on the units
as they unfolded was particularly helpful to the success of the unit. In both of these examples, I
should point out, the reflective piece was possible because these were design studies that

13

involved the classroom teacher as co-researcher. Design studies are specifically designed to
involve on-going data collection and analysis so as to encourage the research team to reflect on
the project’s evolving effectiveness.
But, successfully leading large- or small-group classroom discussions (as I've shown in
the above examples) that engage students in science discourse is not necessarily a natural part of
an experienced teacher's skill set. It is relatively rare for teachers to successfully engage students
in open-ended disucssions (or dialogic discourse), or to work within the ambiguities of openended investigation work (Herrenkohl & Guerra,1998; Mehan, 1979; Oliveira, 2009; Scott,
Mortimer, & Aquilar, 2006). Research on professional development specifically aimed at the
teacher's role in classroom discussions report that focused learning about discourse can enhance
teachers’ ability to use small groups well, and to encourage broader student participation in
classroom discourse (Baker, Lewis, Purzer, Watts, & Perkins, 2009; Buxton, Lee, & Santau,
2008; Herrenkohl & Guerra,1998; Lee, Luykx, Buxton, & Shaver, 2007; Oliveira, 2009). One
important finding in these studies is that explicit teaching about the group task, or about group
members’ roles as they discuss science content, promotes more thoughtful contributions by
students and focuses groups on task completion. Studies in classrooms where teachers learned
about and implemented specific discourse strategies reported greater gains in overall student
engagement (Herrenkohl & Guerra, 1998).
For example, in a study about small group discussion in an affluent elementary science
classroom, Herrenkohl and Guerra (1998) found that explicitly teaching teachers about the roles
of group talk increased the numbers of substantive student contributions. Researchers assessed
the engagement of students in two comparison participation structures that they created, one in
which they defined and taught students’ roles as audience members and a control group who had

14

not included audience roles. They found that students learned specific audience roles were more
active in engaging in classroom discussion. The class receiving the intervention created a
"classroom situation in which understanding, clarifying, and sharing meaning as a whole class
were more central" (p. 466). In the control group, where the roles were not defined, students
assumed a more "passive" stance toward their engagement.
On a more micro scale, Brown and colleagues (Brown & Spang, 2007; Brown & Ryoo,
2008) investigated the roles of explicit teaching about science vocabulary as a non-vernacular
language that all students could add to their linguistic repertoires. They differentiated between
everyday and scientific language in what they call a “content first” approach (Brown & Ryoo,
2008). The approach involved the teacher intentionally using vernacular forms of language –or,
language forms that are more aligned with the language of the local community – to engage
students in the content before moving to more formal forms of science discourse. For example,
they argue that vernacular forms of language – people’s everyday language forms – contrast to
non-vernacular language forms – like the language that football players share with their coaches
– become highly technical and important for communication in that particular context. They
become “specialized ways of using language for specific purposes” (p. 530). The same is true,
they argue, in science. They ask “what is the best approach for helping students make a nonvernacular genre of language (e.g., scientific language) “vernacular” for new users?” (p. 531).
They contrast foreign language instruction (which teaches students new language forms for
familiar ideas) and science (which teaches new language forms for new ideas), and that one role
of science education is to “deconstruct science teaching into conceptual and language
components” (p. 532). They examined this position through a series of assessments given to 5th
grade students after using several computer programs designed to engage students in vernacular

15

and non-vernacular forms of language to present the same concepts. A control group received
computer-based instruction on only the scientific language forms (e.g., using terms like glucose
and chloroplasts to explain photosynthesis), and the experimental group received computerbased instruction which made explicit links between the specific and the non-specific language
forms (e.g., for the same screen on photosynthesis, the terms are food and pigments). Their
findings were that students’ learning improved when they learned new science concepts using
the scaffolded, matched computer activities. In other words, teaching the vernacular forms first
improved students’ learning of the non-vernacular (i.e., scientific) forms.
In sum, research suggests that, in order to help all students become more successful in
classroom discussion – regardless of whether such participation is expected of the students’ own
cultural models for communication (Phillips, 1983), teachers must have support to 1) learn about,
implement, and reflect upon specific discourse strategies; 2) recognize the cultural influences on
learning (Nasir, Rosebery, Warren, & C. Lee, 2006; Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003); 3) make direct
changes in the participant structures of classroom organization (Herrenkohl & Guerra, 1998;
Gallas, 1995; Rosebery et al. 2010); and 4) consider how different language forms influence
concept development. Such shifts of participant structures may be as simple as deliberately
changing a discourse strategy to something more open ended like Science Talk (Gallas, 1995;
Rosebery & Warren, 2010), or to develop projects that draw upon students’ funds of knowledge
(Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2009; Moje et al., 2004), or which provide specific roles for students
as they learn to participate productively in small group discussion (Bennett, Hogarth, Lubben,
Campbell & Robinson, 2010; Engle & Conant, 2002; Herrenkohl & Guerra, 1998), or to develop
specific strategies for helping students learn academic vocabulary (Brown & Spang, 2008; NRC,
2007; Gee, 2008b).

16

The results resonate with those found in studies about (general) language learning: that
teachers are more successful with student engagement when they know about how discourse and
language functions in classrooms (e.g., Adger, Snow, & Christian, 2002; Heath, 1983; Rosebery
& Warren, 2008).
If we put together the research on long-term investigations with the literature of science
talk in classrooms, we see the important role that language plays in learning science in sustained
projects over time. The nature of teacher-student interactions influence, in part, the success of
LTIs. Since language is the primary means by which people learn in classroom spaces, and since
science is a language-rich enterprise (Lemke, 1990; NRC, 2012), the teachers' roles in the
science classroom involve awareness and skillful orchestration of how discourse occurs among
learners (Cazden, 2000; Gee, 2008a; Warren, Ballenger, Ogonowski, & Rosebery, 2001; Warren
& Ogonowski, 1998). The skills with which teachers engage students in language in science
classrooms are not always obvious, nor are they always easy to implement (Moje, et al., 2001;
Warren, Ballenger, Ogonowski, & Rosebery, 2001). Sustaining and supporting student
independence over time requires teachers to have a certain level of comfort with ambiguity,
knowledge of and confidence in the investigative process, and the ability to help students
become independent and interdependent active learners in the classroom (especially where small
group work is involved).
However, we have few detailed descriptive studies of how experienced teachers develop
and engage students in the language of science during long-term investigations as a regular part
of their practice. Such studies would teach us about the nature of long-term investigations long
after implementation, as they are practiced by experienced teachers, after they have become a

17

regular part of the scope of the school year and regular practice in science classrooms. This
dissertation seeks to fill that gap.
A Look Forward
In the chapters that follow, I show how three experienced middle school science teachers
from different teaching contexts develop LTIs with their students. In particular, I explore the
patterns of the macro contexts - those that comprise larger frameworks under which the teachers
teach (e.g., curriculum) - and the micro contexts - the interactional patterns between teachers
and students. These patterns allow me to describe a range of possibilities for teaching the LTI in
different contexts, and the roles that language plays.
In chapters two and three, I contextualize the study. In chapter two, I describe the data
collection and analysis methods. I begin with a description of the Urban Advantage professional
development program in which these teachers participate. I describe the teacher-participants in
general in this chapter, focusing mostly on the participant selection process. I then discuss the
data collection procedures, including strategies for acquiring digital voice recordings of each
teacher's teaching, how I conducted ethnographic observations in each classroom (e.g., field
notes, curriculum materials and student work), and the timeline for my study. I then discuss in
detail the discourse analysis strategies I employed, paying particular attention to the micro talk
structures and my coding schemes. Chapter three provides a broadbrush portrait each teacher.
Through interview data, I report how each came to teaching science, and their involvement in the
UA program. I also describe their particular teaching contexts: their schools, their students, and
their curricula, as they have some bearing on how teachers taught the LTI.
Chapter four explores how the teachers engage students in two science practices that they
employed most often during the LTIs: Planning and Carrying Out Investigations, and Obtaining,

18

Evaluating, and Communicating Information (Achieve, Inc., 2013). I explore the nature of the
classroom discussion that engages students in each practice, and the ways in which teachers use
other curricular textual tools to support these particular practices during the LITs. I also discuss
factors that may help teachers sustain the work over time.
In chapter five, I provide the macro analysis of talk and interaction around the larger
structures of each teacher's LTI. Using the construct of "language as a tool," I describe how
teachers use language to engage students in the practices of scientific investigation (NRC, 2012)
along three dimensions: vocabulary (lexical), talking about science language
(syntactic/grammatical and semantic), and in writing (which also considers the lexical, syntactic,
and semantic dimensions). For each dimension, I provide transcript data and analysis of each.
Chapter six comprises a micro-analysis of the teacher talk in lessons in which science
practices are taught. Here is where I develop a model for thinking about the LTI, as a dialectic
between the macro and the micro contexts in which these teachers work. I first map out this
dialectic as it is represented on a visual map, and then I describe examples for each half (micro
and macro) of the map using classroom talk data. I then theorize the map using Bakhtinian
concepts of heteroglossia and intertexuality. In this way, I set the micro and macro examples of
language use (both written and spoken) in a framework which helps to explain how these are in a
dialectic relationship throughout the LTI. I then bring the theoretical back into the concrete
examples through two elected "cases" of the macro and micro dialectic.

1

In each case, I present

talk and text side-by-side to draw the parallel examples of the macro and micro working
together, and to further concretize the concept of the macro-micro dialectic.
1

Here, I use the term "cases" to identify cases of the dialectic at play. I do not consider each
teacher's teaching practice that I elect to illustrate the dialectic as a "case." The distinction
between a case used for case study and a "case" as in an example of some construct is important
to this chapter.
19

Finally, in chapter seven, I summarize three major lessons learned from the study and set
those lessons in the context of a Bakhtinian (1981) theoretical framework that drove my
interpretation of the data. I conclude with comments about the potential new questions for the
field of science education to which this study may contribute.

20

Chapter 2
Method
The research reported here was designed as a field study that draws upon ethnographic
research methods and uses a sociocultural lens from which to understand teaching and learning
(Adger, 2003; Cazden, John, & Hymes, 1985; Florio-Ruane, 1987; Gee, 2005, 2008a; Gee &
Green, 1998; Hymes, 1980; Johnstone, 2008). Data analysis methods included both
ethnographic and discourse approaches. Here I describe the processes of participant selection,
data collection, and analysis.
Background and Context
Urban Advantage (UA) is a multi-site collaborative professional development program
between cultural institutions in New York City and the city’s public schools. The program offers
middle school teachers sustained professional development focused on science inquiry through
involvement in long-term scientific investigations, exploration of the city's multiple cultural
institutions, and sustained support in classrooms with school-based UA leadership. Teachers in
UA attend three cycles of professional development in their first year in the program in three
New York City science institutions, and are provided material support in their classrooms, such
as notebooks for data collection and tools for investigation. First year UA teachers are eligible to
enroll in a continuing professional development program which engages them in long-term
science investigations across all eight participating cultural institutions as well as in-school
curricular and classroom-based support. Professional development seminars are lead by teams of
scientists and educators; seminars are held at one of eight science cultural institutions around
New York City (e.g., the American Museum of Natural History, New York Botanical Garden,
Brooklyn Botanical Garden, Bronx Zoo, Queens Botanical Garden, New York Hall of Science,

21

New York Aquarium, and Staten Island Zoo). Each institution employs “lead teachers” to assist
with planning curriculum, developing the plans for, and facilitating professional development
workshops. These leaders are selected through a competitive application process, and are
evaluated annually by UA leaders. Approximately 20 lead teachers work for UA in addition to
their regular work as teachers in the NYC Public Schools.
Sample and Participant Selection
The study built upon and extended a larger mixed methods study funded by a National
2

Science Foundation. That study documented the professional development offered in UA, as
well as the teaching and learning of new teachers participating in professional development in
secondary research. In that study, we observed several lead teachers collaborate in teaching the
professional development seminars; however, that study did not involve documenting their
classroom teaching or their learning over time as UA participants. In the study I report on here, I
documented the science teaching practices of three successful UA lead teachers – Diana, Carrie,
and Marilyn – in order to provide an account of how successful teachers engage students in longterm investigations.
Participant selection proceeded through a combination of nominations and convenience
sampling. After receiving approval from the Institutional Review Board from both Michigan
State University and the New York Public Schools, I contacted a UA staff member for
recommendations for participants. My criteria (in no particular order) were: 1) skilled in
conducting classroom discussion and talk with students, 2) highly successful in teaching inquirybased science, and 3) comfortable with classroom visitors. While I asked for nominations of
exemplary teachers of inquiry science, I was aware that even in a program that selects for this

2

National Science Foundation DRK-12 Grant # 0918560
22

quality, there is always a range of skill and experience. Because one goal of this dissertation is
to learn from, and tell the stories of, experienced, skilled teachers’ practice, my first priority was
to invite the most skilled teachers from the pool of UA lead teachers.
I first sent email invitations to the recommended teachers’ school administrators to get
permission to conduct a study in the school, as required by the New York City Public Schools. I
then sent email invitations to the recommended teachers in buildings where I received approval.
This initial letter introduced the study, myself, and outlined their possible commitment of time
outside of school hours (e.g., no more than 5 hours). Of eight teachers to receive the initial
invitation, three agreed to participate. At that point, I sent each a letter outlining the IRB
considerations and other study-specific information, including a possible observation schedule. I
provide full portraits of each teacher in chapter 3.
Data Collection
Data collection proceeded through a series of five periodic classroom observations of
LTIs in each teacher’s classroom, resulting in approximately 15 total hours of classroom
observation per teacher? Or as a while? These observations took place during five trips to NYC
from Michigan in which I was able to visit each teacher’s classroom, sometimes more than once
during the visit. During each observation, I recorded teachers’ talk, and took field notes
(Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995). In addition to recording teacher talk, I also used two additional
digital recorders, placed at student tables, to record their small group talk during each lesson. In
between research trips, I produced analytic memos, and transcribed lesson recordings. I also
conducted three interviews with each teacher at the beginning, mid-point, and at the end of the
project (Kvale, 1996). I collected student work samples, instructional handouts, and curricular

23

materials for as many lessons teachers could provide. I also collected digital versions of final
student projects for each teacher. I describe each in more detail below.
Digital audio recordings of science lessons. The primary goal for each observation was
to obtain classroom discourse data using digital audio recording equipment.

3

I used three hand-

held high-fidelity digital audio recorders with stereo microphones, and one wireless lapel
microphone to record the teachers’ instruction, as well as to record small group discussion
among students. Teachers wore the wireless lapel microphone during each observation, allowing
me to monitor sound input from a recorder/receiver that I kept with me as I moved about the
classroom. After several test runs of the equipment before leaving for the first observation, I was
pleased to find out that if the lapel microphone were to fail at any given moment, the recorders’
microphones were able to pick up the teacher’s voice from anywhere in the classroom. And
thankfully, if the digital data card were to fill during recording, replacing it with another was
relatively simple, which meant that very few minutes of possible recording time were lost.
Of course, working with digital recording equipment is not without risk, and I did what I
could to prevent any loss of data, and planned two back up devices (including field notes) where
possible. But there were some brief moments when that could not be avoided. Teachers move
around the room, which presents a challenge in capturing recordings of every conversation they
might have with students. I taught each teacher how to turn off and on the transmitter that we
connected to her clothing, giving all of them both the option of having privacy by turning off the
device when they were having private conversations with students, talking with parents, or
answering the classroom telephone. Because we connected the microphones well before each
class session, this also allowed them to turn on the device when their lesson began, so that we did

3

The NYCPS do not allow video recordings in classrooms, which would have been preferred.
24

not record all of their extraneous talk with students, parents, or other teachers as they arrived to
class. Since I was interested in instructional talk, this not only helped to focus the recordings,
but in a more practical sense, it also prevented us from using up valuable battery power and
space on the memory card for talk that I was not likely to transcribe. Since I was traveling
around the city sometimes for entire school days without time to return to my hotel room to
recharge batteries, this procedural economy was important.
However, on one occasion, the teacher unknowingly flipped the transmitter to “off.” Not
knowing this until later in my hotel room, this meant that I could not solve the problem
immediately, and did not capture her individual conversation with small groups on this day.
Luckily, other microphones placed around the room captured her whole group discussion, and I
filled in the gaps with field notes.
After the first observation day, which was my first visit to each teacher’s classroom and
served to orient me to the general physical set up of the space, I asked about the typical student
and teacher configurations I was bound to see in the remaining observations. All three teachers
reported that their students worked in small groups every day, and that they (the teachers
themselves) would be moving from group to group during the entire lesson. This helped me to
decide several different places around the classroom where I could take field notes to capture
teacher-student interaction.
Because I was interested also in small group conversations, after the first observation I
brought two additional recorders to capture discussions among small groups of students with and
without their teacher. I recorded a different pair of student groups during each visit. With eight
small groups in each classroom, I captured the small group talk of nearly all of the groups in
each class for the remaining four days of observation. I was able to record more than one

25

conversation with the same group because in two cases, I did not record a group that included a
student whose parents did not give approval for their child to be recorded.
I imagine that readers are wondering about placing expensive digital recording equipment
with students during the sometimes messy endeavor that is inquiry-based science. On the first
day, when the teachers introduced the project and me to their students, students were curious
about the recorders. Teachers reported, before the study began, that my presence would soon not
be noticed by anyone in the room, but that students were always welcoming, and quite used to
having people observe. As busy classrooms go, visitors came and went, student teachers
changed every few months, and various other adults visited throughout the day. So, new visitors
to their classroom appeared not to be disruptive.
Students were respectful of me and of the equipment, oftentimes protecting it from other
students from other groups who came by to ask about it. One student said, “Don’t touch that!
It’s Patti’s.” One student reported to me when she saw the “data card full” message appear on
the small digital screen so that I could take care of it. Another treated the recording device as his
own, talking into it as if he were a news reporter, narrating what was happening, “Now, we are
filling the fish tank with room temperature water….” Another spoke into it on their first day of
recording, “Did you catch that, little person in the box?” And a pair of students said, “Is she
recording what we say?” to which another student responded, “Yeah, so keep it clean, okay?”
Their awareness of the “person in the box” slowly faded as they got to know me and “the box” a
little better. Nevertheless, they took the recordings seriously. And after two sessions, they did
not talk about the recorders, or my presence. Being forgotten felt like an accomplishment.
In addition, the two recorders in each session also served as back-up devices. There were
a few moments in which the teacher’s lapel microphone did not pick up a student’s voice and the

26

student recording provided what the students said. Likewise, the student recordings oftentimes
captured the student voice, but the teacher’s was not as clear. In these cases, I was able to use
both recordings to stitch conversations together. Lastly, the extra recorders captured whole class
conversations as well, providing a back up record of those teaching moments.
Lastly, while I collected several hours of conversations between students in their small
group conversations, for this study -- which foregrounds teachers’ discourse and classroom
practices -- I directed my attention to the teacher recordings. That is, I used the student
recordings as additional supportive artifacts for now, and will no doubt find these data useful for
other analyses.
Semi-structured teacher interviews. To buttress and inform what I was able to glean
from the recordings, I conducted three semi-structured audio-recorded interviews with each
teacher. Following Kvale (1996), my goal was to conduct conversational research interviews,
those that are “neither open conversation nor a highly structured questionnaire” (p. 27). In other
words, my stance was very minimally as the “miner” as Kvale puts it, “digging nuggets of data”
whose end product is as a rider on a “conveyor belt” whose value is “determined by correlating it
with an objective, external, real world” (pp. 3-4). My approach more closely resembled the
“traveler metaphor,” in which “the interviewer-traveler wanders through the landscape…
explores the many domains of the country” and one who “wanders together with” (p. 4). With
this in mind, I designed interviews to gather as much information about the landscape of
conducting the LTI as I could, and as I had originally planned, to learn about the teachers’
experiences and ideas about discourse in science classrooms, especially with students who may
speak minority languages at home.

27

I also embraced the dialectic nature of interviewing (Kvale, 1996). Collecting both
micro- and macro-data would lend itself to naturally occurring contradictions and
interdependencies. I could anticipate tensions between teachers’ ideas about teaching and their
own practice; I could not anticipate, nor did I enter the interview process with, these
presuppositions, about what, exactly, those contradictions would entail. I could anticipate that
both looking broadly at language, and also turning the microscope dial to focus on the minute
meant that themes (or ideas or concepts, etc) would be in tension, and therefore produce new
insights (Kvale, 1996). In short, I was (and am) philosophically oriented toward the dialectic,
toward the possibilities that arise from tensions between two different forces; I embraced the
possibility that my interview data would generate tensions between what teachers lived, what
they reported, and what I perceived and interpreted.
In this spirit, I recorded the first interview on the phone with each teacher just prior to the
first observations in March of 2012. This first interview focused on, in general, the teacher’s
background (see Appendix A), and was organized into themes (Kvale, 1996), seeking
information about the teacher’s teaching and educational background, and her UA involvement.
It also involved coming to know how the teachers conceptualized inquiry- based instruction in
their classrooms, how they conducted the LTI, information about their curricula, and about how
they used the UA teaching tools in their classrooms. I also asked about their school contexts,
which included information about the surrounding neighborhoods, the school focus, the UA
involvement in the school (i.e., to what extent other teachers were involved in the UA program),
the planning schedules, teaching schedules, and demographic information about their students.
Lastly, I asked about the numbers of English Language learners (ELLs) in each classroom and
how they thought about teaching science in linguistically diverse classrooms.

28

The second interview, which took place between the fourth and fifth classroom
observations, was an in-person interview conducted in each teacher’s classroom (see Appendix
B). This interview involved playing two recordings of classroom talk (accompanied by the
transcripts) and discussing her reflections on those recordings. The purpose was to ascertain
teachers’ ideas about students’ engagement in whole and small group discussions. I was
interested in understanding the teachers’ perspectives on student dynamics, to get a sense of their
typicality – in as much as we might be able to discern through audiotape – and teachers’ ideas
about what insights they could share about the discourse data. Another theme of the interview
was to capture teachers’ thinking about classroom discussion (Kvale, 1996). I wanted to probe
their ideas about when to use small and whole group discussions and their reasons for doing so.
I also wanted to find out about their thinking about how ELLs tend to participate. This follows
my interest in teachers’ perspectives about organizing discourse spaces inclusive of students who
speak minority languages. Overall, this interview sought information about the teachers’ ideas
about student engagement.
I conducted the third and last interview with all three teachers in October (see Appendix
C). It was difficult to schedule an interview at the end of the school year when teachers were
busily packing up their classrooms. This interview was the most open-ended of the three, and I
invited teachers to reflect on their study participation, the insights they may have gained since
the last interview about the student recordings, and about classroom discourse in general. I also
ascertained their reflections on their LTI process, including their ideas about the success of the
students’ final LTIs, as well as any ideas for changes they would make to how they would
conduct the process the next year. Finally, I took notes about ideas to follow up on, and to use as
a backup in case the recording equipment failed.

29

Field notes. I took handwritten field notes for each observation in each teacher’s
classroom (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995). I chose handwritten notes as opposed to my laptop
computer to allow me the greatest possible flexibility to move about the classroom, as well as to
avoid physically or socially distancing myself further from the students and teachers (Miles &
Huberman, 1994). Also, using a notebook provided me the opportunity to draw or make charts
of things I saw in a way that a computer could not.
My focus was on things I sensed I would not be able to glean from the recordings: the
classroom physical space and organization, where and how students were organized to work,
how teachers and students moved about the classroom, how the teacher seemed to interact (in
non-verbal ways) with students, the general tenor of the relationships among students, or other
typical school kinds of things, like intercom announcements, people coming and going from
classrooms, other adults in the room, how science materials were handled and organized, where
the teacher tended to stand or how she moved about the classroom, any audio-visual details of
the instructional space (e.g., posters on the wall, uses of technology, the dry erase board or
smartboard or overhead projection equipment, etc.). I also took note of students’ backchannel
conversations (Johnstone, 2008) during instruction: when, how, and what they talked about,
comments they made to each other or to themselves as teachers were teaching, how they reacted
to instructions, and their general eagerness to engage in the tasks. These details helped me flesh
out the narratives with details (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995).
I used the field notes to write narratives of classroom action (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw,
1995). After each observation, as soon as possible, I converted my handwritten notes to a
typewritten description. On some days, this meant three descriptions of three different
classrooms. My notetaking had to be detailed and precise enough to offer clarity about which

30

classroom I was describing. I found that it was remarkably easy to remember details from each
classroom when I typed up the notes on the same day. They were each unique from each other,
and my presence in each room, with different sets of students, felt different. Therefore, I was
able to also fill in the notes with details from my sensory memory how the moments unfolded
(Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995).
Supporting data. The conceptual framework guiding this study presumes that teaching
is situated work. As such, the contexts in which teachers work – material, intellectual, historical,
social – shape what they do. Each teacher planned her LTIs with the help of numerous
curriculum sources. These material resources provide documentation, which contribute to the
macro-view of instruction. I describe each of the other resources that I created or collected
below.
School-specific curriculum materials. All three teachers planned their units and LTIs
with the New York City or State Benchmarks for Science Inquiry; and NYCPS curriculum
materials for 7th and 8th grade science, the Common Core State Standards for English Language
Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects (National Governors
Association Center for Best Practices, 2012) in mind. They connected these various standards
documents to their schoolwide kit-based curricula (such as SEPUP and FOSS). Marilyn and
Carrie, who teach at the same school, used the Science Education for Public Understanding
Program (SEPUP) (www.sepuplhs.org) and the Full Option Science System (FOSS)
(www.fossweb.com), while Diana used selected materials from the Project Based Inquiry
Science (PBIS) curriculum (Kolodner, Krajcik, Edelson, Reiser, & Starr, 2009), as well as Urban
Advantage curriculum materials that accompanied an extensive case study of the zebra mussel
population in the Hudson River, the result of a collaboration between the American Museum of

31

Natural History and the Carey Institute for Ecosystem Studies
(http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web/riverecology/). I provide a full description of
the teachers’ curriculum approaches and of the Hudson River case study in particular, in chapter
4. I did not collect these resources, per se, as teachers were not able to provide copies of books
for me. However, the websites for all of the programs provided adequate information. I was
able to collect paper copies of student readings on the AMNH/Carey Institute case study that
Diana used as they were generated as part of the NSF project that I was working on at the time.
Urban Advantage science inquiry tools. The UA program provides two essential
instructional tools for guiding teachers and students in learning through inquiry: the Investigation
Design and Development tool (IDD) and the Developing Scientific Explanations Tool (DSET).
Both tools are intended to support teachers in guiding their students through the required NYCPS
8th grade exit projects (e.g., long-term inquiry projects). The IDD lays out steps for creating
scientifically sound investigations (NRC, 1996), while the DSET assists students in creating
evidence-based reasoning from the results of their investigations. I describe each in detail in
chapter 3 and provide student samples in chapter 4.
Each tool organizes language and science vocabulary and reasoning according to the
standards for science inquiry (NRC, 1996; 2011), and requires students to be proficient in
reasoning through reading, talking with others, and writing (NGACBP, 2012; NRC, 2011).
Urban Advantage recognizes these tools as literacy tools, as they are also connected to the
Common Core Curriculum for English Language Arts (NGACBP, 2012) as well as to the Next
Generation Science Standards (Achieve, Inc., 2013).
Student work. I also collected student work samples for as many lessons as teachers
were able to provide. Some artifacts were photocopies of student journal pages, or copies of

32

students’ work on daily work (e.g., Do Nows) and graphic organizers. I also obtained digital
copies of students’ final LTIs, as PowerPoint© documents and typewritten lab reports. I explain
and present several examples of these in chapter 4.
Student work samples provide information about the content and inquiry processes from
those verbal interactions into the artifacts students are expected to produce. Thus, student work
was not intended for describing achievement, but instead to provide additional descriptive data
about students’ engagement with the discourses, or language, of the classroom community in
general, and of science inquiry in particular.
Data Analysis
This study draws from sociolinguistics to guide the interpretive approaches to
understanding classroom talk and interaction in science classrooms. Given that much of the
work of science involves socializing students into the academic language practices (e.g.,
structures and social interaction, like argumentation), teachers and students often find themselves
negotiating their way toward mastery of the disciplinary language demands (Hakuta & Santos,
2012). Sociolinguistics helps us to understand how language learning unfolds (Jaworski &
Coupland, 2008; Johnstone, 2008). In her discussion on sociolinguistics in classroom settings,
Florio-Ruane (1987) reminds us that “sociolinguists research what teachers and students need to
know to participate in socially-appropriate ways” (p. 186). I take this approach, one that
involves teachers helping students to engage in classrooms in “socially-appropriate ways”; that
is, in ways that are governed by the normative practices of science discourse (NRC, 2012).
Following Florio-Ruane (1980) I ask questions such as: “What is happening, specifically, in the
social action that takes place in this particular setting? What do these actions mean? How are
the actions organized? How is what is happening… related to happenings at other… levels?

33

How do the ways everyday life is organized in this setting compare with other ways of
organizing social life?” (pp. 186-187).
To answer these questions, I conducted two levels of analysis, one involving a macroperspective on the context (Erickson & Schultz, 1981) surrounding teachers’ work (using
interview data, student work, and field notes). I also conducted a micro-analysis (using
transcript data of classroom talk, the bulk of my data) to trace patterns of engagement. In this
study, I refer to the ethnographic component as the macro-analysis, and the discourse analysis of
selected speech events, as the micro-analysis.
Discourse analysis of classroom talk. As a multidisciplinary endeavor, discourse
analysis includes an array of strategies for parsing transcript data, some drawing from linguistics
(Gee, 2008a; Heath, 1983; Tannen, 2007), from sociology (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974),
or anthropology (Hymes, 1974; Erickson, 2004; Gumperz, 1977).
Following Gee (2008a), I am concerned with the D/discourses in which people
communicate in various ways, for various reasons. According to Gee, the lower-case variation,
discourse, represents “language-in-use,” or the “on site” language we use to “enact activities and
identities” (Gee, 2005, p. 7; 2008a). But, in Gee’s words,
To “pull off” being an “X” doing “Y”…. (a lab physicist convincing colleagues that a
particular graph supports her ideas), it is not enough to get just the words “right,” though
that is crucial. It is also necessary to get one’s body, clothes, gestures, actions,
interaction, symbols, tools, technologies, values, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions “right,”
as well, and all at the “right” places and times. (p. 7)
In studying the language and communication between teachers and students, I consider
both “Discourse” and “discourse.” That is, as I explore the various Discourses surrounding this

34

work, I analyze using a macro-analytic approach; whereas, “discourse” calls for a micro-analytic
approach (Bloome, et al., 2008; Gee, 2005, 2008a; Johnstone, 2008). However, this study
largely attends to issues of small-d discourses (Gee), while I keep the big-D Discourses in mind
as I work to understand the larger contexts in which the discourses of classroom interaction take
place. Jaworski and Coupland (2006) remind us, “One important facet of discourse analysis is…
to show how micro-level social actions realize and give local form to macro-level social
structures” (p. 10). As this study takes place within a swirl of science education policy activity, I
have also partly attended to another piece of the macro- Discourse, or “social structures,” in
which this study lies. In the next chapter, I will present some additional contextual factors that
make up the Discourse (most notably issues arising in the participants’ local teaching contexts).
Here I discuss my process for the micro-analysis of the discourse represented in the recordings of
teachers’ and students’ classroom communication about science.
The analyst’s job is to determine a parsing scheme that will provide salient descriptive
details, understanding that each choice about where and how to parse data is interpretive, and
subjective (Johnstone, 2008). Throughout the study, I have been aware of the fact that my
interests – as former teacher and as a scholar interested in issues of language in urban classrooms
– shape my perceptions when collecting data and my interpretations and analyses (Jaworski &
Coupland, 2006). In this light, I present below my rationale and process for parsing the speech
data in several different types of transcription coding schemes, and through different ways to
“entextualize” or, “to make choices about how to select and delimit chunks out of the flow of
talk… making these chunks into texts, and treating them analytically in much the way we have
traditionally treated written texts” (Johnstone, 2008, p. 20). In short, I chose a multilayered

35

parsing scheme to gather both macro- and micro-discourse data. My scheme involved several
different “slices” of the transcript data.
First, I determined the larger structures that formed in the conversation so that I could
later identify and describe the contexts in which smaller discourse moves occurred (Erickson &
Schulz, 1981). The first slice of data, then, was to identify the participant structures (Jaworski &
Coupland, 2006; Miles & Huberman, 1994; Phillips, 1983), or “culturally learned patterns of
conversational rights and obligations” (Florio-Ruane, 1987, p. 190). For example, in the second
lesson in Carrie’s classroom, in which she asks students to work with their project groups to
develop their initial plans for their LTI (which I will outline in detail in chapter 4), I color-coded
and labeled each bound participant structure as: W, S, S, W, S, I, S, I, S, I, S, I, S, I, S, S, S, S,
S, S, S, S, S, I, S, I, S, W (where W = whole group, S = small group, and I = one-on-one
discussion). Or, to put it more simply, we can see that the lesson began with whole group
instruction and ended in the same way. The “W” in the fourth position was an announcement
made to the whole class during the small group work. The rest of the time, Carrie is moving
from group to group, visiting some groups more than once. The “I” structures in this particular
case, are moments when an individual student comes to Carrie as she is speaking with a small
group. Also, since my gaze is on the teachers in these interactions, I coded this interchange as an
“I” because, even though it only lasted for a few seconds – the student may have been asking a
simple question – I am interested in tracing Carrie’s activity. Though she is still sitting with the
small group, her interaction is focused on the individual, even as an interruption. What is
important to note here is that the duration of each kind of participation varies. For instance, there
are two longer “S” moments in which Carrie sustains the conversation for more than 5 minutes.
In other cases, the “S” moments are typically less than one minute long. From here, I was able to

36

code each smaller “S” or “W” case and find patterns of talk within them. That analysis came in
the next slice of my data.
Looking first at participant structures allowed me to map the patterns of interaction in
each classroom, across classrooms, and over time. For example, I was able to determine when
whole group participation was expected of students in each lesson activity, when small groups
were used, and how much time students spent participating in each. My presupposition here was
that if students participated in several different structures on any given day, they would also be
expected to shift their discourse strategies (e.g., expectations about contributing ideas, addressing
other speakers, listening, writing, asking question). As we saw in the last example in Carrie’s
classroom then, since Carrie made multiple visits to each small group as they worked, we might
expect them to know how to shift the conversation for when she arrives and when she leaves the
conversation. Gumperz (1974) identified these sometimes subtle cues – such as a teacher’s
physical arrival to a table full of students who are steeped in conversation – are called
contextualization cues. Research on classroom interaction has long argued that in heterogeneous
language communities, such as classrooms, the success or failure of communication oftentimes
comes down to the abilities of speakers to identify and appropriately respond to these cues
(Florio-Ruane, 1987; Gee, 2008a; Heath, 1983; Hymes, 1974). This is just one of the many
fundamental principles of the work of conducting research on language in science classrooms.
Once identified, the larger structures of participation served as contexts for the next
smallest slice of data (Erickson & Schulz, 1981), each speaker’s turn (Sacks, Schegloff, &
Jefferson, 1974), for instance. A turn-by-turn analysis allows the researcher to map patterns of
engagement, as each turn is contingent on the meanings of the adjacent turns (e.g., before and
after) (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). Therefore, I gave each turn an interpretive code

37

based on the meanings I gleaned from the interaction of those turns with the adjacent turns
(Miles & Huberman, 1994) (see Appendix D). Then, I mapped those interpretive codes onto the
participant structures to determine the patterns of interaction inside of each participant structure.
For example, I shall revisit Carrie’s lesson for which I provided the map of participant structures
above. In this lesson, Carrie has asked students to work in small groups on their initial plans for
their LTI. The interpretive the coding scheme (see Appendix D) allowed me to see that Carrie
typically opened the floor with each small group she visited by asking them a “checking in”
question, such as “How are you guys doing over here?” I labeled this utterance, “CHECK.”
This was typically followed by a student response that either was a “student initiated question”
(SIQ), like, “For this would it be once if we went [to the zoo] just once?” or a simple report of
“good,” which received no code in this analysis. This particular utterance, “For this would it be
once….” opened the floor to a longer substantive conversation about how to write procedures
that produce the “best data.” (I present more excerpts from this conversation in Chapters 4 and
5.)
Next, I counted the numbers of occurrences of each code inside of each participant
structure. (In this way, I went from one layer to the next, from micro- to macro- and back again.
Checking for new patterns each time.) This allowed me to get a sense of the patterns of
interactions, and the general nature of those interactions over time. This analysis also helped me
to choose several key moments that I would use in even more micro-analysis (Crawford, 2000).
Key moments are those exchanges that were either interactionally compelling – a student
wrestles with a particularly difficult science concept aloud, or a teacher is demonstrating
particularly skilled questioning strategies, etc. – or, were difficult for me to understand,
compelling me to look more closely. In other words, this was an iterative process of moving

38

between codes and creating new sets of codes that would allow me other, and sometimes
competing, interpretations (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
The third analysis involved parsing the transcript data into even finer segments of talk. A
different analytic process informed this parsing. For each key exchange, I divided each
speaker’s turns into smaller chunks according to the most meaningful clusters of words
(Johnstone, 2008). Gee (2005) reminds us that “meaning” in discourse analysis is contingent on
the surrounding texts and subtexts, which make up a discourse. Therefore, meaning can also be
contested between analysts, who are “reading” the texts and subtexts differently (Ochs, 1979).
In as many cases as possible, I parsed the turns according to grammatical and paralinguistic
segments. In other words, pauses in speech or grammatical phrases (syntactical cues) provided
small bounded units for analysis. For example, the utterance, “Who else had the exact word,
food? Can anybody tell me? Raise your hand.” Would be parsed into three separate sentences:
Who else had the exact word, food/Can anybody tell me?/Raise your hand. The pitch change
between the ends of one interrogative clause and the beginning of another marked by a question
mark serves as a logical boundary. Whereas the sentence, “I want you to be sure that you write
your materials and procedures so that… so that if someone else were to try to replicate your
investigation they could,” may have different boundaries for parsing. In my approach, the
sentence would be broken into the following segments:
1 I want you to be sure
2 that you write your materials and procedures
3 so that…
4 so that if someone else
5 were to try to replicate

39

6 your investigation
7 they could.
Notice that each line represents a single idea or single grammatical phrase (Johnstone, 2008).
I parsed according to the different head word they each include: the noun phrase, “someone else”
in the first case, and the verb “replicate” in the second. Each phrase bound by a new phrase
indicates a different part of speech in this way: … so that if someone else/were to try to replicate/
your investigation/they could, includes a conditional (e.g., “if someone”), a verb phrase, a direct
object (e.g., your investigation), and a closing conditional.
I conducted this parsing for one complete lesson for each teacher, and recoded each line
of transcript according to two new sets of codes. I first coded each line, as I had before, in an
interpretive way, looking to see new patterns in the smaller chunks of speech. I also coded each
line for instances of science practices and writing practices. I derived these last two coding
schemes using standards and practices from the official documents of the Common Core State
Standards in English Language Arts (NGACBP, 2013) and the Framework for K-12 Science
Education (NRC, 2012) (See Appendix E). These codes helped me to understand different
aspects of my data, as I will discuss below.
Analytic research memos. Equally significant to transcription data were several
analytic memos I wrote about different slices of the data (Miles & Huberman, 1994). I shared
these memos with my advisor during our weekly meetings, in which we discussed my
conjectures and emerging hypotheses, revised those conjectures, and sometimes discovered new
ones.
My process for creating and using the memos was iterative and discursively connected to
the transcription data. That is, each memo resulted in my seeing the transcript data in different

40

and sometimes contradictory ways. Each week in the fall of 2012, during my analysis phase, I
created a new memo that involved creating a different chart or graph of these data, descriptive
data about the frequency tables on the types of utterances for each participant structure, or new
matrices on which to represent different ways to explore the relationships between themes (Miles
& Huberman, 1994).
For example, one memo analyzed a count of the number and types of utterances coded as
each of the science practices (see Appendix F) for each teacher for each lesson. Collectively
(e.g., across all three teachers), there were 324 utterances about science practices in the 13
4

observations that were recorded and transcribed. Of these, 120 and 126 utterances about
science practices occurred in whole group and small groups respectively. Since these
represented the majority of the types of utterances, the analytic writing about these data helped
me to make decisions about where to direct my attention for the microanalysis. In other words, I
decided that very few science practices were discussed in one-on-one discussions, and those
discussions tended to be very short, I knew to focus my further analytic attention to the whole
and small group conversations.
In another example, I wanted to understand how the nature of talk across the scope of the
LTI, that is in terms of time. Therefore, I produced a matrix with “open-ended” on one axis and
“product-oriented” on another. Inside the matrix, I placed utterances of teachers specifically
about science practices and processes (NRC, 2012), and noted the patterns that arose. This
memo helped me to see the tensions between teachers’ talk about science as being between a pull
toward the more centralizing – as in the centripetal sense (Bakhtin, 1981) – or product-oriented
utterances, and the utterances which push the science discourse outward from the center – in the
4

Due to technical and scheduling issues, two recordings of teacher talk were lost or not
available.
41

centrifugal sense (Bakhtin, 1981) – or, in other words, those utterances which afforded the
students more open-ended writing and thinking tasks. This memo helped to generate a portion of
the argument that I will make later in this dissertation.
Still another memo helped me to see how the literacy codes played out across all three
teachers’ talk. In 435 total utterances coded using the literacy frame (see Appendix E), I was
able to determine that for all teachers, observations 3 through 5 – which represented the planning
and writing stages of the LTI – included the most talk about writing. This memo helped me
inside another perspective that I will present in chapter 5, that teachers’ ideas about how to write
in science nearly always intertwined with the ways that teachers talked about doing the
investigations themselves. Finally, a combination of these and other memos helped me to
theorize about a “trajectory of teacher and student engagement” that I discuss in the analysis
chapters.
Summary
In sum, these data collection and analyses involved both art and science. These processes
challenged and informed every aspect of this work. In fact, it is through these practices that the
focus of this dissertation shifted frames from what I originally conceived – from one about the
nature and differences between and among participation structures (Phillips, 1983), to one about
the trajectory of engagement of long-term investigations. In this way, discourse analysis, though
oftentimes is presented as a scientific practice, highlighted by an insistence on systematicity
(Johnstone, 2008). But, as I practice it, discourse analysis feels more like an iterative
combination of strategies for understanding. It feels kaleidoscopic. Add to this the challenge of
conducting a discourse analysis of teachers in classrooms with students and technology and
science materials and small group dynamics and the hubbub of the school day, and discourse

42

analysis is far more multicolored than one might expect. This has been my own science inquiry
experience.

43

Chapter 3:
Setting the Stage:
Urban Advantage, the Lead Teachers, and their Classrooms
In this chapter, I present the Urban Advantage professional development program
(www.urbanadvantagenyc.org), the context within which this research was conducted. I describe
the program's goals, structure, and major teaching tools. Next, I describe each teacher's
background, teaching assignments, school, classroom, and students. Lastly, I discuss the
similarities and differences amongst and between the teachers to paint a more complex portrait of
the context in which this study took place.
Urban Advantage
Urban Advantage (UA) is a professional development program serving New York City
public middle school teachers (grades 6-8). Begun in 2004, UA is a partnership between eight
science cultural institutions and the New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) to support middle
school teachers and their students in conducting long-term science investigations, called “exit
projects.”

5

All 8th grade students in NYCPS are required to complete an exit project in which

they engage in scientific inquiry through answering questions and developing scientific
explanations while using standard scientific practices (NRC, 2012). UA's mission is to answer
the call for high-quality inquiry-based teaching, to support the efforts of the district in helping
middle school teachers teach through an inquiry stance, as well as developing strategies for
writing evidence-based explanations and scientific argumentation.

5

In addition to the New York City Public Schools, the science institutions who are a part of the
UA program are: the American Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Zoo, the New York
Botanical Garden, the New York Hall of Science, the New York Aquarium, the Brooklyn
Botanical Garden, the Queens Botanical Garden, and the Staten Island Zoo.
44

UA takes a situated learning approach to professional development; the program staff
assume that learning is contextualized, situated in and among various participants and
communities that both use and offer various resources (Cohen, Raudenbush, & Ball, 2003;
Wilson et al., 2012). The program views learning as best supported through a broad range of
material, professional, and personal resources (Cohen, Raudenbush & Ball, 2003), such as the
NYC's cultural institutions, local scientists, parents, and administrators. The program includes
six components (Wilson et al., 2012) designed to support teachers, students, parents,
administrators in teaching and learning about authentic science inquiry practices (NRC, 2012),
including:
1. High-quality professional development for teachers and administrators
2. Classroom materials and equipment that promote scientific inquiry and authentic
investigations
3. Access to UA Partner institutions through free school and family field trips
4. Outreach through family events, celebrations of student achievement, and parent
coordinator workshops
5. Capacity-building and sustainability structures, including a network of demonstration
schools and support for the development of lead teachers
6. Assessment of program goals, student learning, systems of delivery, and outcomes
Largely funded by NYC, schools participate in UA voluntarily. Some schools have a
handful of trained UA teachers, while others have required that all staff participate. The three
teacher participants in this study teach in schools in which the entire science staff has attended
UA programming for at least one year, including the school principals.

45

In the first year, UA teachers receive 48 hours of PD within three "cycles." Subsequent
years involve a series of continuing teacher workshops in which teachers have opportunities to
deepen their knowledge of a particular content area (e.g., life science, physical science, earth
science) or scientific practices (NRC, 2012). In the first year, Cycle 1 is a two-day workshop
that introduces teachers to the UA teaching tools, long-term investigation design, and the various
workshop options and scientific investigation types they will choose for Cycles 2 and 3.

6

During Cycles 2 and 3, teachers conduct long-term investigations firsthand (e.g., field
studies, controlled experiments, design experiments, or secondary research). They participate in
investigation design, data collection, data analysis, and write up their own exit project (Wilson et
al., 2012). For example, teachers who choose to complete Cycles 2 and 3 at the New York
Botanical Gardens spend several Saturdays conducting investigations about plants and
ecosystems. They gather data on soil quality on the NYBG grounds, using soil thermometers
and pH meters, and bring samples back to the lab/classroom space where they test for nitrate and
phosphorous levels. They test water quality of the Bronx River. They compare the observations
(e.g., measurements) to previous research on relevant variables, including dissolved oxygen,
temperature, sediment levels, pH, phosphorous levels, macro and micro-invertebrates living in
the river.
By design, the UA PD engages teachers in science experiences that closely emulate the
day-to-day work of professional scientists. Through these experiences, questions and decision
making processes similar to those of scientists arise from their conversations: Where should we
sample? How many samples do we take? How often? Why? What other factors may affect the

6

Like many professional development programs, UA’s content and structure evolve over time.
The description offered here is being revised, but this description accurately represents what the
teacher participants experienced at the time of their participation.
46

results of sampling and of testing soil or water quality? What may impact the accuracy of our
data collection? How do I make sense of data that does not align with what I know about
ecosystems? Further, participants’ decision making and questioning also occurs in teams of
colleagues who push each other to scrutinize their own knowledge, to argue for a position, to
make scientifically reasonable decisions about the procedures they will enact in collecting and
analyzing data. Finally, participating teachers present their investigations – their own exit
projects – in formal presentations on the last day of the PD. They have opportunities to field
questions from colleagues, and to discuss improvements or next steps in their research. In short,
they work as scientists. Although UA does not explicitly tell teachers how they should use these
experiences in their classrooms, the UA staff believe that these experiences -- rooted in social
constructivist and situated perspectives on learning -- will influence science teaching and help
teachers develop similar opportunities for their students.
In addition to experiences in doing science, UA also provides time for teachers to take
stock in these experiences, to design classroom applications that are specific to their own
teaching contexts. At most UA professional development meetings, teachers are given
substantial time to gather around tables with colleagues from other schools to discuss how to
develop inquiry-rich experiences for their students or to discuss how their classroom efforts are
unfolding. Teachers develop long-term investigations in light of their local curriculum and the
National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996), as well as the Framework for K-12 Science
Education (NRC, 2012) and the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and
Mathematics (NGACBP, 2012). Teachers ommit to trying one new idea in their classrooms and
reporting back (as well as offering others feedback) about it in the final PD session (usually mid-

47

March). In this way, throughout Cycles 2 and 3, teachers participate as both learners of science
and (learning) teachers of science.
As the long-term investigation (the exit project) that UA hopes teachers will use with
their students is central to this effort, here I provide more detail both about that project and the
concepts and tools provided to participants to support their classroom efforts.

7

The exit project. All NYCPS 8th grade students are required to conduct long-term
science investigations designed to answer a specific scientific inquiry. One feature of the
NYCPS science curriculum is that it differentiates between different types of scientific research
and thus there are four types of exit projects: field studies (e.g., collecting data from field
observations about the relationships between variables such as water quality and
microinvertebrate populations), design studies (e.g., designing and testing a tool to satisfy some
specific need or use), secondary research (e.g., investigating and describing relationships
between variables taken from large data sets from organizations such as NOAA), or controlled
experiments (e.g., fair tests of the relationships between variables of some phenomenon).
The exit project is designed to actively engage students in scientific practices (NRC,
2012) such as writing a researchable question, developing a hypothesis, and designing and
carrying out a set of procedures to investigate the relationships between variables, data
collection, and constructing scientific explanations that include a claim, evidence, and reasoning.
UA participants are provided with various scaffolds to support their own investigations
and those of their students. For poster presentations of exit projects, students and teachers use

7

Sixth and seventh grade teachers are not required to do an exit project, but they were
encouraged to engage their students in long-term investigations. While eighth grade teachers are
required to do exit projects, there is considerable variation in how that policy is implemented.
Here I describe the program’s aspirations, without making claims about how well this model was
then transferred into teachers’ classrooms.
48

PowerPoint slides that include: a title, a researchable question, a hypothesis based in background
knowledge, procedures, data presented in charts or graphs, and a conclusion based in the
evidence presented. In the study I present here, I focus on what happened in three teachers’
classrooms as they helped their students engage in long-term investigations over the course of
the school year.
UA schools require students to display their projects in an end-of-year science expo at the
school. Each UA school then chooses several projects, across grades six through eight, to
represent their school at the Annual UA Science Expo at the American Museum of Natural
History (AMNH) each June. This event, hosting more than 400 projects across some 120 UA
schools, is a highlight of UA (www.urbanadvantagenyc.org). Hundreds of middle schoolers,
sheparded by their teachers, and accompanied by their parents, caregivers, sisters and brothers,
aunts and uncles, set up posters in the museum’s halls and present their findings to the other
families, teachers, administrators, and scientists who are milling around the posters. The exit
project then, has some importance, especially for students who want to participate in this huge
science fair, which is an honor for teachers, students, and their families.
Tools. UA provides several different teaching tools that help to guide students along
each step of creating their investigations. These tools help teachers structure students’ learning
and work, and support the development of a shared scientific vocabulary for investigations
(Mikeska et al., 2012; Wilson et al., 2012). One such tool is the Investigation Design Diagram
(IDD or, "ID" as UA participants call it), which is a graphic organizer that helps students record
the different components of the investigation design: title, question, hypothesis, independent and
dependent variables (IV and DV), constants, and levels of the IV (see Figure 3.1).

49

Investigation Design Diagram (ID)
Title:
Question:
Hypothesis:
Independent Variable:
Change in
independent
variable:
Number of
repeated
trials:

Dependent Variable:
Constant variables:

Figure 3.1. Investigation Design Diagram

50

Meant as a planning tool, the graphic does not provide space for students to record results, write
scientific explanations, or to draw conclusions. That work is done with the help of the
Developing Scientific Explanations Tool (DSET), another simple graphic organizer that helps
teachers to guide students through the process of composing a scientific explanation that
involves the claims, evidence, and reasoning involved in their investigation (see Figure 3.2).
In addition to these two tools, UA staff provide others to support teachers. The Exit
Project Rubric, for example, structures how teachers assess students' final projects. Teachers
also sometimes use it as an instructional device so that students may conduct peer reviews, or in
ongoing evaluation of their own projects.
While teachers are free to use these resources as they see fit, these tools generate a
particular way of doing -- and of talking about -- scientific inquiry that will become apparent in
this study.
Lead Teachers. The UA program recruits and trains teacher leaders across the city to
join a professional development team at each cultural (partner) institution (see component 5
above). “Lead teachers" (LTs) are full time middle school science teachers in NYC who commit
96 hours outside of their classroom teaching hours (www.urbanadvantagenyc.org); their role is to
assist in designing and delivering the UA professional development program, consulting with
teachers individually at each school, and assisting with curriculum development at the partner
institutions and UA schools. A year-round position, LTs are paid a small stipend (roughly
$4000), commit to working with teachers in schools throughout the school year, and attend
teacher leader professional development. UA leaders regard the LTs as vital, integral members of
the program.

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Developing a Scientific Explanation Tool (DSET)
What is your question?

Support for your explanation
Claim based on the
evidence (What is the
answer to your
question based on
your evidence?)

Evidence
(observations/data that
answers your question)

Scientific Reasoning
(why you think this
happened based on
background resarch)

Scientific Explanation = Claim + Evidence + Science Reasoning
My claim is (fill in with above claim) because (evidence and science
reasoning)

Figure 3.2. The Developing Science Explanations Tool
Teachers become UA lead teachers through a multi-step process. UA staff might
approach a particularly enthusiastic or talented UA participant or a UA teacher might approach
the UA staff to express his or her interest. Then teachers apply for a position with their chosen
science institution. UA staff assess the applications for evidence of science knowledge, teaching

52

experience, full participation in UA, and success in helping students complete exit projects.
Prospective LTs also provide examples of student work, and submit a written statement about
their vision of high quality professional development. Finalists are interviewed by the UA
curriculum director at the chosen institution (i.e., the Bronx Zoo, the Brooklyn Botanical
Gardens), and several program staff. Thus, the LTs can be seen as the “cream of the crop,”
which made them an appropriate population to sample from for this study.
While the three LTs in this study were immersed in UA, they were also immersed in their
schools, to which I now turn.
The Lead Teachers, Their Schools, and Their Students
Diana. Diana is a six-year veteran teacher, currently teaching 7th grade science and
mathematics at the Middle School for Math and Science (MSMS), a linguistically diverse,
8

mostly Spanish-speaking science-focused middle school. Diana is a White native New Yorker,
who knows the community where she teaches. Although she does not live in the neighborhood,
she has become connected to the parents and families through her work with UA and as a school
leader. Like other UA teachers, she provides as many opportunities as possible for her students
to learn science outside of school, organizing field trips to the city's science institutions
(supported by the UA program) at the AMNH and New York Botanical Gardens, among others.
Diana's connection to UA and the resources it provides is an important piece to her identity. She
once said to me, “I don’t have a sense of who I would be as a teacher without UA.”
Growing up, Diana had no intention of becoming a teacher. As an undergraduate
mathematics major, a mentor encouraged her to take coursework in geology. With some
skepticism, she did, discovering that she loved it. Within a year, she switched her major to

8

All names and places are pseudonyms.
53

geology and upon graduation enrolled in a Master's program in environmental engineering.
There, she got a job working as an intern with an environmental engineer for the NYC
Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) doing groundwater research. But she "ended up
hating it"; working as a scientist was not as fulfilling as she had hoped: "There wasn't the level
of science" that she wanted. She quit the MS program and, because she needed a job, ended up
teaching in a pre-school.
Her “accidental” work as a pre-school teacher led to an epiphany that Diana clearly
recalls. In one pre-school science unit, she made a scale model of the solar system and mounted
it inside the room, even using the classroom bathroom. She realized, "I was getting so technical
and so excited about this solar system thing, I was thinking I should probably not be teaching
three year olds. Probably..."
So she entered graduate school again, this time to study earth science education at a local
college. Another mentor who was teaching at MSMS encouraged her to apply for a job.
Although her original plan was to teach high school earth science, teaching with her mentor at a
science-focused middle school was an opportunity she could not pass up. During her very first
week at MSMS, Diana was encouraged to also enroll in Urban Advantage. UA made an impact
on her, as she immediately enrolled in advanced PD sessions, and after two years of teaching
experience, UA staff (who recognized her strong content preparation) encouraged her to apply to
be a lead teacher. The invitation stood as a testament to Diana's strength as a teacher, as most
UA lead teachers have more experience than she does.
As a science leader, Diana coordinates science units and plans -- especially the schoolwide science fair -- with the other teachers in her building. In addition to working at her
assigned partner institution, Diana’s school-based responsibilities include helping other UA

54

teachers get the materials they need, keep up with the professional development offerings, and
supporting any other UA needs teachers voice. All of the MSMS teachers have now been trained
in UA, so her school-based responsibilities are few; her colleagues have become independent in
their use of the UA tools and teaching investigations.
Diana is highly regarded by her peers and principal. Twice I saw other teachers come
into her classroom asking for advice about a lesson plan, or to borrow science materials. On one
occasion, I was able to meet the principal, Ms. Wilson, who visited Diana's class during a lesson.
Standing at the side of the classroom, Ms. Wilson smiled the entire time. She also interacted
with the students, asking them questions, participating in their discussions about preparing Petri
dishes to collect bacteria samples from different places in the room. They discussed how to label
the four different zones on the Petri dishes so that the students could later compare three different
locations to each other in the same Petri dish (one space would become the control, where no
bacteria would be collected). Ms. Wilson added that it was important that the students be very
precise in their observations, as well as in their descriptions of the locations they choose to
collect their bacteria.
The neighborhood surrounding Diana’s school is marked by wide busy streets, narrow
storefronts, and high-rise apartment buildings. Most businesses in the neighborhood serve the
local Spanish-speaking population and the various other cultures that reside there. The diversity
of cultures -- reflected in the conversations overhead on the street and in the music pouring out
from storefronts and restaurants -- is everywhere apparent.
Diana’s school is one of NYC's historic school buildings, an impressive three-story brick
mid-19th century building that takes up an entire city block and houses both a high school and
MSMS. At the entrance, stalwart white columns tower above two long flights of grand concrete

55

stairs that welcome guests from the quiet side street below. While inviting, entering Diana’s
school is a process. Once past security in the entry, MSMS is located on the second floor, up a
set of stairs hidden from view, down another long hallway, through a set of double doors. The
school takes up both the east and west wings of the second floor (a relatively small portion of the
building). Inconveniently, students must walk down a long corridor in-between the wings,
passing through the high school to move from class to class.
The school’s demographics reflect the diversity of the NYCPS. About 361 students are
enrolled, seventy three percent are Latino/a, 23% African American. The rest are a mix of
Caucasian, Asian, and Native American. Classes average on the order of 32 students, and 96%
are on free and reduced lunch. Ten percent of the school is Limited English Proficient.
Diana's classroom is on the far end of the east wing, about as far away from the main
entrance as anyone can get. The room is relatively small for her 32 vivacious 7th graders. And it
is not a science-specific classroom; there is no furniture that would evoke science – no sinks, no
storage areas, no special fire- or chemical-resistant tabletops. Just 32 chairs situated around eight
small groups of desks pushed together. But science lives in the room regardless. Bins full of
science supplies – measuring tools, plastic tubs, planting supplies, etc. – fill the cupboards along
one wall, while well-organized racks of resources – handouts, books, magazines – line another.
Diana uses a Smart Board to teach science lessons, which allows her to call up websites and
interact with documents along with her students. The tools of her practice are everywhere
apparent.
The room faces north and is not bright, even with the overhead lights on; the light blue
paint exacerbating the room’s shadiness. Even the large windows that stretch from the tops of
the counters to the tops of the 15' ceilings provide surprisingly minimal light. Sound echoes

56

loudly in the long, narrow room, reverberating against windows and desks, hard floors, and a
bank of closet doors on one side of the room. Exuberant middle school voices create an
impressive din, but Diana is not lost in the choir. Her presence is strong; she is relatively tall,
with a strong presence, and speaks authoritatively, assuredly, and enthusiastically and students
can hear her clearly across the room. The audio equipment I used picked up her voice anywhere
she was.
MSMS has an air of formality, and Diana's easy-going nature and motherly care of her
students' various needs balances this formality well. On one afternoon, for example, I arrive to
her classroom during the lunch period. Instead of going outside for the 30-minute break, a small
group of students have convened in Diana’s classroom to watch a movie and generally “hang
out.” And while Diana uses this time to grade papers and organize materials for the upcoming
science lesson, she socializes with her students, asks one student if she’s feeling okay (she had
missed school because of illness the day before), and makes inside jokes with others. She is in
charge here, and her students know her boundaries; they thoroughly enjoy being in her space.
School uniforms are required (dark blue pants and light blue shirts), and each day
students are again reminded of how to wear them. Students call teachers by their formal names –
many of Diana's students call her "teacher" or "Ms. S," or simply "miss." Like the other
teachers, she does not wear a uniform. A 30-something stylish woman, Diana wears her long
dark hair in one easy ponytail, and is always dressed in professional clothing, usually black dress
pants, a colorful blouse, and easy black shoes.
The MSMS students are predominantly Spanish-speaking children from many different
cultural groups, new immigrants, or children of immigrants. They file into the classroom
bringing their schoolyard conversations and frustrations with them, arguing, whispering secrets,

57

plot afterschool rendezvous. They laugh and tease each other, as well as Diana. They ask her
for help with things unrelated with school. They eagerly ask her questions about what is on the
schedule for the day's activities. They crowd around her at the beginning of class in a tangle of
adolescent concern and worry and need. Diana refocuses them instantly, all the while being able
to seemingly work through each special request. With the coordination of an experienced
waitperson in a popular diner (Rose, 2004), she handles the flurry of teenage needs flawlessly.
Diana's is the only White face in the room. Her class includes a large Spanish-speaking
population (a mix of Hispanic and Latino/a students), a small percentage of African American
students, students from African countries, and Chinese students. The class in which I observed
includes 31 students. Eight were English Language Learners (ELLs), and five are former ELLs
(e.g., students who have passed the English proficiency test). The rest are general education
students (i.e., those who receive no additional academic support). She teaches science to this
class five and one-half hours each week, and one homeroom class a week. She also is
responsible for another section of 30 students for mathematics and science (each for five and
one-half hours a week). Her students score with 2s and 3s (out of a total rank of 4) on the state
test, comparable to the rest of the school’s students. Some have repeated a grade in school,
therefore are a year or more older than the other 7th graders.
According to Diana, her students often relate to each other by cultural group: the
Mexican students tend to socialize in small insular groups, often only talking (especially in class)
to other Mexican peers. She sees this as a way for the students to support one another: some
"may only have been here for a short time." Her two Chinese students also tend to want to work
together; because one is more proficient in English than the other, she allows this, hoping that
their shared language and culture can enhance their learning and confidence. Speaking only

58

minimal Spanish and no other languages than English, Diana calls upon her students to be
helpful to one another as often as possible.
As we will see in later examples from Diana's classroom, she is deeply interested in what
she is teaching, and works hard to find the best ways to engage her students. She has high
expectations of them, yet recognizes when they need additional time or assistance.
Carrie. Carrie is the sole 6th grade teacher at the Science Academy, another small
science-focused middle school situated in a neighborhood very different from Diana's. A 10year veteran, Carrie is a National Board Certified teacher. A young African American New
Jersey native, Carrie’s energy is infectious. She is a slender, athletic young woman who wears a
bright smile, easy clothing (sometimes running shoes), a long straight ponytail, and speaks in
enthusiastic bursts. Her colleagues and her students brighten in her presence.
As with Diana, Carrie took an alternative path to teaching. She began college as a
neuroscience major, with aspirations to enter medical school. As she was about to take the
MCAT, and contemplating whether she was ready for medical school, a mentor encouraged her
to join Teach for America (TFA). For Carrie, that first teaching appointment was one of the
hardest things she has ever done.
And I couldn't leave . . . I was like, alright, I should be taking my MCAT now and when
my two year commitment is done . . . I could go to med school, and I'm like, “but I can't
leave” . . .Until four years ago, I had one foot in the door and one foot out the door, and
then it was like, “Carrie, let's be honest with yourself here... you're in here for the long
haul, you're not leaving.”
After Carrie completed TFA, she began teaching in New York City and after teaching at
another middle school for two years, was drawn to teach at the Science Academy (SA), a high-

59

performing school, with most of the students scoring 3s and 4s on the state tests. She has been at
SA for seven years.
Like Diana, a mentor encouraged Carrie to sign up for UA, and she has been part of the
program since her first year at SA. As lead teacher, Carrie has little responsibility at her own
school, because, like Diana, all of her colleagues are also part of UA, including the special
education teachers. Thus, at her own school, Carrie mainly helps with ordering supplies from
UA, or assists other teachers when they ask for help. Most of her work as a lead teacher occurs
at her partner institution, where she assists in planning and delivering the UA professional
development throughout the calendar year.
The Science Academy is located in an affluent neighborhood in NYC. It is a culturally
diverse neighborhood, hosting many white collar professionals and academic families from
different countries. Restaurants, playgrounds, historic parks and buildings, and high-end
shopping areas are within a short walk. The school is housed on the upper two floors of a sixstory building on a quiet one-lane side street (an elementary school inhabits the first four floors).
If one did not know the school is there, it would be easy to pass by without noticing it. Just one
small sign perched above the school's double doors announces its presence. Across the street is
the school's playground, a paved courtyard with several basketball areas, enclosed in a high
fence.
Once inside the building, SA students rush by me on the stairs, seeming unaffected by the
intense cardiovascular workout entailed in climbing five flights of stairs. (Teachers take the
stairs much more slowly.) Once through the doors, the school is bustling with pre-teen energy.
On many of my visits, I arrived during passing time, where students stream through the hallways
talking, laughing, boys and girls teasing each other from a distance. Girls stand gossiping in

60

large clumps by one locker; boys walk three abreast, talking loudly of sports, of a particular
teacher, of yesterday’s science class.
This is a highly selective science school, and students are selected for their academic
standing based on entrance exams, state exam scores, and elementary school grades. Three
hundred and eighty six students are enrolled at SA; just under 13% are Latino/a/Hispanic, 4.4%
African American, 17.6% Asian, and 64% Caucasian. Sixteen percent of them are on Free and
Reduced Lunch; 0.3% are LEP. The students are among the academically elite of the New York
schools, often competing for acceptance into the city's best high schools. They are keenly
interested in academics, and seem happy to be at school. When the teachers arrive at their doors,
students crowd around them, asking questions three at a time. Teachers are called by their first
names, come and go from classrooms, and move along the hallway as smoothly and
unassumingly as their students. The community seems welcoming, students know that teachers
are always available, doors are always open.
The students' sense of autonomy is fostered at SA. Even during lunch hours, several
students leave the building and walk to the neighborhood's delis or restaurants for lunch. Many
carry cell phones, which are not confiscated by the security officials, although students are not
allowed to use them in class. I saw no incidents where a teacher had to ask a student to put away
his or her phone, and noticed no subversive texting during class.
According to Carrie, these students are under great pressure to perform, and she senses
competition running through their classroom interactions. The pressure to get good grades and
to test well in 7th grade, leading to acceptance into the city's best high schools, sometimes
challenges the teaching staff to balance the students’ social and academic needs. Students worry
about grades often. And I heard Carrie on occasion encouraging her students not to ask about

61

how to get the highest score on an assignment. Instead, she redirects their attention toward
learning concepts. Sometimes this is met with students' grunts of disapproval, and even more
hearty quests for information about performance expectations.
Carrie's classroom is located on the 5th floor. Eight tables are squeezed into the small
long rectangular room, leaving little walking room in-between. The room brims with science
materials: an incubator, plastic storage tubs, test tubes, books and magazines, meter sticks,
computers, planting materials. Student work hangs on the walls, as do classroom-generated
posters acting as reminders about how to think through the scientific process, or how to be a
good citizen. Carrie's workspace is not clearly marked, but there are tables with her belongings
on them throughout the room: an audio-visual cart in the center, a large lab table with
curriculum supplies, a small cart at the front that houses Carrie’s teaching supplies for the day, a
chair in the corner that holds her lunch and other bags. The tools of her trade are everywhere.
Marilyn. Marilyn is an 18-year teaching veteran from Trinidad who teaches 7th grade at
SA with Carrie. A heavy Trinidadian accent punctuates her speech, lilting, expressive. Of the
three teachers in this study, she is the only one with recognizably accented speech. A 40something woman and short-statured, she is confident, energetic, and warm; she commands
attention and respect of her students. She is committed to pushing her students to stretch
themselves academically, and has a no-nonsense sensibility about her. When I asked her about
my visits and about bringing recording equipment into her classroom, she responded with, "You
are welcome to come here any time. I am too old and have done this for too long to worry about
how others perceive me. I am not a perfect teacher by any means, but I am always working hard
to give my students what they need."

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Unlike Diana and Carrie, Marilyn did not begin her career as a practicing scientist. She
trained as a teacher in Trinidad, where she taught high school biology before coming to New
York in 2001 during a large recruitment effort by the NYC schools.
Like Carrie, she cites her first position in her first school as difficult, mostly because of
her long commute from home, but also because she felt that the staff was not as supportive as she
had hoped. She enjoyed her students, but was looking for collaborative colleagues. After a year
at the school, she transferred to another school, but soon learned that the school was being
phased out. This prompted her to conduct extensive research to find the school that would suit
her. Marilyn applied for a transfer to SA because she was impressed with the curriculum, the
students' academic achievement, and the location, which suited her commuting needs.
But her move to SA was not straightforward. At first, she was unsure about the fit: "I am
a Caribbean Black teacher and this is not necessarily the most diverse... environment here at
SA... and then we're also in [neighborhood name], so I was like, what would this Trinidadian
teacher do here?" She decided to interview, but she took some time to decide to come to SA
because she wanted to "make sure this was a place where I would fit in." She was comforted by
finding out that her principal was also from Trinidad, that the students at SA were much like the
students she had had in Trinidad, that they were invested in their work, and formed close bonds
among each other and to her. She was looking for a supportive teaching and learning
community, and SA proved to be it.
Like Carrie, Marilyn came to UA after being encouraged by another teacher at SA who
had been involved in years past. She reports learning a lot from UA, especially how to do a
long-term investigation. UA has been an important professional development experience for her,
in that it changed her teaching practice dramatically. Currently, she is the SA science department

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chair, works on science curriculum at SA, and works at her UA institution to deliver PD
programs to other NYC teachers.
Marilyn's classroom is next to Carrie's and though they teach different grades, they
collaborate often. One of their goals is to have students learn a similar way of talking about
science when they move from one grade to another. In this way, when the 6th graders come to
Marilyn's classroom, she already knows the kinds of science experiences they have had, and can
work from there.
Like Diana’s and Carrie’s classrooms, Marilyn's classroom is full of science supplies. A
large plant lab takes up one corner, laptop computer carts and books in another, an incubator and
bins and fish tanks, bags of planting supplies, boxes of measuring tools. There are bins with
student notebooks and journals on one countertop. And handmade class posters fill the walls.
Three large hexagonal sink stations are mounted into the floor, lined up down the center of the
room. These represent the only other physical evidence that this is a science-specific classroom.
The student tables are arranged in groups of four to six, and can be moved around the room to
accommodate several different configurations. This is an active space, filled with the buzz of 7th
graders working and negotiating, arguing, teasing, laughing, flirting.
There are 33 7th grade students in Marilyn's classroom. They are a diverse mix of
students, culturally, linguistically, and academically. As in Carrie's class, students speak a
variety of languages at home, such as Spanish, Chinese, Russian, but they do not currently
receive language services at school. A few students have Individualized Educational Plans
(IEPs) for special education services, and Marilyn works closely with a special education teacher
to plan science lessons and appropriate interventions for them.

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Marilyn talks fondly about her students, describing them as warm, energetic, and highly
competitive. Since 7th grade test scores and academic grades are used to determine their high
school entrance eligibility, she too recognizes the extra pressure that is placed on her students,
from family, parents, other teachers, as well as the school. She does not expect to be able to
combat that competitiveness, but instead sees herself as a teacher who can help them to learn as
much as they can while supporting their particular developmental needs:
So it's not only doing their best, 'cause their parents are like “You need to get 95s and
above,” but they're also working on, you know, that prep for the test for specialized high
school, so you know, sometimes we try to be mindful of the fact that they're going
through so much as well as all the normal things that come around with puberty.
According to Marilyn, another characteristic of her students is that they are helpful to
each other, accepting and open to students who need special accommodations. While they are
also understandably influenced by peer pressure to feel otherwise, SA students appear to be
genuinely interested in each others' well-being. For example, during one visit, a student praises
another student who usually struggles when he contributes a great idea for their group project.
The student leader who offered the praise, turned the moment into a game, offering special
(imaginary) "points" to the student for being "brilliant." Others in the group followed suit; they
too agreed that the idea is brilliant, playing along by distributing points when someone else
offered a good idea. At ease with one another, Marilyn’s students also contributed to my own
sense of ease.
Summary
While the study participants teach in different contexts, with all the attendant social and
cultural differences in the communities in which they teach, they share similarities. As UA lead

65

teachers, having the same professional development training, they approach scientific
investigations in much the same way. They use the UA tools throughout the year, especially
during the investigation that leads to the school science expo project. Students work in small
groups, and are expected to talk to one another and participate fully in whole group
conversations. All three adapt the UA teaching tools (e.g., the IDD, DSET and Exit Project
Rubric) to meet their students' specific learning needs.
The starkest differences between the two schools relate to socio-economic factors and
student achievement. Diana's school is located in a low-income neighborhood where Spanish is
the predominant language, and students typically score 2s and 3s on the New York standardized
exams. A majority of Diana's students speak Spanish and other languages, and several have
received ELL services in the past. In contrast, Carrie and Marilyn's school is located in a
neighborhood with white collar professionals and academics, where English is the dominant
language (and other languages are spoken at home), and where students score 3s and 4s on the
NY exams, only a few of those students having ever received ELL services in the past. Diana
and Carrie, both raised in the New York area, were trained as scientists before choosing to teach,
and each had entered the teaching profession through non-traditional means. But Marilyn was
trained as a science teacher in Trinidad, and had not previously worked as a scientist.

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Chapter 4:
Engaging Science Practices in Long-term Investigations
In chapter three I presented each teacher and the structure of her long-term investigation.
In this chapter, I describe how teachers engage students in particular science practices during the
LTIs (Achieve, Inc., 2013). Recently, the science education community has sought clearer and
more uniform ideas about what it means to “do” science – or to engage in scientific “inquiry” in
P-12 classrooms, arriving at eight practices which "emphasize that engaging in scientific
investigation requires not only skill but also knowledge that is specific to each practice" (NRC,
2011, p. 30). These include:
1. Asking questions and defining problems
2. Developing and using models
3. Planning and carrying out investigations
4. Analyzing and interpreting data
5. Using mathematics and computational thinking
6. Constructing explanations and designing solutions
7. Engaging in argument from evidence
8. Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information
Engaging the science practices involves multiple kinds of investigations. The NGSS
(Achieve, Inc., 2013) states that "at all levels, [students] should engage in investigations that
range from those structured by the teacher—in order to expose an issue or question that they
would be unlikely to explore on their own (e.g., measuring specific properties of materials)—to
those that emerge from students’ own questions" (NRC, 2011, p. 61).

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These ideas come to life in Diana, Carrie, and Marilyn's classrooms, as each developed
LTIs that engaged students' questions, as well as those that they would "be unlikely to explore on
their own." For example, Diana introduced students to a secondary research project on the
Hudson River ecosystem - a topic (and an investigation design) that they were unlikely to study
on their own, while Marilyn provided opportunities for students to develop their own questions
using the most suitable investigation design. Carrie, on the other hand, created an LTI in which
students had some choice about topics and investigation types, but those choices were
constrained to among a few possibilities. Across all three teachers, unless students’ families
were particularly interested in science, it is unlikely that the students would have had
opportunities to engage in such inquiries outside of school.
In this chapter, I focus my analysis on two specific practices most observed across all
three classrooms: Practice 3: planning and carrying out investigations and Practice 8: obtaining,
evaluating, and sharing information, which comprised 75 percent of all of the utterances for all
9

fourteen observations. In other words, teachers talked about these two practices most often than
any others during the LTI. For this reason, I nominate these two practices as significant to these
teachers’ processes for engaging their students in the LTIs. It is also important to note, however,
that all other practices were present, but together comprised less than 25 percent of the total
teacher utterances about science practices.

9

Using the codes for utterances of science practices (as defined by the NRC, 2011), I identified
324 total practice-based utterances across all lesson observations. Of those, 96 teacher
utterances (or 30%) were about planning and carrying out investigations, and 144 utterances (or
45%) were about obtaining, evaluating, and sharing information. I coded each practice as a
combination of their component parts. That is "planning and carrying out investigations" was
coded as two different practices, all but 6 of which were about "planning" specifically. Similarly,
the practice, "obtaining, evaluating, and sharing information," 28 utterances were about obtaining
information, 27 about evaluating information, and 89 of those utterances about sharing
information.
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The purpose of this chapter, then, is to describe and explain the ways in which Diana,
Carrie, and Marilyn engaged their students in these two practices. I use the term "engagement"
to describe how teachers helped students interact with content or scientific practices. In my
analysis, engagement was also marked in the micro-analysis of discourse using Tannen’s (2007)
and Schegloff’s (2007) markers of engagement. I will present these markers in the discussions
of the transcripts themselves. Broadly speaking, engagement also means involvement in science
discourse (Gee, 2008; Lemke, 1990). In this chapter, I show students in scientific discourse as
they engage in science practices and use the various instructional and other tools (such as video)
teachers use to initiate, support, and sustain such engagement.
Planning Long-term Investigations
Planning a long-term investigation involves multiple conversations over multiple
teaching sessions, encompassing a broad range of skills. According to the NGSS, planning
entails "...identify[ing] independent and dependent variables and controls... [which] tools are
needed to do the obtaining, how measurements will be recorded, and how many data are needed
to support a claim" (Achieve, Inc., 2013, Appendix F).

10

In the following discussion, I show

how the teachers address all of the aspects of planning according to this definition. To lend
clarity to this discussion, I show examples of planning within two sub-categories: understanding
variables and working with data.
For instance, I show how Diana provides opportunities for her students to learn about the
variables involved in studying the Hudson River ecosystem database. She guides students to
understand the tools scientists use to gather the river data so that they can apply those same

10

See link to online appendix
http://www.nextgenscience.org/sites/ngss/files/Appendix%20F%20%20Science%20and%20Engi
neering%20Practices%20in%20the%20NGSS%20-%20FINAL%20060513.pdf
69

strategies in their own plans. I use examples from Carrie's classroom to demonstrate what
happens when teachers ask their students to make choices about how to gather data, and "how
many data are needed to support a claim." With excerpts from Marilyn's classroom, I provide
evidence that shows how Marilyn helped students make decisions about how to record their
measurements. Finally, I note how each time teachers engage a practice, they do so with
reference to, and using the support of, a textual learning tool of their own design: a graphic
organizer, a Do Now sheet, or science journals. I show how these textual tools are also
interwoven into the ways teachers taught and engaged their students in science practices.
Understanding the Relationships Between Variables
Students shuffle in to Diana's 7th grade science classroom, take the day's Do Now sheet
(see figure 4.1) from the table in the back of the room as they walk by. Pencil sharpening, paper
filing, chairs squealing across the floor, the students get settled in to their routine. It is the
beginning of their planning for their study on the zebra mussels' impact on the Hudson River
ecosystem. The activity affords them to the chance to apply what they know about ecosystem
variables to design their own inquiry.
Students in Diana's classroom are conducting a secondary research project using data
from a study of the Hudson River ecosystem. As a participant and now lead teacher of UA,
Diana has learned how to develop an LTI using secondary research strategies (Mikeska, et al.,
2012). Diana launched the unit by contextualizing the research scientists conducted on the river,
looking closely at variables the scientists studied (e.g., dissoved oxygen, temperature) and data
collection (e.g., how scientists collect data on the variables, how and when they measure
dissolved oxygen) in order to make a plan for their own study.

70

Figure 4.1. Do Now Handout from Diana’s Classroom (pages 1 and 2 of 3)
71

(Figure 4.1 Cont’d.)

Figure 4.1. Do Now Handout from Diana’s Classroom Cont’d. (pages 1 and 2 of 3)
72

Diana opens one conversation by asking students to respond to the question at the top of
the page: "Scientists were predicting that the zebra mussels would have a huge impact on the
ecosystem. What evidence are they looking for to support this hypothesis?" Students hesitate to
respond, so Diana recasts the question: “How do I know that the changes are from the zebra
mussels? Couldn’t they be from anything else in the river?” With this question, she offers
another way to interpret the question, specifically, the meaning for the term "evidence," and
prompts students to consider each variable (oxygen, temperature, turbidity, etc.) in relationship
to how the zebra mussel survives in its new ecosystem (the Hudson River). Adrienne is one of
the first students to contribute an answer.
1

Adrienne: ((citing her own answer on her Do Now)) Okay. I said that they're
looking for changes in the oxygen the turbidity and the chlorophyll.

2

Diana:

((writing on board)) They, are, looking, for, changes.. in what?

3

Adrienne: I said oxygen turbidity and chlorophyll.

4

Diana:

5

Adrienne: Chlorophyll.

6

Diana:

Oxygen, turbidity, and what?

((writing for 2 more seconds)) Alright. So, how is that going to support
the hypothesis? I agree with you that they ARE looking for measurements
of oxygen they ARE looking for measurements in turbidity, and they ARE
looking for measures in Chlorophyll. How is that going to tell us whether
or not the zebra mussels had an impact?

7

Adrienne: 'Cause they could compare to the information they had before. And the
one of um.. the mussels the zebra mussels came and they noticed the
changes and see what's the um impact.

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This interchange demonstrates how knowledge of the relationships between variables can
help students understand how to provide a causal explanation for scientific phenomena (NRC,
2012). Diana asks them to explain how to know whether the zebra mussels caused the changes
in the other organisms in the river. Adrienne provides a list of variables (organisms) in the river,
but does not explain the causal link. So, Diana uses repetition to draw attention to the idea of
causality (Schegloff, 2007). For example, Diana’s speech pattern here is “they ARE looking for
X variable” in each of her statements in line 6. And each time she does, the point gets made that
explaining variables does not necessarily explain the inference she is asking them to make. After
Diana’s response, Adrienne answers Diana’s question accurately and more fully. She states that
in order to prove that the zebra mussels have a direct impact on the other variables, the scientists
have to compare changes from before and after the zebra mussels arrived in the river (line 7).
But the conversation does not end there. Diana then helps her students uncover each
other relationship one-by-one. In another much longer exchange, she asks, "Why did the
turbidity change?" Jason offers that turbidity might change because zebra mussels eat plankton
so there will not be as many in the water, and thus the water will become more clear. When she
asks about the effects of chlorophyll, Kendra attempts a partial answer, "It's a type of
phytoplankton." Manuel then says, correctly, that “phytoplankton have chlorophyll.” Diana
accepts each answer, and extends their ideas as, “we find chlorophyll in phytoplankton.” She
finishes the connection: chlorophyll is in phytoplankton, and therefore the relationship will be
similar to that of the turbidity question from above. As the zebra mussels eat plankton, the
chlorophyll numbers decrease. Diana points to the board and writes and underlines the word
chlorophyll. When Diana asks about how turbidity is affected, Andrea says, "because the zebra
mussels eat all of the phytoplankton." Other students yell from the back of the room: "It [the

74

water] got more clear,” "It filtered," and "more sunlight went through." All of their answers are
correct. And each time, Diana responds by restating the relationship aloud and writing on the
board, adding that less phytoplankton means less turbidity, greater photosynthesis, and writes on
the board, "the amount of rooted plants (adding an arrow pointed upward) goes up" (for the
example of chlorophyll).
In this example, Diana asks students to respond in writing to a question that asks about
the relationships between variables. She solicits their ideas during the whole group discussion
and records their thinking on the board. As she does, students copy ideas into their notes. Diana
demonstrates that part of the work of helping students to learn how to plan an LTI involves their
understanding of the relationships between variables (NRC, 2012). And one way to build that
understanding is through joint negotiation and making sense of variables through discussions of
phenomena they study firsthand (NRC, 2007). In other words, students do not simply answer the
questions on the Do Now sheet and move on without remark; the form itself becomes the guide
for the larger discussion about variables. Diana continually returns to it, recording students’
ideas on the board so that they can enter them on to the Do Now handout.
And Diana provides multiple ways for students to identify the relationships. For
example, she shifts students' attention from the discussion of the first question on the Do Now to
the graph from the student reading (see figure 4.2). She encourages them to use what they know
about graphs from mathematics class (which Diana also teaches), and points out that she is
looking for a general interpretation of the data (NRC, 2007).

11

11

Looking at data is an example of another science practice, “analyzing and interpreting data”
that I do not take up specifically in this chapter. However, this part of the discussion was coded
as evidence for interpreting and analyzing data as well as “planning and carrying out
investigations” (Achieve, Inc., 2013).
75

Soon after examining the graph, Terrence offers that the graph represented chlorophyll
and zebra mussels. Diana then asks students to think about the chlorophyll rates before the zebra
mussels arrived in the river (marked by the vertical line near 1992) and what happened
afterward. When she asks them to explain what they know about chlorophyll, Manuel, who has
answered many of her questions, confidently states, "it's a chemical used in photosynthesis."
They talk about the relationships among the zebra mussels (ZMs) and the phytoplankton
numbers from before and after the ZM invasion, too. She links this to the chlorophyll numbers,
in that the number of phytoplankton are also dependent upon the amount of chlorophyll in the
water, that the phytoplankton use chlorophyll, so that if there is less chlorophyll after 1992, there
are less phytoplankton. The key relationships are how the zebra mussel affected the chlorophyll
numbers and the amount of phytoplankton in the water.
In these examples, Diana used two different textual tools to support her students'
emerging ideas about the relationships between variables: the Do Now pages, and the graph and
accompanying reading. Students would later apply these relationships to writing researchable
questions and hypotheses (NRC, 2007).
Likewise, in the following exchange, Marilyn and three of her students -- Maddy, Jacob,
and Caroline -- wrestle with identifying and understanding variables as they launch their plan.
Marilyn's LTI is more open-ended than Diana’s in that students may choose the topics (and
therefore the relevant variables) under the broader theme of oceanography. In Marilyn’s
classroom, students worked for the last marking period of the school year to develop their LTIs.
Most worked independently in and out of class time. Marilyn supported their work through a
series of mini-lessons in the beginning of the school year that covered the scientific process and
practices.

76

Figure 4.2. A graph of chlorophyll amounts over time (For interpretation of the references to
color in this and all other figures, the reader is referred to the electronic version of this
dissertation.
During the final LTI, Marilyn supported student work by conferring with them regularly
in class and providing short lessons which reviewed the concepts taught at the beginning of the
school year.

77

The following excerpt comes from a class period in which students are finishing their
investigation designs and using materials from around the classroom to test out how data
collection process will proceed. Steeped in the task, students are working in small groups,
scattered around the classroom collecting and testing materials, reading information on websites,
emailing scientists at UA institutions (museums and zoos affiliated with UA), revising plans, and
negotiating with each other about next steps.
In the following interchange, three of Marilyn’s students, Maddy, Jacob, and Caroline,
have designed a simulation of the effects of wind on wave height in the ocean. They are using an
electric fan to stand in for the wind, and a long, shallow plastic tub with water in it to stand in for
the ocean. As they talk, they find that they are also interested in knowing whether salt or fresh
water has a bearing on wave height. Marilyn helps them to untangle the variables they want to
study.
1

Maddy:

'Cause we have the fan on low, medium and high and then the salt and
fresh water.

2

Jacob:

So like we can make like, it's kind of like a tree. Like, it goes off into the
salt water and the fresh water and then the low medium and high=

3

Maddy:

=high low and medium for salt and then and then we do high low and
medium for fresh=

4

Marilyn:

=for the fresh. Okay. That's fine.

5

Jacob:

That's two independent variables, right?

6

Marilyn:

Well... what is your independent variable again?

7

Jacob:

I guess it would be the wind speed.

8

Marilyn:

Okay.

78

9

Jacob:

But then we..

10 Marilyn:

But but but the water itself is not going to be a variable.

11 Jacob:

But.. it would be the setting the setting of the fan.

12 Marilyn:

It's now going to be. You would say the effect of wind speed on
different.. water.. or different types of water. Or fresh and water...

13 Jacob:

But then we have the wave height too.

14 Marilyn:

On the wave heights of two different types of water.

15 Maddy:

Also we're using tap water for fresh water. Is that okay?

16 Jacob:

Naw, it's fine.

In this exchange, Marilyn listens carefully as students describe their current research
plan: that they are going to use a fan, set at three different speeds, to explore the effects of wind
speed on wave height. In line 4, Marilyn latches on to Maddy's idea of fresh water. Tannen
(2007) argues that latching is a marker of engagement, that when a speaker repeats the last
phrase or word of another speaker, they are focused on that speaker. Marilyn asks for
clarification in line 6, "What is your independent variable again?" Here, she's checking on their
procedure, making sure that they can explain the variables they have nominated. After clarifying
their variables, Marilyn provides the language for their title, "The effects of wind speed on wave
height of two different types of water."
One fundamental difference in the examples from Diana and Marilyn's classrooms is that
students were doing different types of investigations. For example, in Diana's classroom,
students were conducting a secondary research project in which the independent variable was
chosen for them. On the other hand, in Marilyn's classroom, students could choose their own
variables as long as they were under the theme of oceanography.

79

Considering Data
Discussions about variables eventually lead to plans for working with data. That is, once
students identify the variables they want to investigate, they move into making a plan for
collecting data on those variables (NRC, 2012). Through the LTI, teachers engage students in
making decisions and solving problems about data collection (Driver et al., 1994; Michaels,
Shouse, & Schweingruber, 2008; NRC, 2012). Such “problems” may be the available tools for
collecting adequate and accurate data, time, or access to materials, especially in schools, where
material resources are typically in short supply. Many of the students’ decisions about how to
investigate their questions depends on not only their own knowledge of the problem space, but
also the resources available (Driver et al., 1994). In the following discussion, I present several
examples of how teachers and their students considered the data collection methods they would
employ.
Decisions about when and how to collect data. In Carrie's classroom, students
discussed the investigations they had conducted earlier in the school year to inform their current
LTI designs. Specifically, they evaluated how to collect data that would more accurately answer
their questions in the second attempts. In the following excerpt from a whole group
conversation, Vicki, identifies a problem she had the first time she and her group attempted to
gather data on gorilla social behaviors at a local zoo.
1

Vicki:

Well, it was sort of like a problem that my group had was that um, we
have like eight different that we could check off and some of them were a
bit vague.

2

Carrie:

MMMMMM!!!

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3

Vicki:

So like they would go under this category now be more specific kind of
thing?

4

Carrie:

Excellent! So making sure when you fill out your ethogram, that you have
specific descriptions.. of behaviors. ((three second pause while she writes
on the board.)) Excellent. So you know exACTly what you're looking for.

This exchange not only shows students using their prior experiences to inform their plans
(e.g., "a problem my group had was"), it shows them reasoning about how to collect the data
(e.g., use specific descriptions of behavior). Earlier in the school year, students learned how to
use the ethogram – a standard tool for animal behavior studies – to gather their data at the zoo.
To properly use the ethogram, students decide the specific behaviors they plan to observe, and
define what counts and does not count as those behaviors. Students also make decisions about
how often and when to observe specific behaviors.
In the following exchange, Carrie's students continue talking in their whole group
conversation about changes they make to the investigation design.
1

Alex:

Well, I think that we didn't well, we didn't collect enough data because
((unclear)).. go earlier in the morning so.

2

Carrie:

Okay. So more visits. Making sure you got enough data to draw a good
conclusion. Excellent. Vicki?

3

Vicki:

Umm.. what I had in my head was looking at what animal 'cause there
were two animals there so it was hard to see which animal we were
studying.

4

Carrie:

Hmmm.

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5

Vicki:

And uh, we could improve that by having 'cause we have four people in
the group, we could have two people watching and shouting out what
they're doing and the other two people recording the time and behavior?

6

Carrie:

Excellent! So splitting up those observation jobs if you're doing an animal
behavior project, good.

Here we see Carrie naming for her students the specific scientific ideas she wants them to
learn. For example, she states “making sure you got enough data to draw a good conclusion.”
With this, Carrie reflects back to the students what Alex offered in the first line: “we didn’t
collect enough data” and extends that idea with the phrase “… to draw a good conclusion.”
O’Connor and Michaels (1993) identify this discourse move as "revoicing." Cazden (2001)
states that revoicing in the classroom serves two functions: it “rebroadcasts” [the ideas] back to
the bigger group, often reformulating it in the process” (p. 90). One value with reviocing is the
ability of the teacher to then "extract the essential core of previous student utterances that are
hard to hear because of the disfluencies typical of exploratory talk when speakers are thinking
out ideas as they speak" (p. 91).
Further, the revoicings are also “reconceptualizations,” “a fusing of the teacher’s words,
register, or knowledge with the original intent of the student” and “conferring on (or attributing
to) that student a stance with respect to the topic under discussion, a stance the student may only
dimly be aware of” (p. 91). Revoicing also functions to “not only position students in
relationship to content but in relationship to each other” (p. 91). As Cazden (2001) states,
“revoicings can be one strategy for building both an ever-increasing stock of common
knowledge and an ever-more-powerful community of learners” (p. 91). Thus, revoicing can be a
useful especially in the context of the LTI, in which students and teachers ideally work in a

82

community of science learners, which operates with specific language competencies such as
specialized vocabulary, phrasing, and reasoning, etc. (Gee, 2008; Lemke, 1990; NRC, 2012).
Decisions about collecting data occur in reference to a specific data collection tool - such
as an ethogram, a chart, or notebook. As teachers developed the LTIs as small group projects,
they also created opportunities for students to collaboratively make important decisions about the
best data collection methods.
Decisions about how many data support a claim. Teachers provide opportunities
through the LTI for students to participate in conversations about how many data are needed to
answer their questions and support their claims. For example, Carrie’s students consider how the
data they collect will help them to make defensible claims about animal behavior (NRC, 2012).
This is particularly true for the group I highlight below, who are relying on one trip to the local
zoo to get all of the necessary data, making the planning process especially important. In fact,
with limited resources in schools, students generally do not have the luxury of revising their
plans and collecting data more than once. Here, Carrie discusses the kinds of data the group will
need to adequately describe gorilla social behavior with limited time and resources. The
discussion opens with Maddy, a student in Carrie’s classroom, asking about how often she and
her teammates should go to the zoo to observe gorilla behavior.
1

Maddy:

For this would it be one if we just went once?

2

Carrie:

((reading student work)) "The effect of time of day on gorilla social
behavior."

3

Maddy:

So if we do it twice=

4

Carrie:

=So if you go once, I would make sure=

5

Maddy:

=So twice per IV=

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6

Carrie:

=that you do it for a longer time, um=

7

Allison:

((student in background))

8
9

=So, I would say twice=
Carrie:

=in the morning and the afternoon.

10 Maddy:

So, we go twice and we then just do it at 12, 1:30, 3.

11 Allison:

About two times on each day.

12 Maddy:

And then we average out the data.

13 Carrie:

Sounds good. Now, who did gorillas before?

14 Allison:

Me.

15 Carrie:

And what was your IV before?

16 Allison:

It was um.. like, um...

17 Natalie:

((in background)).. grooming behavior.

18 Maddy:

Actually it was.. time of day=

19 Carrie:

=was it time of day?=

20 Maddy:

=time of day on gorilla grooming behavior=

21 Carrie:

=Because you might be able to bring in some of the data from before.

22 Natalie:

((unclear))

23 Carrie:

Good. Now are these the same times as you used before?

24 Allison:

No. We only did it twice and=

25 Natalie:

=and we did it at 11:30 and at 2:00=

26 Maddy:

((in background)) What time? 11:30 and=

27 Allison:

=I think it should be::... 3 times because you get more productive data.

28 Carrie:

So...

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29 Maddy:

So we have more to work with.

30 Carrie:

Excellent. Okay. So I like that you're making this one, you're like, "no,
we need more data," which are some of those improvements that we talked
about. So good. No questions? We're all set? Make sure you're talking and
everyone's on the same page.

This group is particularly concerned with getting data during several times of the day,
hypothesizing that gorilla social behavior will change throughout the day, and they want to
describe those changes. They consider which times of day would yield "the best data." Their
previous experience informed their choice to make more observations this time around, three
times instead of two.
Here, Carrie asks clarifying questions and allows her students to have space and time to
talk through their concerns with minimal interruption. The students are intensely engaged,
taking turns in rapid fire fashion, demonstrated by the multiple times speakers latched (signaled
in the transcript by the equals sign) onto one another’s turns (Schegloff, 2007; Tannen, 2007).
Carrie’s role here is as a less-central speaker than is typical in most classrooms (Mehan, 1974).
Carrie does not interject. Her most significant contribution to this conversation is at the end,
when she summarizes and revoices what the students accomplished. She names their idea of
making more observations as “an improvement,” thus supporting the idea that collecting more
data is better. Students are engaged in conversations about data collection and making early
decisions about their procedures (plan) that would yield "the best data."
Considering data collection tools. Teachers also discuss with students appropriate data
collection tools, another key aspect of planning an investigation (Achieve, 2013; NRC, 2007).
For example, using the video case study (with the accompanying readings and Do Now tool) to

85

guide their understanding of secondary research, Diana asks, "In the video, the scientists
mentioned that the Secchi disk didn't go down very far before it disappeared in the water. What
12

does this mean about the turbidity in the water?”

They discuss how the scientists stop

measuring when they cannot see the disk in the water anymore, which allows them to get a
measurement of the phytoplankton. Students mention that scientists are measuring how “murky”
the water is, and Diana leads them to use the scientific word, “turbidity.” She reasons, “once we
can say it means there’s high turbidity, we can say the water looks murky, why does the water
look murky?" The interweaving of the everyday and scientific (Warren, Ogonowski, & Pothier,
2005) combine to help student meaning making – here, about the notion of turbidity – in
describing the relationships between variables as well as how the scientists take specific
measurements using specific tools.
Problem solving around science tools is also an element in Marilyn's classroom. Similar
to examples from Carrie and Diana’s classrooms, Marilyn’s classroom is abuzz with lively talk
and exploration among students. During one observation, students were working in teams to
refine their investigation plans, using feedback they received from Marilyn’s teacher’s assistant.
Students are moving about the room to ask advice of each other, gather materials, test those
materials, and make final decisions about their written procedures. In writing these procedures,
they test several kinds of materials. They try out measuring devices like scales, thermometers,
and graduated cylinders. Some ask about using the classroom supply of plastic bins to simulate
the ocean. Another group asks about using the incubator for their exploration of algae, and
12

A Secchi Disk is a small flat round disk connected to a rope marked at each meter. The disk
has four sections alternatively colored black and white. When it it lowered into the water,
scientists use the meter markings on the rope to determine when the disk cannot be seen
anymore. This distance is the Secchi depth, a measurement of turbidity, or how clear the water is.
Clarity is then described by Secchi depth and the amount of organisms found in a particular
volume of water.
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sources of light available in the school. The group in the following example is asking about the
aquatic conditions under which algae survive best. The conversation between Marilyn and three
of her students, Sam, Casey, and Ellie, involves their decision about how to make sure that they
transfer equal amounts of algae into cups with different volumes of water.
1

Sam:

But can I ask a question?

2

Marilyn:

Mm-hmm.

3

Sam:

Um this algae? We need to divide it into cups.

4

Marilyn:

Mm-hmm.

5

Casey:

And then we need certain amounts for each cup. So do you have any
kinds of tweezers that are tiny tiny that we could use to get the algae out of
the tank?

6

Marilyn:

I have tweezers but I'm not sure how well that would work. I think what
you should do, the best thing to do at that point in time I would say is to
shake it up and then hopefully by then it's sort of evenly distributed and
then pour. Because there is no other way that you're going to be able to
divide it, like, pull it out and divide it equally.

7

Ellie:

Can we use a beaker for...

8

Marilyn:

((unclear))

9

Ellie:

You mean like certain amounts and like... a.. uh.. larger amount into one
cup and smaller amount into another cup

10 Marilyn:

Did you want.. are you dividing it up into equal volumes? Is that what
you were saying where you wanted=

11 Casey and Ellie: =Yeah ((unclear. background noise))

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12 Marilyn:

So let's say if you put like 5 mL in the first cup and then 10 mL in the
second cup and then.. but just make sure if you're doing that that you
shake it up so that hopefully yeah so that hopefully.. alright, there are no
guarantees but that hopefully it would be evenly distributed. Okay?

While this excerpt is about the use of tools, it is also very much about problem solving
(NRC, 2007). Using tweezers and samples of organisms engages both Marilyn and her students
in a series of decisions about their planning for data collection. Here, Marilyn and her students
rely on their knowledge of how algae behave in a sample of water, how much of the sample they
will need for each cup, and how many samples they need. Getting an equal amount of algae in
each sample is important to their fair test, and deciding on a reliable technique is a challenge.
But they are equally unsure about the best technique for dividing the algae samples equally.
Marilyn offers her best advice, though unsure herself whether it will yield the best results. This
is a part of the challenge LTIs, as teachers sometimes have to trust the ambiguities in
investigation design, given that we enter into authentic investigations without a priori ideas about
the results.
For instance, in line 6 Marilyn says, "I have tweezers but I am not sure how well that will
work." With this, she is thinking alongside her students, attempting to make the decisions with
them, not for them and positioning herself as their learning partner, not as an all knowing expert.
Later, they decide that they will use a different kind of sorting technique: stirring the sample in
the water to get an even distribution of the algae before pouring into the different cups. This
demonstrates how teachers and students work together in an authentic task using their knowledge
of the tools of science to design the most sound data collection method (NRC, 2007; NRC,
2012).

88

In the next sample, Carrie is leading her students in a whole group conversation about
how to refine their data collection methods from the first time they conducted their trebuchet
projects. This time, students are to use what they learned in the previous iteration of the project
to make revisions to the data collection methods. In the following, Carrie is asking students
about the challenges of conducting the projects, and to imagine solutions to those challenges.
The first response a student gives comes from his previous experience with the techniques and
tools they used for measuring distance.
1

Carrie:

Alright let's go to trebuchet people so that we are fair. You guys ALL
have done a trebuchet project.. what were some challenges? There
definitely were some challenges this was our first time doing it. What
were some challenges and how do we plan to improve upon them?
Excellent! Alright Cameron start us off!

2

Cameron: Well, our table disagreed about ((unclear)).

3

Carrie:

Ah.. so deciding how to measure distance. Deciding how DV is measured.
Alright. I know people are arguing is it where it hits? Is it where it rolls
to? You guys have to decide those things ahead of time very good.
Ginny?

In thinking about the difficulties of measurement, the students consider the role of error in design
and execution of the plan.
4

Ginny:

Um, like tying strings or...

5

Carrie:

That was one of THE most difficult things, something as simple as just
tying strings. And they kept coming loose and kept coming off and the
load kept coming out. So that's something that you guys... ((to herself as

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she writes on the board)) Ty... ((back to class)) need to think about ahead
of time. Go for it, Wendy?
Next, Wendy links to this idea and gives another example of error.
6

Wendy:

Um how well you did the launches?

7

Carrie:

What do you mean by "how well"?

8

Wendy:

Just like sometimes if.. if the.. sometimes we did good launches that went
far and we'd have like some flawed launches like we'd mess up and it
wouldn't go.

9

Carrie:

Okay and what were some of the things that possibly could have messed
up the launch?

10 Wendy:

Um..well..the.. person launching it ((laughs))

11 Carrie:

((laughs, other kids laugh)) Okay so maybe some human error in there. So
((writing)) making sure launches are consistent. I saw lots of hands up
back there. Let's see Vicki?

With this, Carrie revoices Wendy's idea as human error, and adds in the idea of
consistency of each trial (launch) (NRC, 2012). The conversation continues with Vicki adding in
the idea of the trebuchet design itself. The trebuchet project was a design investigation, which
involves an iterative process of design, test, and redesign (NRC, 2007; NRC, 2012).
12 Vicki:

Um.. how you set up your trebu..

13 Carrie:

Yeah, what do you mean?

14 Vicki:

Sometimes you ((unclear)) under it and you have the load and it doesn't fly
far and it hits the ground. ((unclear)) that's why it's hard to decide where it
landed.

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15 Carrie:

Alright. Going back to where it landed and deciding where to measure
from. And making sure that um.. the launches are started every time the
same way. Trevor?

16 Trent:

Um.. make sure um.. there's no one in your way when you launch it 'cause
there was a lot of human interference.

17 Carrie:

Ah, make sure the launch path is clear. ((writing)) Excellent. Alright.

Carrie once again using revoicing and pressing for further explanation as ways to engage
students in the discourse of science (Cazden, 2001; Gee, 2008; Windschitl, Thompson, &
Braaten, 2012). In all of these moves, Carrie affirms students’ ideas and intuitions about
solutions to the problems they experienced in the first trebuchet investigation, and she confirms
and recasts for students the scientific habits of mind (NRC, 2012) and the ways of talking and
being as scientists in discourse in the practice of planning (Achieve, Inc., 2013; Gee, 2008; NRC,
2012).
From here, students will capture their plans to a “considerations sheet,” a tool Carrie
designed for her work in the LTI in response to the difficulty she observed in students’
organizational skills and attention to details in planning (see figure 4.3). Carrie uses the
considerations sheet as a scaffold for organizing the specific details of the project plan.
These excerpts show how teachers generate discourse through the task of engaging
students in their own plans and revisions to their investigations (NRC, 2007; Gee, 2008). Instead
of the more traditional IRE discourse pattern, Carrie asks students to draw upon previous
experience to think about their planning process in the next LTI. One experience informs
another. They are contextually dependent, involving students in the higher-order thinking and
metacognitive processes required of scientific practice (NRC, 2007).

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Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information
Across all three classrooms, students and teachers engaged in several conversations that
demonstrate the practice "obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information" (Achieve, Inc.,
2013). According to the NGSS (2013),
Being literate in science and engineering requires the ability to read and understand their
literatures. Science and engineering are ways of knowing that are represented and
communicated by words, diagrams, charts, graphs, images, symbols, and mathematics.
Reading, interpreting, and producing text are fundamental practices of science in
particular, and they constitute at least half of engineers’ and scientists’ total working
time. (p. 74)
Teachers in these classrooms are providing opportunities to become "literate in science."
As I noted earlier, almost half (45%) of the teachers' utterances across all observations were
dedicated to working with information. They read texts, watch videos, write emails to scientists,
write lab reports, observation notes, talk with classmates about findings, offer peer reviews of
work, develop charts, use mathematics, and so on.

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Figure 4.3. Carrie’s animal behavior project considerations sheet

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In my coding of the transcripts of these discussions, I treated each element (obtaining,
evaluating, and communicating) separately to find patterns across teachers for each (Miles &
Huberman, 1994). Exchanges about obtaining and communicating occurred more often than
evaluating information. I also observed that developing these practices was an iterative process,
following The NRC's (2007) descriptions of scientists' work. In other words, teachers and
students engaged in all three elements of this practice - obtaining, evaluating, and
communicating - throughout the LTI, and not in any particular order. In the following
discussion, I provide examples and analysis of teachers engaging students in this practice
through transcripts of discussion as well as samples of various textual tools.
Opportunities to Obtain Information
Obtaining information, or doing background research, occurs across the LTI. Teachers
engage students in background research at the beginning of the LTI in order to develop content
knowledge. They do research to understand how variables are connected to each other as they
learn about the specific study’s phenomena. And they use several different kinds of texts
(written and audio-visual) as they develop their own investigation designs. Students also do
research to support their claims after data collection. In general, in these teachers' classrooms,
the LTI proceeds in a dialogic fashion, one that involves an interweaving of texts which are used
to provide information all along the way.
For example, Diana used several tools to help students to gather information about their
variables. Using the Do Now handout, Diana asked students to watch and take note about
information in a series of videos from the Carey Institute case study. Several background
readings also accompanied the videos. Students also had access to the interactive database

94

provided by the Carey Institute and the AMNH.

13

Informational text played a role in all phases

of the work.
For example, in the excerpt that follows, students are getting ready to watch the second of
four case study videos of the Hudson River study. In Diana's classroom, the students have begun
thinking about their projects and have selected the variables they would like to investigate. (I
showed a few examples of these lessons in the previous section.) Here, they are using the
background information to develop a deeper understanding of the scientists' work and of the data
collection process. Seeing the scientists at work and hearing their explanations about their
processes provides necessary background information for conducting secondary research, one in
which the data are not one's own (Wilson et al., 2012). The excerpt opens with Diana
transitioning a whole group conversation into viewing the video.
1

Diana:

Now we're going to find out what the scien- We're gonna get the most
current information.

2

Video:

"We are at the Hudson River at ((unclear)) on the North Side of the river
and we're collecting zebra mussels in order to know their population...
right here, fully-loaded... so here's the rock and you can see that there are
some older zebra mussels on it these larger guys, which are a few years
old. And then you can see all these small ones that are attached on here,
these all settled out last August. So what we've been noticing is ah, a few
years ago that they were mostly large and then we saw a few small ones.
And so now what we're seeing is that we don't see much survival between

13

See http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web/riverecology/
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June and August of the large ones. And we'll see that there's more small
ones currently.
3

Diana:

((pausing the video on an image of the zebra mussels attached to rock)) So
what does that mean? What happened to the zebra mussels over time?
Allen?

4

Allen:

They started to die.

5

Diana:

They started dying. What happened? The ones that aren't dead, what
happened to them?

6

Charles:

They're getting smaller.

7

Diana:

Yes. Charles, raise your hand.

8

Charles:

They're getting smaller.

9

Diana:

They got.. smaller..

10

((a student says something over Diana that I can't hear.))

11 Diana:

She's showing us.. right, if you look, you can actually see it. Look at the
SIZE of the zebra mussels in this picture here and look at the size of them
there ((comparing two sizes of mussels that have collected on the rock)).

Here, students watched and listened to the Carey scientist on the video explain how the
scientists knew that the size of the zebra mussel had changed over time. In the video, the
scientists are on a boat on the river, and show a rock they had pulled from deep in the water. The
rock has attached to it several small and some larger zebra mussels. They explain that the larger
ones are a few years old, and that the smaller individuals settled onto the rock just months
before.

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Diana stops the video to ask the students to make meaning of the video text (NRC, 2012).
With this, she provides them an opportunity to reason about what happened to the zebra mussels
over time. With Diana's help, the students infer through this video - which counts as a textual
tool in this study - that zebra mussels were also affected by their new habitat. Diana helps them
to see that changes in their size happen over time. I present this as an example of obtaining
information because it shows how information can come in the form of written or visual texts. It
also shows how students have opportunities to learn content as well as process from studying the
scientists' work through the case study videos and accompanying readings.
Another example of obtaining information comes from Carrie's classroom. Here,
students are putting their final touches on the display boards just a few days in advance of the
school science fair. Carrie is circulating among the students, giving feedback and direction. The
focus of the conversation on this day is about how to make the most professional looking display
board that includes the key investigation information. In the example below, students are now in
the final "presentation" phase of the LTI in which students prepare their artifacts - here, tri-fold
display boards - for a formal presentation. In three teachers' schools, students present their
projects at the school science fair, and each gave opportunities like this for their students to
complete their display boards in class.
In the following exchange, we see how Carrie challenges her students to return to the
background information they were to gather earlier in the marking period, so that they can
include this information as support for the claims they want to make about trebuchets. In this
moment, Carrie reads their work before allowing them to glue the text to their display board.
She notes missing information.

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1

Carrie:

((back to group)) Okay you have resources. Okay. Make sure you guys

put your names here. And then let's break this up by doing like this. [3 seconds]
Okay?
2

Garrett:

3
4

I think I lost maybe some of the info so...
[10 seconds]

Carrie:

But you guys ne::ed some background info you don't have any scientific
background info.

5

Garrett:

Yeah, we're...

6

Carrie:

That's all that's all history of the trebuchet. But that doesn't tell me
anything about length of string counterweights, anything.

7

Alex:

...((unclear)) 'cause any time we looked up background information on
trebuchets, um, it just gave the history.

8

Carrie:

[2 seconds pause] That's not okay. That means you don't have any data to
support your hypothesis or excuse me scientific, reasoning. And we what
did we learn about when we did trebuchets earlier this year?

9

Alex:

10 Carrie:

That, trebuchets were...
What was the scientific.. vocab that we learned? [2 seconds] Do you
remember?

11 Alex:

U::mm...

12 Carrie:

You guys have to be the experts on this. And right now you're not
sounding like an expert. When WE studied trebuchets in class what were
the scientific words that we learned?

13 Brad:

Ah...

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14 Garrett:

((unclear))

15 Carrie:

No. That's a PART of it.

16 Alex:

Potential energy.

17 Carrie:

And?

18 Garrett:

Kinetic energy.

19 Carrie:

I don't see ANY of this in your background research and that's what we
did in class and THIS time you should have gone above and beyond
THAT. Okay? So I would go back. And check that at LEAST you have
something about potential and kinetic energy in there.

I coded this excerpt as "obtaining" because Carrie refers specifically to the students' use
of science resources to support their claims. As shown here, discussions about obtaining
information occur throughout the LTI, but even in the final stages of preparing the display board,
teachers sometimes refer to previous moments when students were obtaining information about
their variables. Sometimes those conversations lead to students having to make last minute
revisions based on how they communicated that information.
Students gather information at the beginning of the investigation as they are learning
about variables - as in the first example from Diana's classroom - and they obtained information
as they were making changes to their final lab reports as in the last example from Carrie's
classroom. Also in Carrie's classroom, one group of students watched online videos of lion
behaviors during the design phase so that they could more clearly define the behaviors they
expected to see at the zoo, so they could accurately record them on their ethograms. I also
observed students in Marilyn's classroom gathering information as they were designing their
investigations. They researched variables on websites and used their cell phones to contact local

99

businesses about the materials they would need for their projects. In sum, obtaining information
occurred throughout the LTI, and became an integral part of the students' work as I observed
students interacting with several different kinds of texts and media sources to support their
understanding and refine their plans regardless of the task of the day (i.e., revising a lab report,
writing investigation procedures, gathering data).
Opportunities to Evaluate Information
As with obtaining information, evaluation occurs throughout the LTI process. In its
description of this practice, the NRC (2012) states,
Being a critical consumer of science and the products of engineering, whether as a lay
citizen or a practicing scientist or an engineer, also requires the ability to read or view
reports about science in the press or on the Internet and to recognize the salient science,
identify sources of error and methodological flaws, and distinguish observations from
inferences, arguments from explanations, and claims from evidence. All of these are
constructs learned from engaging in a critical discourse around texts. (p. 75)
The practice of evaluating information is iterative. In fact, the NRC (2012) places
evaluation at the center of the "three spheres of activity for scientists and engineers" (p. 45). In
this view, evaluation informs and is informed by all other activity and is the cornerstone of
critical science activity.
Likewise, in these teachers' classrooms, evaluation occurred throughout the LTI and in no
particular order. In these classrooms, students, like scientists, evaluate the information they
gather for various reasons. They evaluate information for its validity and clarity. And they
evaluate the information of their peers based on the language conventions used in the scientific
community (Latour & Woolgar, 1986; Lemke, 1990). Students evaluate textual information

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along the process, from evaluating the best information for use in supporting claims, to peer
evaluation of reports prior to the final presentations.
In the following exchange, for example, Carrie’s students are learning the best ways to
present their LTIs for the school science fair. Using former students' projects as fodder for
discussions about not only project quality but also the information and its organization, students
talk about the display boards in small teams and write notes in their journals for use later as they
evaluate and plan their own boards (see figure 4.5). In the following excerpt, Carrie's students
are in small groups, each with a display board to evaluate. Carrie stops by Sandra’s and
Andrew's table.
1

Carrie:

((to another group)) So what's good about this one?

2

Sandra:

Well, they have all the information.

3

Carrie:

All the info's here is it in the right order?

4

Sandra:

No.

5

Andrew:

What if you take the um...

6

Carrie:

What's out of order?

7

Sandra:

U::um... the graphs..

8

Andrew:

It's in the right order.

9

Carrie:

Does it flow like a lab report?

10 Sandra:

No.

11 Carrie:

Up and down, and then like a newspaper across?

12 Sandra:

((unclear))... it goes up and down and then you have to go back up.

13 Carrie:

But, that's the newspaper part.

14 Sandra:

And they're missing a question.

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15 Andrew:

What's their question?

16 Sandra:

It's in the title.

17 Carrie:

So they say the title but they don't say the question. Okay.

18 Sandra:

But isn't that, isn't the title the question?

19 Carrie:

It's just a rephrasing.

20 Sandra:

The question is, "what is..." ((unclear))

Here, Carrie has asked students to respond to a number of elements she expects them to
include on their display boards. They must organize the information so that it reads "like a
newspaper" down three separate columns. They also must state their question in a particular
way, using the UA model, "What is the effect of X [independent variable] on X [dependent
variable]." Students have noted that this particular display shows the right orientation of text, but
that their title - which is closely related to their question - is missing.
As groups evaluate the displays, they include their notes in their notebooks (see figure
4.4). Notebooks like these were used throughout the LTIs among all teachers. In Carrie’s
classroom, students responded to each day’s Do Now prompt in their notebooks. Below is an
example of a Do Now response from a student’s notebook from the above lesson about
evaluating the information represented on the students' project display boards.
Notice that the student organized the notebook page according to the two Do Now tasks:
what was good and what needed to be changed. The notebook page shows the interactions with
text and was another space for students to practice reviewing the language expectations as
members of a scientific learning community (NRC, 2007; Lemke, 1990).

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Figure 4.4. Student journal page from Do Now for peer review of lab report (see Appendix A on page 214 for translation of text)

103

Opportunities to Communicate Information
According to the NRC (2012), “communicating in written or spoken form is another
fundamental practice of science; it requires scientists to describe observations precisely, clarify
their thinking, and justify their arguments" (p. 74). Teachers also engaged their students in
several opportunities to communicate information throughout the LTI. They communicated in
emails to local scientists, presented ideas to peers, developed formal lab reports for the final LTI
project, and gave oral presentations to parents and students at the science fair. During my
observations, students most often communicated formally in writing. Their informal
communications were most often spoken, as parts of discussions in class. Regardless of the
modality, along the way teachers provided scaffolding – in the forms of discussions and textual
tools – for learning and practicing the formal written and spoken conventions that are a part of
doing science (Latour & Woolgar, 1986; Lee, Quinn, & Valdes, 2013; Lemke, 1990; NRC,
2012). While I address the ideas of writing and talk in the next two chapters, I discuss how
teachers use writing and talk in the context of learning to develop the practice of communication.
In the following example, Carrie is moving about the classroom as her students are
working on revising their lab reports. Their lab reports will eventually accompany their science
fair projects, and comprise a major part of the project grade for the LTI. A student calls Carrie
over to her table, asking for advice about her writing.
1

Maddy:

So over here, do I have to write the behaviors in my hypothesis?

2

Carrie:

No, you can describe it here ((referring to a section in the lab report)).

3

Maddy:

Oh, I have to move my hypothesis...

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4

Carrie:

So you can work on finding more background info on what behaviors
gorillas exhibit. So is there you know feeding behavior. Are there
grooming behaviors, social, like specific behaviors that you guys could
possibly see when you go to the zoo.

5

Maddy:

So do I need to add most of my hypothesis... ((unclear)) I mean I do I
know I do, but I mean like specific...

6

Carrie:

So you guys ((reading, unclear)).. So why do you think being a close,
ancestor genetically, that's what you're getting at here right? Why do you
think being a close ancestor genetically, would make them, more likely to
be active.. or....

7

Maddy:

So like humans are most interactive ...((unclear)) So... ((unclear))

8

Carrie:

And that's what you need. So...

9

Maddy:

Should I change my hypothesis?

10 Carrie:

Yes. You want to have some science supporting what you're thinking.
Okay?

In the beginning of this interchange, Maddy asks Carrie for advice about how to write
about the animal behaviors in her hypothesis (lines 1 and 3). But as Carrie reads her work, she
notices that this group needs more background information to support their rationale for
hypothesizing that “being more active” is a human trait that we can logically attach to gorilla
behavior because of genetic similarity. So, she redirects this conversation. Carrie presses them
for more information. Windschitl, Thompson, and Braaten (2012) identify “pressing” as a key
discourse move that experienced teachers use in helping students to engage in scientific
discourse practices. Pressing involves asking a follow up question that “presses” students to

105

provide more information to support or explain their ideas. According to Windschitl, Thompson,
and Braaten, pressing helps develop scientific reasoning among students and helps all learners
become more skilled in participating in the discourse of science. Here, Carrie presses Maddy
and her group to write a hypothesis using background information. I provide this exchange as an
example of communicating information because writing a hypothesis is one of the conventions
of doing science.
And in other moments, communicating information is about how to use one’s spoken and
written language to develop ideas in scientifically formal ways. In the following example, Diana
helps a small group of students to develop their titles for their final projects so that they learn to
follow the conventions of the UA program and scientific discourse (Lemke, 1990; Gee, 2008).
1

Diana:

((to another group)) You have a title on your sheet. "The effect of zebra
mussels on... "

2

Marlyse: Turbidity.

3

Diana:

Turbidity. In the Hudson River. Or tot... you could say, tot. You could
say ...

4

((to Adrienne, who is across the room)) Adrienne you need to decide as a group
whether you want to say Total Suspended Solids, or if you want to say
"Turbidity." Talk to your group.

5

((to this group)) Because zebra mussels eat the plankton. So there will be less
plankton. Or le- how how how do YOU want to say it?

6

Marlyse: Like that.

7

Diana:

So there will be a decrease or there will be less or there will be fewer. Or,
that's why we think it will go down. You figure out how you wanna say it.

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Notable in this exchange is the idea that Diana provides for them formalized language
scaffolds, such as using the correct terminology (“turbidity” for example), yet also supports
students in expressing their ideas in their own way.
Sometimes teachers attend to the writing conventions and are concerned with surface
features like organization and conventions such as indentation. While I explore the ideas of
writing in the next chapter more fully, I mention this here to show how teachers use talk as a way
to engage students in ideas that will later translate into writing, in their ways of engaging the
practice of communication.
1

Jonathan: We just, my conclusion is taking up the whole page but we thought that
... ((unclear))

2

Carrie:

And your paragraphs aren't indented so it's like we can easily tell it looks
like a LO::T of text. So it looks like.. you have a very thorough
conclusion but see how like, I can tell kinda here 'cause there's, a space
here..

3

Jonathan: Uh-huh.

4

Carrie:

...but it's not indented. So that, it doesn't look so... so the first, part of
every paragraph, indent it, so it breaks it up. So it's not like... people can
tell where a new idea or a new section of a conclusion begins.

5

Jonathan: If we indented it... but if we indented it, I felt like it's too many words..

6

Carrie:

Well, lay it out I don't think you'll have any room for indenting and
((laughs)) a space. But an indent will help to break it up.

Here Carrie reminds Jonathan that communicating in science also includes attending to
all of the details of formal writing conventions, such as making paragraph indentations. Though

107

a relatively trivial example, teachers throughout the study had similar conversations with
students. Carrie, Marilyn, and Diana’s students were engaged in conversations about even the
seemingly small ideas about communication in science, that the details matter, that formal
science language involves precision of conventions as well as investigative precision (Lemke,
1990; NRC, 2012).
In another example of opportunities to communicate information in science, Diana’s
students learn the syntactical conventions of science discourse. In the following, students are
using the Do Now form to help them organize their thinking, and Diana sits with small groups to
help refine their language use. The discussion begins with Cameron reading aloud the text at the
top of the page (see figure 4.6).
1

Cameron: Okay.. ((giggles))

2

[reading] "How do you think the Hudson River ecosystem is being affected by zebra
mussels? Use what you have learned to make a prediction that... how...
your independent variable could be changing the... or dependent variable.
Use your science knowledge about the variable you choose and about the
14

... of the river (?)"
3

Diana:

Okay so everyone's gonna start the same way. Because everyone has the
same what? Everyone has the same what?

4

Students ((in unison)):

5

Diana:

Variable!

INdependent variable. Because that's what's changing the ecosystem. We
wanna know, how do zebra mussels affect phytoplankton, how do zebra

14

The ellipses in this transcription of Cameron's reading represent places where the recorder
was not able to pick up his voice. Though the text he is reading is included in figure 4.6, I left
the transcription as is. Without a clear recording, it is possible that the text may not have been an
accurate representation of what he read or how he read it.
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mussels affect the water, the fish the shallow water, how do zebra mussels
affect copepods, how do zebra mussels affect turbidity, and so on. So
everyone has a different question but it's all gonna start with, "If ... " what?
6

Cameron: If the scientists stopped studying=

7

Diana:

=No. What independent variable here? I just said it, the independent
variable is=

8

Students: =Zebra mussels=

9

Diana:

=Zeb- IF zebra mussels are introduced into the ecosystem, right, or you
could say, if the zebra mussels=

10 Students: =Went up.
11 Diana:

Increase or the amount of zebra mussels in the ecosystem increases.. IF
the amount of zebra mussels in the Hudson River ecosystem, INcreases...
you could say it another way, you could say, if zebra mussels increases it's
pretty simple you could say if zebra mussels are introduced into the
ecosystem.. reproduced.

12 Marlyse: How about if zebra mussels in the Hudson River increase...
13 Student:

((student asks a question.))

14 Diana:

No. Figure out a way to say it on your own. You don't as long as you say
something about zebra mussels increasing, this is where you write your
prediction. What do you think is gonna happen when you look at the
phytoplankton, or you look at copepods, et cetera and so on and so on and
so on. So you have to make a prediction about your variable. So, this is
where you make your prediction about your dependent variables. This is

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where independent variable goes. Here's the dependent variable. And in
ALL these lines you have lots of space there, fill in the whole thing please.
This interchange involves Diana in helping students to learn the formal science
conventions of communicating the relationships between the IV and the DV and writing a
hypothesis. Diana begins by telling them that they are "all gonna start the same way," that the
first part of their hypothesis will include the independent variable, which is the same for
everyone: zebra mussels. In her next utterance (line 5), she uses repetition (Tannen, 2007) to
emphasize the notion that the students will then set that independent variable against their
dependent variables. Cameron takes a turn at trying on the convention, but he uses the wrong
phrase. Rather than saying, "The effects of zebra mussels on..." he links back to an earlier
conversation in which Diana was asking students to finish the sentence, "if the scientists stopped
studying..." Diana attempts to repair (Schegloff, 2007) that mistake by restating how to express
the relationships between the variables. In line 5, she states "We wanna know, how do zebra
mussels affect phytoplankton, how do zebra mussels affect the water..." And Marlyse makes an
attempt at starting the phrase on her own, "How about if zebra mussels in the Hudson River
increase..." A student then interrupts Marlyse, asking (presumably) if all students need to write
their hypothesis in the same way.
Diana then redirects the students. She repeats the phrase (in line 14), which functions to
provide emphasis, that there is a regular pattern to this language, that students should use the first
part of the phrase - which doesn't change - and simply add their own dependent variable at the
end. In her last utterance (line 14), Diana then adds that students will add their prediction about
what they think will happen to the dependent variable if the zebra mussel population increases.
This is the hypothesis they are to write.

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Students then work in teams to develop the hypothesis. Diana provides the Do Now form
to scaffold each segment of the hypothesis (see figure 4.5). The students have the responsibility
to compose the hypothesis based on their collective knowledge, using the language pattern Diana
modeled for her students in the conversation and presents again in text form on the Do Now
handout. In other words, this tool, and Diana’s teaching of the tool, provides students another
opportunity to learn how to communicate information - in this case, the hypothesis scientifically.
This student example demonstrates that the conversations Diana held with students
earlier in the LTI about understanding the relationships between the variables (discussed earlier
in this chapter) appear here in the written product.
These interchanges between the teachers and their students and the resulting writing
illustrate the complexity of language work in science (Achieve, Inc., 2013; Lemke, 1990; NRC,
2012). Compiling, evaluating, and finally compressing that knowledge into a clear
communication about scientific principles is multilayered work. Through the LTI, teachers
provide opportunities for students to both learn and practice the formal discourse of science in
authentic contexts, in the day-to-day work of designing, conducting, and communicating a
scientific investigation over an extended period of time. They use other textual resources too,
like the Do Now or considerations sheets, or graphs and charts, or science notebooks, to provide
students spaces to record, and then later use, their new scientific knowledge.
Summary
Teaching the practices is a generative, demanding, language intensive pedagogical move.
What I have attempted to demonstrate here is that tools cannot be used in isolation, nor can
students work completely independently with the tools without careful guidance of the teacher.

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Figure 4.5. Hypothesis Page from Do Now from Diana’s Classroom
Each example of the teachers engaging students in each practice demonstrates that the teacher
plays an important role in translating, naming, revoicing, and providing multiple opportunities
for students to engage these practices in whole group as well as small group formats.

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The work of the LTI, regardless of the structure or investigation type, requires teachers to
develop strategies for guiding students through each phase of the work. One way that teachers
guide the students is through the use of several different kinds of textual tools such as Do Now
sheets, the IDD, considerations sheets, journals, readings, and videos. Teachers stick close to the
process alongside their students. They move in and out of direct instruction and more openended conversations. Much of their instruction happens in the natural interactions, in the
improvisational moments of talk with students, in responding to their needs, their questions, their
knowledge.
In this chapter, I present examples of teachers engaging students in just two of the eight
science practices (Achieve, Inc., 2013). I presented these two practices because I observed
teachers helping students to plan their investigations and work with information (obtaining,
evaluating and communicating) more often than the ways they interacted around other practices.
However, the other practices were present, and interwoven throughout the process as well. For
example, I observed teachers asking students to develop arguments using their background
knowledge and experiences in order to develop their investigation designs (practice numbers six
and seven above). And all students were required to provide scientific reasoning in the final
laboratory reports and science fair projects (practice number seven).
All three teachers used several instructional tools (i.e., the IDD, Do Now, considerations
sheets) to organize, through writing, students’ emergent understanding of science practices and
content. But, the written work did not always come about individually, as a result of quiet
contemplation; instead, it was constructed in the context of classroom discussion (Bakhtin, 1981,
1986; Bazerman, 2004; Leander & Prior, 2004; Latour & Woolgar, 1986; Street, 1984;
Vygotsky, 1986). Leander and Prior (2004) explain: “writing, speaking, and embodied activity

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co-evolve and interact in a specific strip of interaction” (p. 226). Similarly, Latour and Woolgar
(1986) illustrate how texts are instantiations of the social activity of scientists’ work, at the same
time that they also drive such work. Here I consider how teachers in this study used written tools
to support students’ “embodied activity” as they engaged in LTIs, where students and teachers
talked and generated new texts as the LTI evolved.
Further, the LTI is not scripted work that inherently results in students' doing science.
Teachers have an important role to play. Here, Diana, Carrie, and Marilyn sustain the work with
their students through on-going conversation focused on their moment-to-moment learning
needs. For example, Carrie helps students write a hypothesis more clearly in one moment, and
then moves to another group to help them understand their variables. Diana helps two students
clarify how to express their variables in one moment, and in another, she helps students
understand how to write their hypothesis. In a single class period, teachers working in small
groups with students may have many different kinds of conversations, all focused on different
points along the process: from writing a question, to using measurement tools appropriately, to
making decisions about how to best measure a variable, when to collect data, etc. In other
words, these teachers orchestrate their students' involvement in the LTI process responsively.
That is, in response to students' needs at any given moment (Gallas, 1995). This work is not
dictated by the page number in a textbook or any one standard item in a list of curriculum goals.
These teachers use the UA textual tools and language to scaffold their students' needs, to
shape the interactions among students, and between the students and their own projects. For
example, when Carrie listens carefully to her students grapple with decisions about when to go to
the zoo to gather data on gorilla behavior, she not only guides them to make decisions as science
colleagues, as partners, she helps them to make critical decisions about how best to collect data.

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She does this through pressing them to explain their ideas, she draws from them (through
questioning) their reasoning for their investigation design. She guides them to find the most
efficient use of their time given the materials and the constraints she knows are accessible to
them (e.g., one trip to the zoo to collect all data, their emerging understandings about how to
define observable animal behavior, how to make a claim based on the data they are likely to
collect). The teachers' roles during the process of the LTI, how they sustain the work, and push
students toward knowledge of content and of practices, are central to this work. I shall show, in
even further detail, how these roles play out in subsequent chapters.

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Chapter 5
Language as a Tool
Now that I have considered the basic structures of long-term investigations, the science
practices that teachers engage, and touched on teachers' roles in the LTI, I delve inside. What
particular things are teachers doing in the moment-to-moment interactions? I attempt to answer
these questions by looking at the spoken language (talk) in these classrooms as teachers engaged
students in the LTI.
Why language? Wells (1994) reminds us that, talk “makes [a contribution] to the
activities in which students engage in the “lived-in-world” of the classroom, the actual structures
of participation, and the function that talk performs – along with other semiotic systems – in
mediating the goals of these activities” (p. 2). Further, recent calls for science education to pay
close attention to the practices that teachers engage in science classrooms makes language, and
the discourse of science, a key concern (Hakuta & Santos, 2012; Nagy & Townsend, 2012; NRC,
2012), especially in classrooms that serve students from minority language communities (Hakuta
& Santos, 2012). Hakuta and Santos have argued that NGSS and CCSS “raise the bar for
learning, call for increased language capacities in combination with increased content
sophistication, and call for a high level of discourse in classrooms across all subject areas” (p. i).
This chapter’s purpose, then, is to drill further into language, into the generative and
receptive nature of talk in science classrooms where students are conducting long-term
investigations (Nagy & Townsend, 2012; Wells, 1994). My use of the phrase “language as a
tool” derives from sociocultural theory, which explains how spoken and written language, as
primary components of discourse, are socially constructed by those who participate in discourse

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(Gee, 2008a).

15

In his summary of Cole (1994), Mercer (2008) states, “drawing on a strong

tradition in sociocultural theory, language is the ‘tool of tools’; it allows us both to intervene in
social action to shape and direct it and also to represent that action and the world in which it
occurs in a ‘theory of experience'” (p. 100). Similarly, Nagy and Townsend (2012) adopted a
tool metaphor in thinking about how words work in language: “being able to use an item of
academic vocabulary means being able to use it in the service of the functions of academic
language” (p. 96). In other words, words do things.
In this chapter, I bring together the analysis of science practice that I conducted in chapter
four with language by exploring how the language of science – embedded within the activity of
scientific practice – becomes a tool that students can learn to employ to both develop and
communicate ideas in scientific investigations. Research on disciplinary literacy shows that
students can appropriate the language of a discipline in the context of practicing (e.g., discussing
and being actively engaged in) that discipline (Gallas, 1995; Gee, 2008a; Hull & Moje, 2012;
Moje, 2008; Nagy & Townsend, 2012; Snow, 2008).
In this chapter, I hope to show how language – the spoken and written words, and the
conversations they create – is a tool, like a wrench or a Phillips-head screwdriver (Nagy &
Townsend, 2012) teachers use in their LTIs. I hope to show, through micro-analysis, the
different dimensions involved when teachers and students employ, negotiate, and learn to use the
LTI language.
I begin by describing how teachers use language to engage students in the practices of
scientific investigation (NRC, 2012) along three dimensions: vocabulary (lexical), talking about

15

Although there are also other components that make up discourse -- semiotic or paralinguistic
tools like body language or written or visual texts (Gee, 2008), for example – those are not the
focus of this analysis.
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science language (syntactic/grammatical and semantic), and in writing (which also considers the
lexical, syntactic, and semantic dimensions).
Learning Disciplinary Vocabulary
Learning an academic language like science entails learning to use words as one learns to
use a specific tool. We do not live our days solely using academic language(s) (there are many),
but having such language(s) available to us provides us with greater opportunities to participate
in multiple language (and social) communities. Nagy and Townsend (2012) relate, “Learning
academic language is not learning new words to do the same thing that one could have done with
other words; it is learning to do new things with language and acquiring new tools for these new
purposes” (p. 93).
Recent research on disciplinary vocabulary development suggests that vocabulary – or
specific technical words -- cannot be separated from the contexts in which it is used (Gee, 2008a,
Nagy & Townsend, 2012; Snow, 2008). Not only are the meanings of words inherently
inseparable from their contexts, but students learn new vocabulary within the context of
authentic discussion (e.g., a small group discussion with other students) within a larger
meaningful context (e.g., a LTI) (Lindfors, 1987; Nagy & Townsend, 2012; Snow, 2008).
Consider several examples of the ways Diana, Carrie, and Marilyn engaged in talk about science
vocabulary.
Getting to "trachea." First, let’s return to Diana’s classroom. Here, Diana conducts a
whole group discussion, early in her LTI process, in which she solicits students’ answers to the
question, “What are the parts of the respiratory system?” This is a part of a Do Now exercise,
intended to review terms before they begin building models of the respiratory system later in the
class period. Ariel is the first student to respond.

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1

Ariel:

Your windpipe.

2

Diana:

Windpipe.. um.. I don't disagree with you.

3

There's a word I'm gonna put down,

4

a new vocabulary word for today and it starts with a T and it's the, the=

5

Sam:

=Trachea.

6

Diana:

The yeah. ((laughs)) That's how I want I'd rather you put it on there.

7

Trachea is a funny word to spell, so look at how I'm spelling it.

8

T-R-A-C-H..

9

Sam:

E-A.

10 Stacey:

E-A. ((said simultaneously with S before))

11 Diana:

E-A. ((laughs)) Raise your hand if you had trachea. Very nice.

12

Or if you had like..

13 Sam:

Can I put throat?

14 Diana:

Throat. Yeah well throat you gotta be careful

15

'cause when you think of your throat

16

sometimes you think of your digestive system,

17

right 'cause both food and the air, going through here.

18

So trachea is a way to distinguish the part that that,

19

I guess air goes through.

Here we see Diana and her students in negotiation of terms. Students provide terms,
starting with “windpipe” and with Diana carefully nudging them along, they move toward the
scientific term, “trachea.” Diana announces there’s “a new vocabulary word,” and before she
can say it, Sam yells it aloud (line 5), partly surprising Diana, making her laugh (line 6). She

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explicitly tells the class that this is a term she prefers that they use (line 6). She identifies it as “a
funny word to spell.” Students also copy the word into their own notes.
Then Sam inserts a question, “Can I put throat?” (in place of trachea) (line 13). Diana
explains the distinction between throat as a more general term for the area surrounding the
trachea and esophagus (a part of the digestive system) and trachea as the specific organ in the
respiratory system, their focus of study for the day (lines 14 through 19). Students do not take
this idea any further after Diana’s last utterance (in line 19), and the conversation moves on to
listing other parts of the respiratory system.
While Diana explicitly teaches the scientific term for “windpipe,” she also takes up her
students’ contributions (e.g., “windpipe” and “throat”) as resources for fine-tuning the terms she
wants them to learn (Warren, Ballenger, Ogonowski, & Rosebery, 2001; Snow, 2008). This is a
moment of negotiation and meaning making in the context of a discussion designed to prepare
students to build models (the second practice in the NRC framework) (Warren, et al., 2001;
NRC, 2011). This exchange is also multimodal (e.g., using talk and text interchangeably), and
depends on the social negotiation between Diana and her students (Nagy & Townsend, 2012).
Research has provided numerous examples of this sort, providing a reason to believe that this
approach is fruitful, especially for students who speak minority languages (Gee, 2008a, Nagy &
Townsend, 2012; Rosebery & Warren, 2008).
But there is something else noteworthy about this exchange. Let’s zoom in on the last
few lines of this exchange, in which Sam inserts his question about the word “throat” (line 13).
After Diana provides the term she prefers, Sam asks (line 4) if he can use the word “throat” in
place of “trachea.” Diana clarifies for him the distinctions between the throat – which includes

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several organs, some of which are not a part of the respiratory system – and the trachea, which is
a specific name for one organ located in the same area we call the “throat.”
But this moment involves more than a curious student. Sam's question, confidently
inserted even after Diana provides her preferred term, expands the discussion, prompts Diana
into a spontaneous explanation. She provides an answer (lines 14 through 19) (e.g., “you have to
be careful…”) about how to explain “trachea” as the more precise term.
Sam’s exploration of other possible terms (i.e., “throat”) is an example of what Rosebery,
Ogonowski, DiShino, and Warren (2010) argue is the heterogeneity of language use among
students in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. They go on to suggest that this
hetereogeneity is a resource for teachers and students. Here, his honest question has the potential
to push everyone’s learning, because it prompts Diana to be more clear and to consider
alternative terms (Rosebery, et al., 2010). This moment also provides a glimpse into how murky
the linguistic waters are for teachers and students, that words may not always be clear until we
are given opportunities to wrestle with them alongside others (Gee, 2008b; Rosebery, et al.,
2010).
My own little language. I now turn to a longer excerpt that involves an entirely different
sort of conversation about vocabulary. I have broken this excerpt into four sections, each
according to the natural shift the conversation (Erickson, 2004; Gee, 2007); these shifts define
successive conversational turns in which speakers refine their understanding of a particular
technical term.
Marilyn’s students, early in their LTI, were working in “expert groups” to read articles
and share what they learned about various weathering processes. Marilyn has just arrived to a

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group to check on their progress and the conversation begins with Jamie responding to Marilyn,
who asks about how their note-taking is coming along.
1

Jamie:

2
3

I really didn't understand.
Marilyn:

4
5

Um. When I did it, I kinda got ((unclear)) because a lot of the words

Oh yes, and this is one of the things I was telling you yesterday,
that our vocabulary for this is really tough.

Jamie:

So, Margaret’s ((another student)) kind of helping me kind of break it
down and like put it into more like, my own little language so that's a great
idea for like [word], hydration, ((provides two more terms))

6

Marilyn:

So, he's named a whole lot of different things there... what are those?

7

Keith:

There's just different forms of chemicals.

8

Marilyn:

Different forms of chemicals.

9

Keith:

And all the processes in which chemical weathering happens.

10 Marilyn:

Okay.

11 Keith:

Chemical.. and then you can sub.. into which chemical processes are
happening, there's oxidation, carbonization, ((lists a few more)).

In the opening of this conversation (Schegloff, 2007), Jamie explicitly identifies
vocabulary as a challenge toward understanding the assigned reading. Marilyn supports Jamie
by recasting in lines three and four, saying, “our vocabulary for this is really tough.” They
establish their mutual understanding. And now, with everyone in the know, the work begins.
Jamie and Keith drive this segment, identifying what is difficult for them (e.g., the terms),
identifying what they have done so far (e.g., put them into his “own little language”), and naming
what they do know so far (e.g., terms like “hydration”). Marilyn interjects with one clarifying

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question, “What are those?” (line 8), pressing the boys to move from the specific terms to the
general category (e.g., chemicals). The conversation continues as Marilyn and students shift the
conversation into an explanation of “oxidation.”
12 Marilyn:

Okay, who wants to explain oxidation for me?

13 Jamie:

((unclear))

14 Marilyn:

So what do you think? Who can explain oxidation?

15 Margaret: We didn't get that much..
16 Marilyn:

You didn't get that much on it. Okay, so you just spoke about... you just
spoke. So how about her?

17 Vicki:

((raises her hand to speak))

18 Marilyn:

Ah.. okay.. Vicki, thank you=

19 Vicki:

=Well, I said that it made rocks like smoother?

20 Marilyn:

Made rocks smoother, but what's happening.. in the rock..

21

'cause I'm not sure it actually makes rocks smoother so much,

22

it's actually a very familiar chemical reaction

23

except that you may not know it by the term oxidation,

24

you may know it by something else.

This segment begins with Marilyn’s direct question, “Who can explain oxidation for
me?” It takes a few turns and hedges (e.g., “we didn’t get that much on it”), before a student
attempts an answer (line 24). And when Vicki does respond with “Well, I said that it made rocks
like smoother?” her statement includes a rising tone at the end, as if asking a question
(Johnstone, 2008; Tannen, 2007). This indicates Vicki’s hesitation about her answer. Vicki
provides the result of this particular weathering process, but does not explain the process.

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Marilyn gently nudges with, “I’m not sure it makes rocks smoother so much… you may know it
by something else.” This signals that Marilyn will provide a hint next (Schegloff, 2007). But
before she does, Alex takes the opportunity to add his explanation to the table, as we will see in
the next segment.
25 Alex:

I know what it is, but..

26

if I can say more about it,

27

it's when the compound oxygen reacts to ((unclear)) electrons,

28

it makes the rock unstable which makes it collapse?

29 Marilyn:

Which makes it.. now..

30 Alex:

((something about softness))

31 Marilyn:

Now, you tend to get this sort of reddish-brown substance,

32

being.. ((Margaret guesses)) exactly.

33 Vicki:

((to Margaret)) What did you say?

34 Marilyn:

You want to say it again a little louder?

35 Margaret: It's like it's.. it's like it's rusting.
36 Marilyn:

It's like it's rusting. And some of our rocks will actually contain iron in it.

37 Vicki:

The Statue of Liberty. It got oxidized.

Here, Alex begins explaining the process of oxidation – even asking for more time to
“say more about it” (line 31). He uses highly technical language: “when the compound oxygen
reacts to …. electrons” Marilyn responds in line 34 “which makes it… now,” hinting that she
wants students to name the end result – rusting -- which is the word she hinted at in the above
sequence that students “may already know.” She gives the next more specific clue in line 36

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with “now you get this reddish-brown substance.” And with this, Margaret explains that the
process of oxidation results in rusting (line 40).
Here, Marilyn effectively helps students to use their everyday language to make a
connection to the formal variation on a specialized word (Gee, 2008b; Snow, 2008). And Vicki
provides her own device for remembering the term (line 42), ruminating that since the Statue of
Liberty appears rusty, “it got oxidized.”
Throughout this exchange, Marilyn provides small supports for her students as they
attempt their own explanations. Their talk about vocabulary moves back and forth between
teacher and student ideas, moving from identifying a difficult term, to explaining it, to putting it
into the context of everyday knowledge (e.g., rusting). While it is true that Marilyn provided the
goal, to explain the word “oxidation,” the students participate in nearly equal measure in this
discussion. They responded to each of Marilyn’s moves with full answers, attempts at scientificsounding language, timid guesses, as well as confident leaps. Each time, Marilyn supported and
pushed.
But what were Marilyn’s discursive moves and why do they matter here? Recall in the
first section, she shows alignment with the student who opens the conversation (Schegloff,
2007). In other words, she shows that she is in agreement with Jamie (line 1), who observes that
the vocabulary is difficult. She then inserts a proposal (Schegloff, 2007) that they explore one of
the difficult words in their reading, “oxidation.” Then she notices that students, while using
highly technical language to explain the process, are relying on the written text to tell them what
they need to know. Marilyn attempts another shift by suggesting that they “know [the term] by
another name” effectively asking them to rely on their everyday experience as a resource
(Rosebery, Warren, & Conant, 1992; Warren, Ogonowski, & Pothier, 2005).

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Weird words. In this next example, we return to Diana’s classroom. This time, Diana’s
students have completed a short activity in which they were to explore how the diaphragm feels
when they breathe. This short exchange comes from a whole group conversation to help students
understand how the diaphragm works. As in the first example, this excerpt is from the lesson on
the organs in the respiratory system, in which she teaches about “trachea.” However, this time,
Diana takes an extra moment to teach the word “diaphragm.” This excerpt begins with Diana
demonstrating the same activity that the students had just completed. She stands at the front of
the room with both hands just below her ribcage, where she can feel her diaphragm expand and
contract as she breathes deeply, in and out. Students are watching, some imitating her at their
seats, as waves of breathing and giggling move across the room.
1

Diana:

So when you breathe in, ((demonstrates taking a breath))

2

it actually feels like it gets bigger. Right? That's correct.

3

And when you breathe out ((breathes out)) it almost feels like it gets
smaller.

4

So if we go back to our Do Now, there's a muscle, that we're missing.

5

And remember when I said leave a blank?

6

Students: ((two boys say simultaneously)) Yes.

7

Diana:

The word is diaphragm.

8

And look at how I'm spelling it. ((writing on the Smart Board))

9

It's a weird weird word.

10

And your diaphragm is the muscle.. underneath...

11

and you guys will be able to read a little bit about it

12

and it'll be part of your model..

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Though the transcript only reveals Diana’s talk, students are interacting with her nonverbally: some continue to test how their own diaphragms work, others laugh, still others write
notes. And many have their eyes squarely on Diana.
This example illustrates another type of move that teachers used when teaching
vocabulary, one that involved an investigation experience out of which new vocabulary comes.
Here, Diana takes a moment to connect a physical experience with its word. In a sense, this
moment mirrors the one reported by Rosebery, Ballenger, Ogonowski, and Rosebery (2001) in
which a student understands the growth of a pumpkin seed by enacting the growth physically, he
"interanimates" it. Rosebery and her colleagues demonstrate how students make connections to
concepts through active interanimation. Diana’s students do the same thing here. Although this
time, Diana directs the embodiment, the students create their own variations on that as they
observe that they “get dizzy” when they breathe deeply in this way, or feel their “ribs going in
and out” or their “diaphragm going up and down.” In this way, Diana supports students’ own
ways with words and active embodiment resources to both visualize the term and make
conceptual connections (Heath, 1983; Warren, Ballenger, Ogonowski, & Rosebery, 2001).
“Food” or “nutrients?” We stay in Diana’s classroom for the last example of
vocabulary work. This exchange comes from the bacteria lesson (see chapter 4) in which Diana
asks the students to name under what conditions bacteria survive, writing answers on their Do
Now sheets, and sharing them with the class. This excerpt begins with Diana responding to a
student who provides the first answer: “water.”
1

Diana:

Water. Okay. Raise your hand if your group also said water.

2

Did any-, any other group say water? No?

3

Okay, some bacteria need water, yeah.

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4

Alright, um, who else wants to share something your group talked about?

5

Andrew, what did your group say? One thing.

6

Andrew:

Um, people agreed that um... ((unclear))

7

Diana:

Okay. Food.

8

Alright, raise your hand, if you had the exact wo::rd, "food.”

9

Okay. Raise your hand if you said, 'nutrients.’

10 Students: ((yells out in the background)) I put it on the side!
11 Diana:

Sh... okay, so I'm gonna put, -slash- nutrients.

12

((writing student answers on the board))

Though brief, again we see Diana making explicit moves toward specificity (Lemke,
1990; Snow, 2008). As she takes ideas from the class, she asks students if they agree or disagree
with the idea. She records their ideas on the projection of the Do Now sheet on the Smart Board
as students write answers in their own Do Now print outs (see chapter 4).
In line seven, Diana responds to Andrew who, though we cannot hear his entire answer,
presumably adds the word “food” to the list. Diana asks if others wrote the “exact word.” Then,
she introduces the word “nutrients.” But this time, she does not announce it as a vocabulary
word, simply writing “nutrients” beside the word “food” on the board. She says nothing more
about this explicitly in this conversation, and moves on to soliciting more student answers.
However, I paused on this moment for two reasons. First, it demonstrates how teachers
differentiate between levels of abstraction or specificity in science language. As Snow (2008)
explains, one difficulty with learning science vocabulary is that, as students move from
elementary to high school, they are expected to use more sophisticated -- and abstract terms. She
outlines a system of classifying words into three different categories, or tiers (Beck et al., 2002

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cited in Snow, 2008). Tier one words are those that students who grow up in most any Englishspeaking community would already know, such as “plant,” “water,” or “fish.” Tier two words
are those that are “encountered in academic discourse but are not specific to any particular field
or discipline” (Snow, 2008), such as “compare” or “characterize.” Or, they can be less common
forms of tier one words such as "growth" instead of "grow", or "differentiation" instead of
"different". Tier three words are those that are highly technical and abstract and used only in a
science context, such as, "electromagnetic" or "oxidation" or "photosynthesis." Tier two words
are said to be the most difficult for students to learn because they are less likely to be taught
explicitly, their meanings are complex and sometimes abstract, and they occur in casual
conversation (Snow, 2008).
Snow’s ideas are illustrated in this example. Diana replaces the word "food" with
"nutrients,” moving from a tier one word to tier two or three.

16

But instead of replacing one

word with the other, she writes them side-by-side (line 11).
This discursive move brings me to my second reason for including this example. As
Diana writes the words next to each other, she effectively positions them as equal in meaning at
the same time that it honors Andrew’s answer, as well as other students who said they wrote
“food” (Warren, Ogonowski, & Pothier, 2005). Though the subtext of her question (e.g., “okay
raise your hand if you said ‘nutrients’…. okay I’m gonna put, slash, nutrients”) suggests that one
word is preferred over the other, she stops to recognize that these words may be interchangeable,
but that Andrew provided an opportunity for Diana to point out these subtle differences between
16

Snow (2008) also notes that some words are difficult to place in a category and may actually
be appropriate to place in both tier two and tier three, such as “nutrients,” which may be used in
casual conversation among some groups more often than others, but that may also be a
scientifically-technical word, depending on the grade level. For example, “nutrients” would not
feel like a technical word to a 12th grader in advanced biology, but for a younger student, it might
be completely new.
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words. This moment is reminiscent of the moment when Sam asked “Can I put throat?” These
are moments that Diana did not squander, moments in which a student presents her with an
opportunity to explore vocabulary and meaning making with her students.
In these examples, we see several strategies that teachers use to help students learn
scientific vocabulary. They draw students’ attention to vocabulary that they know is
challenging, and push students to use the resources around them, material and experiential, in
acquiring these new words, so that later they can become tools in their communication about
science. Teachers draw on students’ ways with words to help them to make connections to
specific scientific terms (Heath, 1983; Rosebery & Warren, 2000; Rosebery, Ogonowski,
DiShino, & Warren, 2010). They clarify the distinctions between words that students may use in
their everyday language that have different meanings in science (Lemke, 1990; Gee, 2008a;
Rosebery & Warren, 2008; Snow, 2008). They take opportunities to clarify meaning through
recognizing the subtle differences between terms, to focus on helping students add new things to
their linguistic toolboxes. And what did these tools afford students and the teacher?
Talking About Science
In addition to focusing on specific words, teachers also taught how to use various other
conventions for "talking science" (Lemke, 1990). In this section, I describe the strategies
teachers and their students used to learn about and use multi-word, phraseological (Bakhtin,
1986) constructions of scientific language – which includes the lexical, syntactic, and semantic
dimensions – and discourse (Gee, 2008a). With the examples that follow, I hope to show two
different patterns with respect to teachers’ use of and teaching about language during the LTI.
First, I explore how teachers explicitly taught the language they would later expect students to

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use both in classroom conversation and in writing. Second, I demonstrate how the LTI provided
a context for learning the language of science (Rosebery, Warren, & Conant, 1992).
Learning LTI conventions. Recall that at different times in the school year, teachers
launched the LTI with instruction about the science practices and ways to think, talk, and write
about the scientific process (NRC, 2012). As teachers and students moved into planning for the
LTI, they applied the language in class discussions concerning the investigations, including
talking about variables, writing scientific questions, writing a hypothesis, and deciding how to
collect data. I now turn to several examples of those language forms (e.g., the grammatical and
syntactic conventions).
In one 50-minute whole group discussion, Diana guides her students through
understanding the IDD. It is her first time teaching the textual learning tool, and she uses the
bacteria activity (see chapter 4) to teach students how to navigate and understand the tool. The
excerpt illuminates how Diana and Marlyse talked about the formal language conventions that
teachers teach through the IDD. Later, I will show how this same language is repeated
throughout the LTI, in different forms, for different purposes.
At the beginning of the lesson, Diana asks students to respond to questions on the Do
Now (see Figure 4.1), where students list what they knew about the conditions under which
bacteria live. The back side of the IDD is for filling in information in advance of beginning the
data collection for the bacteria investigation. Here, Diana moves the discussion from talk about
bacteria to the question that they will write, using the specific language she wants them to use
(Gee, 2008a; Lemke, 1990; Nagy & Townsend, 2012). Diana is at the front of the classroom,
writing on the board as she talks. She expects the students to copy the information on their IDD
as she writes.

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1

Diana:

So the first part of our question is, "how.. does.. location... affect.."

2

and we're not actually gonna say "dirty"

3

what are we re::ally looking at in this investigation?

Diana opens with how to write the scientific question with very specific language: “How
does location affect…” She pauses briefly here to allow students to catch up with their
notetaking. After a few moments, she continues:
4

Diana:

((we’re not)) really saying dirty,

5

we're saying where is really, there are the most bacteria in the classroom.

6

So, "How does location affect..." who thinks they know how to say it
now?

7

What should we say?

8

"The amount.. of.. bacteria" ((writing)) "that... is growing.. or that will
grow."

9

So under DEpendent variable what do I write for DEpendent variable?

10 Student:

((unclear))

11 Diana:

((writing and talking simultaneously)) Is growing.. or will grow..

12

so you put it in your own words, yeah.

13

Yeah, the amount of bacteria.

14

How much bacteria. ((writing))

15

And I'm going to put in parentheses our vocabulary word,

16

"number of colonies of bacteria".. "number.. of colonies.. of.. bacteria."
((writing on the board))

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After the students have completed writing their question, they title the LTI. Here is a
small excerpt from the “how to write a title” segment of the conversation.
1

Diana:

Alright. So we don't have a title.

2

So, we want our title, the title of an investigation a scientific investigation

3

is almost like having a question,

4

but instead of having a question mark at the end of it,

5

you just say it as a statement.

6

And instead of saying the work "affect", we're gonna talk about the word..
"effect."

7

Alright, this is that affect-effect thing that can be really confusing
sometimes.

8

So, the title, we're gonna say the title is, [writing]

9

The effect.. of.. and what's the the INdependent variable,

10

you wanna say the independent variable first..

In this last segment of the conversation, Diana teaches that the title of the project is going
to build from the question, that it is “almost like having a question, but… you just say it as a
statement” (lines 4 and 5). She then notes that there is a difference between the words “affect”
and “effect.” Diana is writing as she explains these ideas, which partly explains the pauses and
repetitions in her speech. Also, students are writing the same information on their IDDs. She
begins the sentence construction as, “The effect of…” and reminds students that the first phrase
in the sentence includes the independent variable. The rest of the lesson moves in a similar way,
in which she leads the students to write the title as, “The effect of location on the number of
colonies of bacteria.” This becomes the title all the students will use.

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Later, in the same conversation, Diana moves on to teaching about the dependent
variable, another new term. Here, Diana and Marlyse (a few students chime in as well) discuss
what they know about the conditions under which bacteria will live, and apply what they know
to a video they saw previously about people who become ill after eating foods that had not been
properly stored at a picnic. Marlyse opens the discussion by offering the example, and Diana
takes it up, as an entry into teaching about variables. The excerpt begins with Diana asking
Marlyse to remind the class about the dependent variable.
1

Diana:

Marlyse, what did I just say?

2

Marlyse: You said that the dependent variable is the number of people that got sick
((at the picnic in the video)).

3

Diana:

Yeah, it's a little more, I tried to give it to you a little more subtly.

4

Stacie:

It's the measurement.

5

Diana:

Yeah.. you guys, Stacie can you repeat it again?

6

Stacie:

It's the measurement.

7

Diana:

Okay, so it's what.. you.. measure ((as she's writing the answer on the
board)).

8

So if the dependent variable is what you mea::sure.

9

It's the one you measure 'cause it's the dependent variable, ON what you're
investigating.

10

So, the INdependent variable is the other one,

11

does anyone remember what the OTHER one is?

12

I know Stacie knows... does anyone else besides STAcie know?

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13

What's the De... what the INdependent one then? Yeah. ((points to
student))

14 Taren:

One that somebody changes.

15 Diana:

It's the one that YOU get to change.

16

So, you change some stuff, and then you MEAsure.

17

What do you measure?

18 Geoffrey: ((unclear))
19 Diana:

Your DEpendent variable is what you're gonna measure.

Diana asks her students to complete a Do Now which asks the question, "How do we
apply what we learned about bacteria to an investigation in which we culture bacteria? What
conditions are favorable for bacteria growth?" As students answer her questions, Diana writes
the ideas on the board while students are writing these same answers on their handouts.
While it may appear as though this exchange is a traditional example of the IRE (Mehan,
1979) pattern of classroom interaction, there's more that's going on here that we cannot hear.
While the transcript – a limited portrait of a noisy, busy classroom -- might paint the picture of a
lifeless marching back-and-forth between teacher and student, students verbally and non-verbally
interact with Diana during the discussion. Students talk in the background, offer up answers
without being called on. They write, read, agree with each other and Diana, or not. The students
call out-of-turn, often in a call-and-response manner (Adger, Wolfram, & Christian, 2007); she
consistently, and in good humor, reminds students to raise hands to take their turn in speaking.
Here, guided largely by the IDD, Diana’s teaching unfolds in a careful march through the
elements of the IDD (e.g., the question, the title, the independent and dependent variables) and

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the common language she will expect students to use in subsequent lesson – most importantly,
the final LTI.
Applying the LTI conventions. Teachers not only guide students to learn the language
of investigation design, they later ask students to apply that language as they work in teams to
design investigations. In other words, the language they have learned in early lessons about the
IDD, considerations sheets, or the Do Nows, for example, is useful for later learning and
communication in science (Wells, 1994).
One example occurred in Marilyn's class, where students are arranged in their LTI
groups, writing their procedures and making a list of the materials they will need for their
investigations. They are scattered throughout the classroom, huddled over computers and books
and various science materials that Marilyn keeps accessible for them. There is a vibrant buzz in
the room as groups excitedly work on their plans, moving around the room gathering materials,
rummaging through cupboards for tools, exploring the plant lab to plan how to use the space,
gathering water in aquariums. Students smoothly shift between writing, revising, and exploring.
Marilyn circulates, spending about two minutes with each group. Her general approach
is to check in on the progress of groups and keep them on task. Occasionally students reach out
to her, asking for help.
On this particular day, Jacob called Marilyn over to his table, while the other members of
his group (four other boys), listened in. Their investigation title is, "The effect of light quantities
on the growth of the Euglenoid algae." We hear how they negotiate their investigation design
based on their anticipation of these variables.
1
2

Jacob:

We're trying to figure out 'cause we can't really use the incubator
'cause of the light situation and air, really, we'll figure that out.

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3

But then if we can't use light, the grow lab's actually gonna work for us

4

'cause it's like 5 degrees higher than the perfect...

5

Marilyn:

That's good! And then you'll get your light...

6

Jacob:

And then.. is there way is there like a while light bulb, like white.
light light bulbs? Like some are...

7

Marilyn:

They have bulbs that they mix in light?

8

Jacob:

Yeah.

9

Marilyn:

I'm not sure you can get smaller ones but fluorescent ones...

10 Jacob:

Alright yeah like that well can animals grow from that like, is that makes
them...

11 Marilyn:

That makes them um, like regular light? It could.

12 Jacob:

Because we can't use the incu- that light ...

13

that's not hot enough or cold enough we don't have like a range of
temperatures there.

14

So we need other spaces like the incubator but then, we missed
somebody...

15

trying to figure out like our cold situation.

16

Is there like a really cold cold space in school?

17 Marilyn:

In this place?

18 Jacob:

That will keep it alive?

19

The fridge I'm pretty sure is too cold.. the temperature...

20

'cause then we'd have like a wild range.

21 Marilyn:

Now, these are the limitations that you're coming up with now that

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22

are pretty good for coming up with

23

before you actually start writing up your materials and procedures,

24

so you know what sorts of things could happen.

25 Jacob:

So like, we have it to the, not to the extremes.

Jacob, the group’s unofficial spokesperson, opens the exchange asking Marilyn for help
in finding the right equipment to use while the group plans. He grapples with the decision about
what kinds of lights to use since they all emit heat and he and his colleagues want to control for
heat. Jacob speaks at the formal register that is expected of him. He reasons that they need an
appropriate light source that will not result in the “extreme range” of temperatures that he fears
would come from using the light sources in the classroom. He considers the variable (light) as it
relates to heat production, and worries about which light sources would be best to use in this
investigation.
As Jacob helps his group think through their plan, he applies his knowledge of science
content (e.g., heat and light), using the idea of a “range” or “extreme” to describe how to narrow
down variables to ensure that they conduct a fair test. Jacob demonstrates that he knows – either
intuitively or through experience – that investigation design and decisions about materials and
other resources (i.e., a cold place in the school) are not arbitrary decisions, but depend on a host
of understandings about the phenomena one is exploring (Lemke, 1990; NRC, 2011).
Though subtle, Marilyn’s role in this exchange is noteworthy. In the broadest sense,
Marilyn provides Jacob (and his group mates) an opportunity to practice his (their) science
knowledge (Gee, 2008a; Snow, 2008). In this student-centered exchange (Crawford, 2000),
Marilyn's role is to offer support of the students’ ideas, and to attempt to problem solve alongside

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the group. Marilyn does not impose her own ideas; rather, she answers Jacob's questions
honestly, offering up suggestions for other light sources (e.g., like "fluorescent").
Looking even more closely, Marilyn provides a sounding board for Jacob's thought
process. He opens with exploratory talk in line one. Exploratory talk, according to Cazden
(2001), is speaking "without the answers fully intact" (p. 170). His engagement with Marilyn
demonstrates that he is interested in Marilyn's feedback. He shows her his knowledge of the
investigation process through his alignment moves (Goffman, 1981; Schegloff, 2007) with
Marilyn in lines 8-18. He latches onto Marilyn's speech in line eight where he says "... it makes
them..." and Marilyn responds with, "... that makes them um, like regular light? It could.”
Marilyn finishes Jacob's sentence for him, showing that she is listening, and engaged in what he
is saying (Tannen, 2007).
Later, Jacob does not directly take up her advice about light sources; rather, he moves on
to another question about where to find a cold space in the school (lines 9-15). Marilyn’s last
line recasts, in a meta-level (Cazden, 2000; Gee, 2008a), what Jacob is doing with his thinking
(lines 19-22). Jacob's last line (line 23), "So like, we have it to the not to the extremes," is
another chance for him to demonstrate to Marilyn that he understands some of the subtleties of
investigation design (e.g., to have consistent intervals – however they are measured – between
levels of the IV). It shows alignment (Goffman, 1981) with Marilyn and her knowledge about
his choice to be careful about temperature. In this exchange, in other words – through latching,
alignment, and recasting – they show that they are sharing in the problem solving task, Jacob
taking the lead, Marilyn in the supporting role.
Now let’s turn to Carrie’s classroom, which offers another variation on talk about
planning, and applying the science language students have learned in previous lessons. As in the

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last exchange between Marilyn and her students, Carrie has asked her students to sit with their
project groups to determine their plan for the LTI. Carrie's role is to move from group to group
and check in on their progress and answer any questions. As in Marilyn's classroom, the entire
class is engaged in their projects, moving about the room, collecting materials, and writing
together. They are arranged in table groups of about four students apiece, some standing,
hovering, some sitting. We hear several different kinds of negotiations across the room:
students arguing about methods they should use to measure things, some students excitedly
exchanging ideas about their projects, several taking notes for the group as they talk. There are
laptop computers, journals, and colored markers strewn about the tables.
Students are hunting down additional information online about where to find materials at
stores in their neighborhood. And yes, some student groups argue. They argue about who is
doing the most work, who is being the most unhelpful, and whose turn it is to take notes. And
yet, they are also remarkably resourceful and confident. They email the Urban Advantage
scientists at partner institutions (e.g., the Bronx Zoo, the New York Hall of Science) for
additional information about specific animals in the exhibits, or for background information
about the physics of trebuchets. This is a high-energy hour, and students are focused on
completing the planning sheet that Carrie requires.
In the following exchange, Carrie is checking in with one small group as they begin
planning their LTIs. Here, the students are designing a field investigation about gorilla social
behavior. They are trying to decide how they can measure the time of day when gorillas are
likely to be the most social at the local zoo, and to mark what kinds of social behaviors they
expect to see during different times of the day. One student had done this investigation earlier in
the school year, and wanted to explore her data in a different way. Carrie and two girls in this

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group, Maddy and Allison, decide on how often and when they should visit the zoo to collect
their data.
31 Carrie:

Alright checking back in, any questions?

32 Maddy:

For this would it be one if we just went once?

33 Carrie:

((reading student work)) "The effect of time of day on gorilla social
behavior."

34 Maddy:

So if we do it twice=

35 Carrie:

=So if you go once, I would make sure=

36 Maddy:

=So twice per IV=

37 Carrie:

=that you do it for a longer time, um=

38 Allison:

((student in background))

39

=So, I would say twice=

40 Carrie:

=in the morning and the afternoon.

41 Maddy:

So, we go twice and we then just do it at 12, 1:30, 3.

42 Allison:

About two times on each day.

43 Maddy:

And then we average out the data.

44 Carrie:

Sounds good. Now, who did gorillas before?

45 Allison:

Me.

46 Carrie:

And what was your IV before?

47 Allison:

It was um.. like, um...

48 Natalie:

((in background)).. grooming behavior.

49 Maddy:

Actually it was... time of day=

50 Carrie:

=was it time of day?=

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51 Maddy:

=time of day on gorilla grooming behavior=

52 Carrie:

=Because you might be able to bring in some of the data from before.

53 Natalie:

((unclear))

54 Carrie:

Good. Now are these the same times as you used before?

55 Allison:

No. We only did it twice and=

56 Natalie:

=and we did it at 11:30 and at 2:00=

57 Maddy:

((in background)) What time? 11:30 and=

58 Allison:

=I think it should be::... 3 times because you get more productive data.

59 Carrie:

So...

60 Maddy:

So we have more to work with.

61 Carrie:

Excellent. Okay.

62

So I like that you're making this one, you're like, "no, we need more data,"

63

which are some of those improvements that we talked about.

64

So good. No questions? We're all set? Make sure you're talking and
everyone's on the same page.

This exchange begins with Maddy asking Carrie for help in choosing how many times
they should make observations at the zoo in one day. As Carrie relates to me in an interview, the
students’ acknowledgement that more trials means better data is admirable, but in this particular
field study, there would not be a significant difference between taking notes at 12 p.m., or 1:30
p.m. However, Carrie supports their efforts to find ways to get more data. But getting there
takes some negotiation on their part.
The students and Carrie enact several specific discourse patterns that both position the
speakers as in and out of alignment (Schegloff, 2007). Both Maddy and Allison interrupt Carrie.

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The pair of utterances in lines 3 (by Carrie) and line 4 (by Maddy) are not in alignment. In line
3, Carrie reads what the girls have written, attempts to assess where they are in their work. Just
as she finishes her reading, Maddy begins to answer her own question from line 2 (“So if we did
it twice?”).
Carrie then begins to answer, as her utterances and Maddy’s intertwine, but are not true
responses to each other (lines 5 through 9). Inside of these turns, Carrie has a complete thought,
her only piece of advice in this exchange, "So if you go once, I would make sure that you do it
for a longer time, um, in the morning and the afternoon," that is broken into three segments, by
by Maddy and Allison’s overlapping (Tannen, 2007). Once begun as disagreement, they both
come to agreement near the end of that segment in lines 10 and 11. These utterances work to
align speakers to each other, bringing their ideas into agreement (Schegloff, 2007). They fall out
of alignment again when Carrie asks them what their IV was in the previous investigation (lines
15 through 20) (Schegloff, 2007).
Then, in lines 16 through 20, Allison, Natalie, and Maddy overlap each other as they
attempt to answer Carrie’s question about who investigated this topic earlier in the year. It was
Allison’s project in the fall, but Natalie and Maddy attempt to answer her question. In fact,
Maddy corrected the two other students in lines 18 and 20: “actually it was time of day…. time
of day on gorilla social behavior.”
Carrie listens as Maddy and Natalie wrestle with the appropriate number of visits. She
interjects softly, “so…” (line 28) which redirects the discussion toward finalizing their answer to
Carrie’s original question. Notice how Maddy latches onto Carrie beginning her answer with
“so…” This indicates that Maddy is in tune with Carrie’s move toward bringing the
conversation to a close (Schegloff, 2007)). Carrie praises them in the end, revoicing (line 31)

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what she has just heard them say -- “So I like that you're making this one, you're like, "no, we
need more data," -- and explicitly connects this moment to what she had taught earlier in the day,
how to make improvements in the plan. After this utterance, Carrie moves to another group, and
the girls get back to writing their decisions in their considerations sheets (see Figure 4.9).
With her students' overlapping talk and occasional misalignment – mostly through
excitement, as I interpret it – throughout this exchange, Carrie remains task-driven. She persists
in asking questions of the group to keep them moving forward with their plan. And her last
statement in lines 31 and 32 operate in much the same ways as Marilyn's from the last exchange.
In short, Carrie and the students use several discourse moves to negotiate a solution to
potential obstacles toward a scientifically sound plan: overlapping talk, alignment, latching,
revoicing, refocusing (e.g., Carrie's task-driven statements). These moves demonstrate how all
the teacher and students alike rely on a shared knowledge about investigation design, and apply
that knowledge in making important decisions about their investigation. Their fluid exchange
about planning a sound field study results in a successful plan in short time.
Here I have attempted to show how the teachers engage students in multiple opportunities
to discuss and learn about the “phraseological” (Bakhtin, 1986) aspects of science language, the
lexical (vocabulary) and the syntactic forms that combine to make scientific discourse. In the
following section, we see how the verbal interactions about science language transfer into
writing.
Writing Science
The written work is also a noteworthy aspect of the LTI. As I mentioned in chapter 4,
teachers engaged students in the practice of communicating information, and I showed several
examples of teachers' attention to students' writing. The written includes – in fact, it cannot be

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separated from – the first two aspects I presented thus far: vocabulary and talking about science.
In the following discussion, I present how teachers guide students in writing using a combination
of lexical, syntactic, and the semantic forms they learn as they proceed in the LTI.
The first example is from another moment in Carrie’s classroom, the day their projects
are to be finished. Here, students are working on their final project presentation boards, cutting
and trimming and gluing and arranging their printed PowerPoint© slides onto the tri-fold display
boards. The school science fair is in three days, and this is their final class period to put on the
finishing touches. Carrie is touching base with each group, some more than once in this 90minute period. In this following exchange, Carrie reads what a small group has printed. Before
they are allowed to glue anything to their boards, she has asked them to get permission (e.g., a
final check) from her.
1

Carrie:

So the verbal summary is just a summary of the numbers.

2

Gina :

No I don't know why I said "verbal summary"

3
4

I kind of might change this.
Carrie:

Yeah, so what's in here is kind of a conclusion, which is why it's over
here.

5

So this title is misle::ading.

6

Gina :

I know I was gonna fix that.

7

Carrie:

And you don't have to put this up top

8
9

'cause you guys already have that here.
Gina :

Mmm-hmm.

10 Carrie:

Okay? So make sure you have conclusion like...

11 Gina :

And the verbal summary can just be here?

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12 Carrie:

Right. So if there is a.. mmm…

13

I guess you will have to reprint it. But yeah, and then…

14 Gina :

You know I can just do this...

15 Carrie:

For what? But it's not a verbal summary is what I'm saying.

16

The verbal summary is...

17 Gina :

Yeah.

18 Carrie:

...doesn't interpret. And YOU interpreted.

19 Gina :

Yeah.

20 Carrie:

So the verbal summary is just like "In the morning this happened this
many times."

21

You know, "in the afternoon..." so the verbal is literally just a summary.

22

You've done. This is conclusion.

23

So make sure that, you print a new one where this isn't on there. But...

24 Gina :

Yeah.

25 Carrie:

... so far, very good!

This exchange begins with Carrie re-teaching (line 1) about how to write a “verbal
summary,” a term Carrie uses to describe the data summary. She points out students that, instead
of writing a verbal summary – which simply includes a written (e.g., verbal) description of the
data, the students have written conclusion, which includes interpretation (lines 15 through 18).
Carrie revoices (O’Connor & Michaels, 1993) what a verbal summary might sound like (lines 20
through 21), with the phrase “in the morning this happened many times.” She encourages them
to go back and reprint this page after revisions.

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This brief discussion also involves ideas about organization in writing. In lines seven
through 11, both Gina and Carrie talk about where the verbal summary should be placed on the
project board. Though Carrie tries to remind Gina that what she has written is not, in fact, a
summary, but a conclusion, they talk about where to place the item on the board.
In the next example, Diana leads students in a similar kind of lesson about writing.
Students prepare PowerPoint slides that will later be attached to their display boards, while
Diana consults with small groups and individuals, helping them to finalize their writing. In this
exchange, Diana comes to a small group, lead by Stefanie, who asks Diana for help. It appears
that she is still looking for help in understanding how to express the DV in her project since she
has a choice about whether to use the term “turbidity” or “total suspended solids.”
1

Diana:

2

((to student who asks for Diana's help from across the room))
What? You're stuck? Show me where you're stuck.

3

Stefanie: DV and constants.

4

Diana:

5

Stefanie: Well, DV is uh...

6

Diana:

7

Stefanie: TSS.

8

Diana:

9

Beautiful.

DV is...

Very good and make sure in the actual report please right,
don't write TSS. What are you gonna write for the real thing?

10 Stefanie: Turbidity?
11 Diana:

You could write turbidity. Or you could write ...

12

later on you could say that turbidity is measured by.. Total.. what's the
"S"?

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13 Stefanie: Solid?
14 Diana:

SusPENded Solids.

15 Stefanie: Solids ((overlapping with Diana))
16 Diana:

Mussels is spelled wrong, honey.

17

Um, you leave this blank, good. DV is the turbidity.

18

And constant is on the board.

Here, Stefanie's project is to determine the effects of the zebra mussels on the amount of
total suspended solids (TSS), or turbidity, in the Hudson River. In this exchange, we hear that
Stefanie has learned the formal science language (Nagy & Townsend, 2012; NRC, 2011) – that
turbidity is expressed in terms of TSS. But, she checks in with Diana about how to express this
idea in writing. As they discuss – or make decisions about – word choice, Diana makes it clear
that it does matter which word Stefanie chooses to use. If she uses the term “turbidity,” she
would have to write in her report that turbidity is measured in terms of total suspended solids
(TSS). The difference matters here. In the end, Diana makes it clear that turbidity is their DV
(line 17). This is not just a discussion about how to write something, it is a discussion about
word choice, about vocabulary, that word choice matters in science (Gee, 2008a; Lemke, 1990;
Nagy & Townsend, 2012; Moje, 2008; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008).
As I showed in earlier examples of vocabulary and in talking about the language of
science, teachers are also concerned with issues of specificity in writing. As in the next few brief
examples, the IDD and the teachers’ ideas about inquiry have helped them to develop a set of
expected patterns in writing about the LTI. Those expected patterns form the rules of a
particular genre (Bakhtin, 1986), that they then work to develop with students.

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Marilyn too explicitly discussed writing science with her students. She explains writing a
procedure, as part of a whole-group lesson during the beginning phase of the LTI:
and then the procedures which are basically a step-by-step procedure, including your
materials, um, written in enough detail to repeat the investigation, and that details seem
consistent with the project over all, so re::ally important when you're writing your
hypothesis is that some someone should be able, to do or replicate your investigation, and
get similar results.
At another moment, Marilyn provided her students with an example of how to be specific
in writing about procedures:
You're gonna tweak this, so don't worry but you want to be more specific so like if you
know how many you're how much you're gonna mix already, and then you can actually
take the data from there okay like we have to mix two cups of our ocean salt material
with five cups of water or whatever start writing it down like that, just don't say “mix the
salt water,” 'cause nobody's gonna know how much.
We saw other examples of specificity in Diana’s concern about the word choice between
“place” and “location.” We heard her as she asked her students to be specific about writing TSS
or “Total Suspended Solids” during planning (see chapter four). We heard Carrie insert ideas
about specificity when she asked a small group of boys studying trebuchets to include
information about potential and kinetic energy in their lab report (see chapter 4). Examples of
teachers’ concerns about specificity ran throughout their conversations with students, as they
pushed students to use the language strategies that were a part of science (Lemke, 1990; Moje,
2008; NRC, 2011; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008).

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Teachers also were concerned with syntactical, or grammatical, conventions in science
writing (Gee, 2008a; Lemke, 1990). In the next exchange, Marilyn is consulting with a group
who asked her if, in writing their procedures, they should use the passive voice and past tense.
(Since I saw this in many students’ work, and in a discussion in Carrie’s classroom, I surmise
that using the passive voice and past tense is a common practice among the science teachers at
the school.) Here, a student initiates the conversation:
1

Gina:

2

I mean ((student name)) had something written down
but they were really incomplete.

3

Callie:

((interjecting)) Are we supposed to change this to past tense?

4

Marilyn:

Pretty much, you can...

5

Gina:

Like if you say "we added"... it's like...

6
7

Um, "10mL of X was added to..."
Marilyn:

((to another student in background)) Okay 12 cups were added to....

Notice that students direct this interchange. In fact, Marilyn speaks twice, and in very
brief segments. Gina and Callie have acquired the language conventions Marilyn has taught –
that scientists write the report of what they did in past tense and using passive voice.
In the next example, Marilyn discusses issues of language in the final writing of the lab
report with another small group. She begins by reading what they have written, then providing
an example.
Alright. “The effect.. o::f.. the different amounts of light.. on algae growth... like was
observed.” You understand what I mean? So take a look at how we've said this. “In the
investigation the effect of the, different amounts of light on algae growth was observed.”
And then you can continue like that.

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As in the last excerpt, Marilyn supports a particular grammatical convention through
modeling – or revoicing how she expects it to sound (O'Connor & Michaels, 1993).
Carrie also tackles issues of genre during a whole group discussion about how to write
the LTI report. In a whole group lesson, her students evaluate an anonymous student’s work,
giving ideas about how to improve it. Carrie writes their ideas on the board. With almost every
example Carrie provided, students noticed that the titles or questions were worded “incorrectly.”
As Carrie wrote their ideas on the board, she stated them aloud. Statements like, “Is this the way
you write a title for a project?” or “that's a question” or “the hypothesis is missing a because
statement” permeate the conversation.
In sum, Diana, Carrie, and Marilyn engaged students in learning and applying scientific
language through focusing on vocabulary, the language of science investigation, and writing.
While teaching vocabulary, teachers began by teaching the vocabulary explicitly, then, they drew
from students’ prior experiences to make meanings of difficult or new vocabulary; they engaged
students in experiences that would generate new and alternative vocabulary; and they helped
students use several other resources (including peers) in learning new vocabulary (Nagy &
Townsend, 2012; Snow, 2008).
Teachers taught the specific language conventions of science prior to expecting students
to use it in an LTI. Teachers modeled the specific phrases that are written on the IDD, providing
– for example – sentence starters for the scientific question, “What is the effect of the IV on the
DV?” while students wrote them in their notes. They taught about how to phrase the hypothesis,
and they talked about how students should express their ideas about the independent and
dependent variables. Teachers and students also applied their knowledge about the science
discourse in authentic conversations about their investigation plans. In these conversations,

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teachers were no longer the directors of the conversations, providing explicit instruction about
the investigations, but active listeners as they offered support to the students as they talked
through their plans. In each teacher’s classroom, students used the vocabulary and syntactic
constructions effectively, so that the focus of the conversation was no longer on the language,
but on the science practices at hand.
Lastly, in teaching their students how to write in science, teachers focused on concerns
over specificity (similar to their efforts with vocabulary). They were also concerned with
particular conventions, particularly in instances where teachers were teaching about how to use
the IDD and new vocabulary. In all of these cases, teachers pressed students toward final drafts,
giving suggestions for revisions, and offering thoughts about what a final draft ought to look
like.
The Micro View of Tool Use
In this chapter, I presented a micro level analysis of language, to illustrate how language
is also a tool for engagement. In the above examples, we saw teachers teaching students about
specific disciplinary vocabulary (the lexical dimension of language), as well as about longer
phrases or conventions or the “grammar” of the LTI. Lastly, we saw examples of teachers
teaching students about (some) aspects of writing in science. But what does all of this work do?
Let’s consider my second research question: What is the role of language in the LTI? In
attempting to answer that question, I begin with Wells’ statement (1994) from above:
What we must attend to… in order to understand the role of talk in the classroom, is not
so much the talk per se, as the contribution it makes to the activities in which students
engage in the “lived-in-world” of the classroom, the actual structures of participation, and

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the function that talk performs – along with other semiotic systems – in mediating the
goals of these activities.
Before I move into the specifics, let’s first consider Wells’ statement and how these ideas
are situated in the context of this particular study. First, I would like to add that in this study –
and as presented in this chapter – writing has a role in developing students’ participation in the
LTI and more broadly, in the discourse of science. In this way, when I say “language” I mean
talk (as Wells discusses here) as well as writing – the “other semiotic systems” – as microinstantiations of the discourse of science. Wells considers tools as “mediating activity.” As a
tool, language is “constituative of the task” at hand, that is, it “is used to mediate the
achievement of the goal of action” (Wells, 1994, p. 15).
What teachers created were entry points into the discourse and practices of science,
guided by the material tools, the shared language, and time. Let’s consider the science practice
“analyzing and interpreting data.” If this is our macro frame, bound by the science reform
document and a part of the Discourse of science education, then, the micro practice – which may,
for our purposes at the moment, be construed as a teaching practice – is illustrated in Diana’s
choices about how to help her students into the classroom discourse (here I mean small-d
discourse) of looking at the data. If looking at the data on a graph about the Hudson River
ecosystem is the activity, then the conversation about that data, the language that Diana leads her
students to use, and the language that they employ as they make meaning of the graph, is a part
of the micro aspect of language. In other words, the graph, to which the teacher and students’
attention is focused, mediates their conversation about it. Diana asks specific questions about the
graph, inviting each student in. Each invitation is a discourse move that involves – indeed
requires – students to use particular pieces of the language.

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Let’s layer the three aspects of language I presented in this chapter: vocabulary, syntactic
(or grammatical) constructions, and writing. In the example of joint meaning making of the
graph about the zebra mussel data, Diana asks the students to use particular vocabulary. She is
not teaching them new vocabulary, they are now asked to use it (as a tool) to communicate some
aspect of their understanding about the graph. Such vocabulary might be: “axis,” “independent”
and “dependent variable,” “temperature,” “zooplankton,” and “zebra mussel.” They use the
words “increase” and “decrease” as operational words that describe the natural world that is
represented in the graph – that the graph is a semiotic tool that represents a phenomenon, the
relationship between temperature and copepod populations in the river as a result of the zebra
mussel population. These are terms she taught in the context of discussing the elements of the
ecosystem (Gee, 2008b, Hakuta & Santos, 2012.)
At the level of the syntactic construction, students engage in talk that closely mirrors the
constructions of the formal discourse of science. They draw relationships between variables, as
in, “the level of the temperature increased because the plankton levels decreased.” Gumperz
(1977) would call this meso- level as important to creating the interpretive frames within which
speakers operate. That is, conversations are made up of collections of words, put together in
strings of phrases (or utterances (Bakhtin, 1986)) which speakers trade in turns as they respond
to one another.
In science classrooms – and in these UA classrooms in particular – the larger purpose is
to develop scientific discourse in order to convey meaning. But there is a lot that happens
between the words themselves and how they combine to address or fit into, or create, the larger
purpose. Teachers and students (interlocutors) interact verbally, through writing and through
talk, according to particular social norms of the context in which they find themselves. Each

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moment of talk between people is constiuent of that context. Here, the context is partly
comprised of the teachers’ UA training, ideologies about how science ought to be taught, as well
as their understandings about their students. The context also includes such things as the
curriculum materials – or material tools, as I discussed in chapter 4 – and the other material
resources that are available, such as computers, cell phones, other adult experts, and science
cultural institutions around the city (Cohen, Raudenbush, & Ball, 2003; Wilson et al., 2012).

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Chapter 6
Warp and Woof:
Intertwined Micro and Macro Contexts
For Diana, Carrie, and Marilyn, textual tools provide a structure for working across the
arc of the long-term investigation. This structure unfolded in three different forms relative to
various factors: the teachers' local teaching contexts (i.e., the school, neighborhood, grade level,
curriculum, and UA connections); the teachers' ideas about science practices, content, student
learning needs; as well as the teachers’ own science inquiry teaching practices (recall chapter
three). We have also seen that the work of the LTI involves activity that occurs in the discursive
– or micro -- spaces through talk (as shown in chapter five).
My goal here has been to portray both an overarching macro structure -- the curriculum
materials (and other organizational structures) – as one context in which teachers and students
interact and the micro structures, or the moment-to-moment interactions, that produce another
kind of context. Following Erickson and Shultz (1981), here I consider context as "constituted
by what people are doing and were and when they are doing it" (p. 148). Thus, the macro and
the micro constitute different, related contexts.
In this chapter, I argue that the micro and macro contexts come together across the arc of
the LTI, illustrating this interdependence with two cases of teacher practice. Throughout, I draw
upon the theoretical concepts of intertextuality and heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981) to describe the
complex, dynamic nature of teaching the LTI with middle school students in linguistically
diverse classrooms.

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A Bakhtinian Conception of Learning the Discourse and Practices of Science
In chapter four, I described how Diana, Carrie, and Marilyn used various textual tools –
the IDD, the considerations sheet, the DSET, the fact boxes, etc. – to engage students in the LTI.
Diana used several different Do Now tools to explicitly teach about the biotic and abiotic
elements of the Hudson River ecosystem. Carrie helped students plan the details of their LTIs
using the considerations sheets. And using fact boxes sheets helped Marilyn discuss with her
students what content knowledge they were going to use to support their conclusions.
Teachers used the tools across the various science practices, particularly in designing
their investigations, as well as in gathering, organizing, assessing, and presenting scientific
information (NRC, 2012). For example, Diana used the IDD and her Do Now handouts to help
students to design their investigations. Recall that the IDD included space for students to write
their title, the research question, a hypothesis, and to record their independent, dependent, and
constant variables (see Figure 3.2). I conceptualize the LTI as having a particular arc, or
storyline, that involves the interrelationships between the textual tools, science practices, and
their use over time (see Figure 6.1). The diagonal arrow represents time, and the various texts
that teachers used throughout the LTI are included on the line, in general order of appearance.
Note that this is a collective list of the tools Diana, Carrie, and Marilyn used. Each
teacher used the IDD, the DSET, and rubrics, but not all used the other tools. For example, the
Do Now is listed first because teachers used it daily, and was most often the first tool teachers
used in each lesson, creating the first learning activity in which students became engaged in any
particular day. As we saw in chapter four, Carrie created the considerations sheet to help
students make critical decisions in their planning process, which is why it is placed somewhat

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Figure 6.1. The Macro Context of the LTI

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near the middle of the time line, because planning happened roughly near the middle of the LTI.
And Marilyn used the fact boxes sheets (as did Carrie) at about the mid-point of her LTI to help
students collect important content information about their chosen variable.
Roughly, reading the map from left to right, all of the teachers used some version or
referred to some element of the IDD every day -- along with other texts -- for several different
reasons. One primary reason was to identify and show the relationships among variables (NRC,
2007). They next introduced the IDD, and then after students chose the variables they would
study, they organized information about their procedures – using something like the
considerations sheet – and collected information about those variables in fact boxes, for example,
and then all used the DSET to organize their arguments. Teachers used several different rubrics
to evaluate the work through peer review and in advance of the final presentation of the LTI.
Finally, the curricular tools – the AMNH videos and readings, and the SEPUP, FOSS, and PBIS
materials – are subsumed under general curricular texts because the teachers used these texts to
build background knowledge throughout the process.
Along the top of the graphic is a list of the specific science practices that I observed
teachers teaching most often during the LTI. These practices are placed on the map in roughly
the order in which teachers employed them. However, these practices do not exist in a linear
relationship as they appear to be represented here; they are more iterative, informing each other
at different points along the LTI’s arc. In other words, scientists do not gather information after
they have designed the investigation. Rather, they gather background information throughout the
process (NRC, 2007; 2011) to support claims, refine ideas, and redesign their inquiries. Because
inquiry-based science teaching is, in part, intended to engage students in practices that closely
mirror those of professional scientists, the ways that teachers help students to use background

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information to support their work matters (NRC, 2012). That is, students should have
opportunities to use their content knowledge and to conduct research for background information
in order to design investigations, support claims about data, and ask new questions. In this light,
the graphics I offer here are limited in their ability to capture the iterative and dynamic nature of
the work of science.
Situated within this macro contexts are micro contexts (see Figure 6.2). In this figure,
the line drawn between macro and micro tools denotes the connection across the diagonal line
representing time. Below the line are the major categories of talk as we saw in chapter five:
vocabulary, grammar conventions, and writing. These are the tools that teachers use to create
micro contexts. At the bottom of the graphic are the theoretical concepts that help to explain the
nature of the micro contexts: heteroglossia (which involves centrifugal and centripetal language
forces) (Bakhtin, 1981), and intertextuality. The double-sided arrow between macro and mico
represents the interconnection between the two, as I will argue are in dialogic relationship.
These concepts of macro and micro contexts draw upon Bakhtin's (1981) concepts of
heteroglossia and intertextuality which have been used by many education scholars (Gee, 2008a;
Moje, 2008; Rosebery, Ogonowski, DiShino, & Warren, 2010; Vareles, Pappas & Rife, 2006).
As we saw in previous chapters, teachers draw upon the several texts and experiences they have
provided for their students to develop their LTI plans. And their engagement in practices is
negotiated and developed within several different discussion formats (e.g., small group, whole
group, etc.).
I start with the claim that teaching the LTI is inherently intertextual: teachers use visual,
written, and spoken texts (e.g., video) to develop content knowledge, as seen in the top half of
the graphic.

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Figure 6.2. Macro and Micro Contexts of the LTI
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Gee and Green (1993) relate,
This dynamic and constructed view of intertextuality suggests that members and analysts
alike must consider how members, through their interactions, propose, acknowledge,
recognize, and interactionally construct a socially significant past, current, and future
texts and related actions. (p. 132)
In other words, as students and teachers interact around science content, they
simultaneously draw upon past texts and construct future texts that are leveraged for engaging in
science practices throughout the LTI. They use and construct these texts to identify variables
and how to measure them, to decide on data collection procedures, to write scientifically sound
hypotheses, and to support scientific arguments (NRC, 2012).
Teaching the LTI also involves multiple instantiations of talk as represented at the micro
level. Teachers and students both experience and take advantage of the tension between
informal and formal registers and ways of being in classroom language communities (Brown &
Spang, 2008; Gee, 2008a, 2008b). Bakhtin (1981) explains this tension as a central element of
heteroglossia: “Every utterance participates in the ‘unitary language’ (in its centripetal forces and
tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal,
stratifying forces)” (p. 272). That is, at the same time that the centripetal forces of language pull
our language forms toward the center (or unifying), or more formal forms (determined by the
social context), the centrifugal forces also pull our language outward toward forms that are less
likely to be recognized by formal codes of the particular speech community. This push-pull
creates the stratification of language forms, or heteroglossia, that are always in tension.
Bakhtin argues that all language is populated with other forms and processes, that people
use such forms to generate new language forms that constitute the context within which they are

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created. In other words, each new speech context is constructed by and for those who participate
in the context. In this analysis, the contexts involve students and their teachers, who draw upon
previous experiences and texts and meanings in order to develop new plans for investigating
phenomena.
As is represented in Figure 6.2, this work is inter(con)textual as well (Gee & Green,
1998). That is, multiple contexts -- here the macro and the micro -- interact to form new contexts
for meaning making. Gee and Green (1998) discuss one particular approach to discourse
analysis that involves the multiple contexts of meaning making in social interaction. Using an
example of a year-long ethnographic study of 6th graders in science (Florian, 1993), Green and
Gee described how students' shared experiences generated ideas and specific phrases that held
historical significance for them, shaped their work in whatever current activity they were
engaged in, and "signaled future use of current texts and practices" (p. 133). These moments
become historically important and socially relevant to these students as they constructed
"cultural models that they now drew upon to guide their participation " (p. 133).
Two Cases
Here I present two cases to illustrate the dynamic and dialogic relationship between the
macro and micro. One case involves Diana helping her students to understand the relationships
between variables in the zebra mussel investigation; the other concerns how Carrie helps her
students to decide on the data they will collect and how to get the best data.
I chose these two examples as cases because they represent two different kinds of
conversations, or contexts (Erickson & Shultz, 1981), that engaged the same science practice:
“planning and conducting investigations.” Planning and conducting investigations (NRC, 2012)

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involves the careful consideration of variables and their relationships. According to the NRC
Framework for K-12 Science Education (2011),
Planning and designing such investigations require the ability to design experimental or
observational inquiries that are appropriate to answering the question being asked or
testing a hypothesis that has been formed. This process begins by identifying the relevant
variables and considering how they might be observed, measured, and controlled
(constrained by the experimental design to take particular values). (p. 59)
We will see in the micro-analysis of each teacher how -- in interaction with her students –
the class comes to use a “unitary language” to generate science knowledge, but inside of that
17

language, they draw upon more informal talk forms as well.

We will also see how the teachers

and their students draw upon other contexts for learning - a visit to a zoo, a previous discussion
about a video case study, previous lessons in which they discuss scientific terminology - for
engendering new roles and responsibilities as they engage in the LTI.
Unpacking Turbidity: Understanding Variables
I begin with a discussion of a stretch of classroom talk about a particular variable and
how it was supported through the Diana’s use of the Do Now handout, a textual tool that
structures the macro context. I will then show how other parts of the same conversation
supported a student, Marlyse, as she developed the hypothesis for her LTI. Recall that in
Diana’s classroom, students produced secondary research investigations, which involves using

17

I use the terms "informal" and "formal" in terms of register and related to the social context
(Gee, 2008a). In science classrooms, the formal register of science - using highly technical, tier
three terminology, for example - becomes the goal. But teachers often draw upon other forms of
language in order to generate science knowledge at the same time that students are learning and
using their emergent science language (Brown & Spang, 2008; Gee, 2008a, Gee, 2008b). I do
not use the terms "informal" and "formal" in any evaluative sense, that one form is more
desirable than another.
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data collected by others to answer questions about phenomena. Diana situated the work first
through the development of background knowledge about the specific factors that the Carey
Institute scientists measured, as well as the data collection process (e.g., which tools are used to
gather information on the river and decisions that ecologists make about data collection – when,
where, how much, etc.). In so doing, Diana was presuming that, in order to ask questions using a
large dataset, students first need to understand the variables and how data are collected answered.
Part of Diana’s approach, then, was to provide her students with the background knowledge they
would need to understand the variables under study.
Diana began with explicit instruction of freshwater ecosystems and of the specific case of
the zebra mussel's impact on the Hudson River. Diana also took students on a field trip to the
river so that they could experience collecting some of the same data the Carey scientists had,
using the same kinds of scientific tools (a plankton net, for example). She blended students’
authentic experiences (e.g., the field trip) with classroom discussions about the case study videos
and the accompanying texts. She also used several different textual tools – the IDD, the DSET,
and several Do Now handouts as well as curriculum materials, as we saw in chapters four and
five – to provide a structure for these conversations. All of these texts, videos, experiences, and
tools operated as macro contexts that support student knowledge of variables and how they
interact (Erickson & Shultz, 1981).
Diana taught about these relationships about halfway through the SR project. At the
beginning of class one day, Diana led a whole class discussion concerning the question, “How do
zebra mussels affect the biotic and abiotic factors in the Hudson River?” Students discussed the
question, completed a chart about the environmental factors (e.g., phytoplankton, zooplankton,
dissolved oxygen), and discussed a second question: “What happens to other organisms in the

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river that eat plankton?” Diana then asked them a third question: “What happened to the
turbidity of the water?”
Before reading what they said, let’s consider the task. Figure 6.3 provides just one page
of a three-page Do Now handout that Diana used to conduct one of many conversations about
variables her students will later explore in their LTIs. In Diana’s classroom, the “AIM” is
written at the top of the handout, as well as written on the chalkboard at the front of the room.
The AIM remains the same for several lessons, as it represents the project’s larger goals, or helps
to situate the day’s lesson. The Do Now section asks students to respond in writing about some
aspect of material that they have read in anticipation of the day’s classroom discussion. Here,
the question is, “The scientists were predicting that the zebra mussels would have a huge impact
on the ecosystem. What evidence are they looking for to support this hypothesis?” Notice that
this question asks students to refer back to the video and texts they had viewed and read the day
before about the Carey Institute study of the Hudson River. In this way, this tool automatically
involves an intertextual relationship across activities in the LTI. In referring to these other texts,
Diana explicitly asks students to locate the evidence, and link it to their hypothesis.
Completing this part of the handout requires students to use prior information both about
the zebra mussel case, and of the terms, “evidence” and “hypothesis.” Notice too that Diana uses
the word “predicted” in the first line to denote hypothesis. Again, in terms of scientific
vocabulary, as we saw in chapter five, students would have to know to connect these two terms
as existing on different registers, but meaning the same thing (Gee, 2008a, 2008b).
Diana does not offer direct instruction about these terms. Rather, she uses the terms in
their different registers in situ. She naturally uses "predicted" and "hypothesis" interchangeably

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without explanation, which illustrates the interplay between the more centralizing and decentralizing forces of language, or heteroglossia, at work.
The chart also asks students to record changes in three variables (e.g., phytoplankton,
zooplankton, and DO) in relationship to the information from reading passage three, which links
to the third (of four) videos. This second question asks students to make connections between
the tertiary impact of other organisms as a result of the change in plankton numbers – asking
them to make a causal link (NRC, 2007). The last question on this page, which asks about how
the turbidity of the water changed as (the presumed) result of the zebra mussel populations, is the
focus of the discussion I present next.
The excerpt begins with a question Diana asks her students to respond to in class
discussion, and in writing. Her first utterance in line one involves point out how to use the
readings to answer the question.
1

Diana:

2
3

The reading. We highlighted together.
So Marlyse why might turbidity change?

Marlyse: The turbidity might change because we know that zebra mussels like to eat
a lot of plankton.

4

Diana:

5
6

Thank you!
Because we know, the zebra mussels eat... plankton=

Marlyse: =a lot of plankton.

7

And they eat the plankton and…

8

like there would be not much left in the water and then..

9

Diana:

So what happens to the cl- how clear the water is?

10 Marlyse: It would become like more clear.

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11 Diana:

It would become more clear.

12

Do you guys get THAT connection?

13 Students: Yeah.
14 Diana:

That's how turbidity might change.

In this exchange, Diana involves Marlyse in explaining what she knows for the benefit of
the whole class. When Marlyse answers correctly, Diana repeats her answer (line 3). In line 4,
Marlyse takes back her turn, not waiting for Diana’s cue, and continues her explanation, latching
onto Diana’s response (Erickson, 2006; Schegloff, 2007; Tannen, 2007). Latching –when a
speaker interrupts another to continue a (presumed shared) thought – demonstrates engagement
between speakers (Tannen, 2007). Marlyse continues her own thought, which connects to
Diana's, “a LOT of plankton,” placing emphasis on Diana’s phrase “the zebra mussels eat...
plankton.” The hesitation between the words “eat” and “plankton” in Diana’s turn is because she
is writing ideas on the board as she speaks, her pause follows her writing pace, and is not a hedge
(Schegloff, 2007).
Diana asks the next logical question, “So what happens to the cl- how clear the water is?”
(line 5). Diana stops mid-sentence to shift her word choice from “clarity” to “how clear the
water is.” She does not use the nominalized form, “clarity,” in favor of a phrase that describes
the term, “how clear the water is" (Latour & Woolgar, 1986). This move demonstrates a form of
heteroglossia, in that Diana chooses a less formal way to express "clarity," which, in its
nominalized form, is part of the most formal science register (Latour & Woolgar). She moves
between the centrifugal and centripetal forces of her own language choice, in the split-second
decision to move toward the informal expression. Marlyse answers, “It would become like more

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Figure 6.3. Diana’s Do Now Tool

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clear,” which also uses the more informal register. Diana repeats her answer using a similarly
informal register, showing alignment with (support for) Marlyse's thought (Schegloff, 2007).
Diana reinforces Marlyse’s answer by saying, “Thank you!" and repeating, "Because we
know, the zebra mussels eat... plankton” (line 3). The repetition and affirmation of Marlyse’s
response “indexes” a correct answer (Johnstone, 2008; Mehan, 1979). Indexicality is a
“linguistic form or social action that, in addition to or instead of contributing to the denotational
or “literal” meaning, points to and sometimes helps establish “social” meaning” (Johnstone,
2008, p. 132). Indexicals can both point to previous social meaning, or create new social
meaning. In this moment, Diana and Marlyse jointly establish -- they index -- the connections
between variables.
After having established one connection, Diana proceeds to introduce the next question:
“So what happens to the cl- how clear the water is?” (line 5). Finally, in line 7, Diana repeats
Marlyse’s answer again with, “it would become more clear. Do you guys get THAT
connection?” which serves to metacognitively link the concepts “phytoplankton” and “clarity”
(NRC, 2007). Again by making these connections, Diana is providing both explicit and implicit
(or modeled) explanations of the language students are using. She connects words to texts and
experiences. She works intertextually, and the language she uses to do so leverages both
students' and her own heterogeneous forms for meaning-making (Rosebery, Ogonowski,
DiShino, & Warren, 2010).
Let's now consider what happens as Marlyse then transfers this conversation into her
written response on the Do Now form, which students are asked to write during class time. If we
piece together all of Marlyse’s turns in talk (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974) from the

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transcript, we can see her spoken ideas closely mirroring her written response. Recall her spoken
response:
The turbidity might change because we know that zebra mussels like to eat a lot of
plankton… a lot of plankton. And they eat the plankton and... like there would be not
much left in the water and then… It would become like more clear.
Her written response was: “The turbidity went down which means the water was more clear
because of phytoplankton being eaten by zebra mussels.”
In the first instance, we see Marlyse's reasoning about how the water becomes clearer:
“there would not be much left in the water." And in her written response, she explains “the
turbidity went down,” which means that “the water was more clear.” In other words, she
connects the idea about turbidity to water clarity, and is able to provide a reasoned rationale as to
why: “because of the phytoplankton being eaten by zebra mussels.” In both oral and written
responses, she makes a direct causal link between turbidity and the zebra mussels (NRC, 2007).
Thus, Marlyse is working intertextually.
The conversation continues below as Diana moves to the next conceptual step. After
recognizing that turbidity is determined by the number of plankton in the water, Diana shifts to
thinking about the link between plankton and chlorophyll. That is, the amount of chlorophyll is
the measure of the amount of phytoplankton in the water, and thus is another way to express
turbidity.
1

Diana:

2

I agree with her. Faith.
What is chlorophyll? Why do I care about chlorophyll?

3

Student:

[boy student starts to answer] Is it...

4

Diana:

Hold on I wanna see if Faith knows it.

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5

Faith:

Hmm...

6

Diana:

Chlorophyll's important.

7

Why is it important?

8

Especially in this ecosystem...

9

Faith:

10 Diana:

I don't know.
Cameron?

11 Cameron: The type of chlorophyll?
12 Diana:

Chlorophyll is not a TYPE of phytoplankton,

13

but you're SO:: close. Mario?

14 Mario:

It's chemical that umm...

15 Diana:

Thank you.

16 Mario:

... has to do with photosynthesis.

17 Diana:

Thank you.

18

((to Faith)) Did you hear what Mario said? What is it?

19 Faith:

((she answers faintly.)) It has to do with photosynthesis.

Here, Diana guides her students to the next step in the logic of these relationships. In order for
students to know how the turbidity changed in terms of the phytoplankton numbers, they would
have to know that phytoplankton is measured by the amount of chlorophyll found in the water.
Notice that Diana intuits that students (here it is Faith) do not fully understand what chlorophyll
is, and so turns to Mario who may be able to explain it. She does not elect to explain it herself,
leaving that privilege to the students. Her role, at this point, is to keep the direction of the

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Figure 6.4. Marlyse’s Response to the Do Now

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conversation moving forward. Like a conductor, she orchestrates how the logical connections
are made, allowing the students to provide the content. She also keeps Faith involved in the
conversation by coming back to her at the end, encouraging her to try her answer now, so that
she can verbalize what she now knows from listening to her classmate. This is another way in
which Diana engages students in the LTI, keeping them engaged in the micro-contexts.
So far, we have seen how Diana lead her students in a discussion about the variables
involved in the secondary research project about the zebra mussels’ impact on the Hudson River
ecosystem. Marlyse's spoken response connected to her written response on the Do Now
handout. In both her spoken and written response, she accurately described that the plankton
numbers, as measured by chlorophyll, would decrease because zebra mussels eat phytoplankton.
In her written response, she linked this to the idea of clarity, thus completing the two causal
relationships that are crucial to exploring the effects of the zebra mussels (the independent
variable) on the river’s turbidity (Marlyse’s chosen dependent variable): the relationship
between zebra mussels and phytoplankton, and the relationship between phytoplankton (as
measured by chlorophyll) and turbidity (NRC, 2007).
Recall that the micro tools of language involved teachers’ talk about vocabulary,
grammatical conventions and writing (chapter 5). In Marlyse’s hypothesis (see Figure 6.4), we
have an artifact of all three aspects of language. Marlyse demonstrates her knowledge of the
vocabulary: “phytoplankton,” “chlorophyll,” and “photosynthesis.” She also is able – even with
her teaching tool’s minimal scaffolding – to write a hypothesis using the appropriate language
construction: “If X, then Y, because we know that...”
Marlyse’s hypothesis reads:

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If the amount of zebra mussels increase then I think that the chlorophyll will decrease
because we know that the chlorophyll in the phytoplankton is the chemical that makes the
phytoplankton be able to do photosynthesis. And if the zebra mussels eat the
phytoplankton, they will die and not be able to do photosynthesis, so the chlorophyll will
decrease.
Here Marlyse integrates elements of the whole class discussion with the readings. She
constructs links between the variables in a scientifically accurate way: a decrease in the
phytoplankton will cause a decrease in the chlorophyll numbers. She also makes revisions as she
writes, as indicated by her scribbles.
This case illustrates how a particular micro context -- understanding variables -- engages
several different strategies and roles for involving students in the practice (NRC, 2012). Diana
orchestrated the talk about the variables her students will study in their LTI (e.g., turbidity),
employing several discursive tools. She did not take the lead role in explaining concepts: rather,
she provided them opportunities to do so. She indexed when students were providing sound
explanations, and asked new questions to redirect their thinking when necessary. She asked
questions to also direct the logic of the relationships -- typically a causal relationship -- and
pressed students to consider each others' ideas (e.g., "Did you hear what he just said?"). We also
saw an example of how one student, Marlyse, leveraged the conversations into her written
responses on the Do Now form and in her hypothesis.
Now I turn to another case, an example of Carrie's approach to engage a small group of
students in planning for their LTI. In this case, students have learned about their variables, and
now are grappling with how to write a procedure that will collect the data they need. Additional

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Figure 6.5. Marlyse’s Hypothesis

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examples of inter(con)textual work follow, as students move back and forth between what they
have learned and what they have yet to know to make important methodological decisions.
“Because You Get More Productive Data”: Crafting a Plan for Data Collection
In this case, Carrie is working with her students to refine their plans for data collection.
In chapter three, I introduced how Carrie drew upon long-term projects conducted earlier in the
school year in order to help small groups of students develop their LTIs. I showed how they
used several tools to support their learning and to organize information about the variables they
were studying. In Carrie's classroom, students use considerations sheets to develop their ideas
about how to collect data aligned to their investigation question.
In this lesson, Carrie is working with a small group as they plan their field study of
gorilla behavior using the considerations sheets. In this excerpt, they discuss the possible
revisions to the first parts of their lab reports, which includes the hypothesis statement.
1

Maddy:

2

So over here,
do I have to write the behaviors in my hypothesis....

3

Carrie:

No you can describe it here ((referring to a section in the lab report)).

4

Maddy:

Oh, I have to move my hypothesis...

5

Carrie:

So you can work on finding more background info

6

on what behaviors gorillas exhibit.

7

So is there you know feeding behavior.

8

Are there grooming behaviors, social, like specific behaviors that you guys
could possibly see when you go to the zoo.

9
10

Maddy:

So do I need to add most of my hypothesis.. ((unclear))
I mean I do I know I do, but I mean like specific...

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11 Carrie:

So you guys ((reading, unclear))

12

So why do you think being a close, ancestor genetically,

13

that's what you're getting at here right?

14

Why do you think being a close ancestor genetically, would make them,
more likely to be active… or....

15 Maddy:

So like humans are most interactive.. ((unclear)) So... ((unclear))

16 Carrie:

And that's what you need. So...

17 Maddy:

Should I change my hypothesis?

18 Carrie:

Yes.

19

You want to have some science supporting what you're thinking. Okay?

This brief excerpt shows Carrie working with a small group to decide on how to write
their hypothesis. Their research topic is “The Effect of Time of Day on Gorilla Social
Behavior,” and the task is to define the behaviors they are choosing to study. One student begins
by asking about whether to describe the behaviors in their hypothesis. While Carrie says that
they can describe those behaviors somewhere else in their report, she does encourage them to
become very clear about what specific behaviors they want to study (line 4). She asks a key
question in line 6, “Why do you think being a close ancestor genetically would make them more
likely to be active…” This is in response to the group’s earlier assumption that they could
predict the gorilla behavior based on what we know about humans since humans and gorillas are
close genetically (see chapter 5).
Carrie supports their logic with “And that’s what you need…” (line 8) in response to her
student providing a logical response, that “most humans are interactive…[during a particular
time of day].” This is an alignment move (Schegloff, 2007), which indexes that Carrie is

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supporting students’ reasoning (NRC, 2012) about the comparison between human and gorilla
behavior. But she also presses them (Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2013) to then “support
what you’re thinking” (line 10). All of these communicative behaviors – alignment, pressing,
questioning – are moves that Carrie makes in the service of helping her students to write this part
of their lab reports for their LTI.
However, we could also read this exchange as both Carrie and her students talking past
one another, as opposed to interacting in joint negotiation (Rosebery, Ogonowski, DiShino, &
Warren, 2010). If we look closely at Carrie’s turns, we see that she focuses on the content
knowledge students need to add to their hypothesis. Putting all of Carrie's turns together shows
the following.
1

No you can describe it here ((referring to a section in the lab report)).

2

So you can work on finding more background info on what behaviors gorillas exhibit.
So is there you know feeding behavior. Are there grooming behaviors, social, like
specific behaviors that you guys could possibly see when you go to the zoo.

3

So you guys ((reading, unclear)) So why do you think being a close, ancestor
genetically, that's what you're getting at here right? Why do you think being a close
ancestor genetically, would make them, more likely to be active.. or....

4

And that's what you need. So...

5

Yes. You want to have some science supporting what you're thinking. Okay?

Carrie's responses are almost all focused on pressing students to go back to the
background knowledge to support their thinking, while Maddy, as the unofficial spokesperson
for her group in this particular exchange has something else in mind. She says,
1

So over here, do I have to write the behaviors in my hypothesis....

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2

Oh, I have to move my hypothesis...

3

So do I need to add most of my hypothesis.. ((unclear)) I mean I do I know I do, but I
mean like specific...

4

So like humans are most interactive... ((unclear)) So... ((unclear))

5

Should I change my hypothesis?

Notice that Maddy speaks in terms of smaller, surface level changes she needs to make to
her writing. She opens with a concern about writing about the behaviors, but after Carrie says
that she can describe the behaviors someplace else in her report, Maddy continues to think in
terms of the surface features of the text. Maddy’s fourth turn, “So like humans are most
interactive… so….” is in response to Carrie’s direct question about why being a close ancestor
genetically would be enough support for to reason that gorilla activity is similar to humans and
that we can describe them in the same way.
Carrie’s incisive interactions with her students keeps science content in the foreground of
the interactional and scientific, discursive work in this exchange. This is an example of a
teacher’s improvisational work that occurs in small groups during inquiry-based science. In
Carrie’s example, we can see one possible example of the teacher’s role in the social space of the
science classroom, of her role in the development of content knowledge that draws from the texts
and contexts within which she works, and how in these moment-to-moment talk moves are also
central in helping students acquire knowledge.
I continue this idea in the following exchange, which is a continuation of the
conversation from above. The small group has moved on to discussing specific behaviors they
will look for in their data collection. The students have included aggression among their list of
dependent variables they will attempt to count. Carrie presses them to define the behaviors that

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constitute gorilla aggression. She impresses upon them that background research is important to
making major decisions about investigation design (NRC, 2012), allowing the students to decide
for themselves if it is scientifically reasonable to attempt to describe aggression in zoo animals.
The transcript picks up from the previous example, with Carrie checking in on what the group
means by gorilla aggression, and ensuring that they can support their definition with research.
1

Carrie:

On gorilla aggression?

2

Now do you guys have any research that shows that they're aggressive?

3

In... captivity? In their habitat?

4

Natalie:

Uhh...

5

Maddy:

It actually said that they don't …((very unclear, a lot of background noise
in the classroom is overlapping the soft voices of the students here)).

6

Carrie:

And did you guys write… did you guys write the experts at the at the
Bronx Zoo?

7

Allison:

Yeah we wrote an email.

8

Maddy:

But she didn't really say anything she said the teacher should…

9

'cause we emailed them our background research

10

and she said the teacher should tell you something or something like that.

11 Carrie:

Is the email in here?

12 Maddy:

No, it's on the computer.

13 Carrie:

Because my fear…

14

if they know if they wrote you, that they train them NOT to be
aggressive...

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The primary element of this exchange is the way that Carrie presses the students to be
accountable for and precise about the information that they gather (NRC, 2012). She
accomplishes this (line 9) by asking questions, and clarifying her own thinking, or metacognition
(Cazden, 2001). Carrie presses them, in line one, to look for information about how gorillas
behave in captivity, to distinguish the possible behaviors from gorillas studied in the wild. She
asks if they used their resources: the scientist/UA partner at the Bronx Zoo where they will do
their data collection. Carrie clarifies, metacognitively, why she is asking for this information:
that if the zoo trains aggression out of the gorillas, then the students would not be able to explore
this behavior, which would impact their investigation design. With that, Carrie indexes the
importance of precision and logical thinking in information gathering to the design process
(NRC, 2012).
Carrie and her students continue the conversation, beginning with Carrie, who is reading
from an email the group received from Andrea. After reading the email, the UA partner at the
zoo, she reports that it is legitimate to investigate aggressive behaviors in gorillas. It turns out
that Andrea provides them some additional resources, again, further indexing the importance of
background research to the design process (e.g., intertextuality).
15 Carrie:

Well, Andrea is saying that, you can do it.

16

So maybe even though they've trained them not to be,

17

maybe sometimes they still do (get aggressive).

18

And she was going to give you some sites to go to to find information.
Because in your question you ask about the background research.

19

So she's saying you can check those sites out.

20

So when you guys, who observed the gorillas before?

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21 Allison:

I did.

22 Carrie:

Okay. Did you see any aggressive behaviors?

23 Allison:

A little.

24 Maddy:

Yeah.

25 Carrie:

Okay. And how do you… how do you KNOW that they are aggressive
behaviors?

26 Allison:

In general.. sometimes.. a gorilla will come over and hit another gorilla.
And it...

27 Carrie:

So, what I want you guys to be very clear on are the behaviors.

28

What's the difference between play, and aggression...

29 Allison:

No, they wanted them to move. They wanted them to move.

30 Carrie:

So. I want you guys to be clear in your background research,

31

make sure you know, you know, clearly what gorillas do when they're
playing

32

when they're socializing

33

when they're grooming when they're, being aggressive.

34

What are the signs that they are being aggressive

35

so when you were doing your observations when you were at the zoo.

36

You know exactly which ones are aggression

37

and which ones fall into the other category.

Carrie encourages the students to get more background information, which will help them
to decide the categories of behavior for their data collection (line 19). In the middle segment of
this excerpt (lines 10 through 17), Carrie asks students to be accountable for their knowledge

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once again, asking how their previous experience (the macro context) influences their choice for
exploring aggression. The students report that they did, in fact, see what they would define as
aggressive behaviors in the form of hitting. The students interpret hitting, presumably according
to the context in which they saw the behavior, as “wanting them to move.” Carrie presses back
again in line 19, by asking the students to distinguish between playing, socializing, grooming,
and aggression. Again, this move indexes the importance of what recent science reform states is
precision of thought in investigation design (NRC, 2012). Carrie has engaged the students in
inter(con)textual work as well, as she leverages their previous experience to help inform the
decisions they must now make as they refine their investigation design.
A few moments later, Carrie returns to this group, which has now begun to make
decisions about how to collect the data. Here, they consider the time of day, the independent
variable, and how best to design their collection procedures accordingly. Consider how Carrie
involves her students in making decisions, and in using different macro contexts (previous
experiences and texts) within this micro context (e.g., talk) to further develop their investigation
design. Now they have decided on the behaviors they will study, they work to make sound
decisions about how to collect data.
1

Carrie:

Alright checking back in, any questions?

2

Maddy:

For this would it be one if we just went once?

3

Carrie:

((reading)) "The effect of time of day on gorilla social behavior."

4

Maddy:

So if we do it twice=

5

Carrie:

=So if you go once, I would make sure=

6

Maddy:

=So twice per IV=

7

Carrie:

=that you do it for a longer time, um=

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8

Allison:

((student in background)) =So, I would say twice=

9

Carrie:

=in the morning and the afternoon.

10 Maddy:

So, we go twice and we then just do it at 12, 1:30, 3.

11 Allison:

About two times on each day.

12 Maddy:

And then we average out the data.

13 Carrie:

Sounds good. Now, who did gorillas before?

14 Allison:

Me.

15 Carrie:

And what was your IV before?

16 Allison:

It was um.. like, um...

17 Natalie:

((in background))... grooming behavior.

18 Maddy:

Actually it was... time of day=

19 Carrie:

=was it time of day?=

20 Maddy:

=time of day on gorilla grooming behavior=

21 Carrie:

=Because you might be able to bring in some of the data from before.

22 Natalie:

((unclear))

23 Carrie:

Good. Now are these the same times as you used before?

24 Allison:

No. We only did it twice and=

25 Natalie:

=and we did it at 11:30 and at 2=

26 Maddy:

((in background)) What time? 11:30 and=

27 Allison:

=I think it should be::..

28

3 times because you get more productive data.

29 Carrie:

So...

30 Maddy:

So we have more to work with.

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31 Carrie:

Excellent. Okay.

32

So I like that you're making this one, you're like, "no, we need more data,"

33

which are some of those improvements that we talked about.

34

So good. No questions? We're all set?

35

Make sure you're talking and everyone's on the same page.

This conversation developed during a lesson in which students were asked to complete a
considerations sheet. Students talk about their projects while filling in the sheets. They have
also begun to collect information on their fact boxes form. Again, this work is intertextual, as
the students use information they collected from before to make important choices about what
new texts will come from their planning session, namely their written procedure.
Specifically, this exchange centers around students’ concerns about how many times they
ought to collect their data in order to get the “best” data, to measure the effect of the IV (time of
day) on the DV (gorilla social behavior). Carrie had begun the lesson with students in a
discussion about how to make improvements on the investigations they did earlier in the school
year. Since their LTIs drew upon these earlier experiences, Carrie is able to refer the students to
what they learned the first time around to make decisions about their new projects. This
becomes another macro context from which students draw through an inter(con)textual
reference. We see her strategy at work in the last half of this excerpt, in lines 13 through 26.
Carrie asks the students to consider how many times they collected data in relationship to their
new plan. With this question in mind, students decide that making one additional observation
would improve their data. Maddysays, “I think it should be 3 times because you get more
productive data… we have more to work with” (lines 27 through 29). Deciding on a data
collection plan is part of the “planning and carrying out investigations” practice described in the

186

NGSS (Achieve, Inc., 2013) and the NRC (2012). And Carrie engaged these students in talk
about why it is important to think carefully about how to get the best data given the resources
that they have available to them (i.e., access to a zoo, background knowledge about gorilla social
behavior, and strategies for organizing information such as Fact Boxes, the IDD, and the
considerations sheets). She uses previous contexts in light of what the written text asked of them
(Driver et al., 1994).
Carrie’s interactional strategies are of note here as well. She gives most of the
conversational floor to her students, interjecting her ideas in joint negotiation of their plan along
the way (Erickson, 2006; Hymes, 1983; Rosebery, Ogonowski, DiShino, & Warren, 2010). She
gives one suggestion (lines 7 and 9) about taking a longer time to observe if they were to observe
once instead of more often. With this, she offers another option for observing: duration versus
number of observations. In the end, the students chose more observations over duration. They
have full ownership of this choice, informed by Carrie’s questions, and their previous
experience.
If we look now to their considerations sheets, we can see this dialogue in action in
writing. The students filled in the sheet during the conversation, and Carrie’s written responses
reflect the ideas about data collection we discussed here (Figure 6.6).
Notice that much of this considerations sheet is left blank and that the most detailed
response is under the prompt, “types of behaviors.” As Carrie and this group discussed their
project ideas, they focused largely on finding ways to define the behaviors they were wanting to
observe. They also made choices about how many trials they were going to include in their
procedure. The ideas the group brought to the discussion with Carrie align neatly with those
represented on the considerations sheet.

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Figure 6.6. Animal Behavior Considerations Sheet by Maddy, Allison, and Natalie

188

Nowhere on this sheet is the idea of gorilla aggression. Since I do not have transcript
data of the discussion that occurred after the one presented here – in which aggression figures
prominently – I can only surmise that the group decided to eliminate that behavior category as a
possible variable to study.
Since we do not have video evidence to trace whether the group completed the
considerations sheet before, during, or after the discussion, we cannot make a claim about which
activity came first. However, we can say that the text and talk were dialogically related; they
existed together in the same activity space, as part of the same discourse, informed by other
contexts, other texts. Also, note that this group completed a lab report and final PowerPoint in
which the final hypothesis they crafted noted the time of day on gorilla social behavior, but did
not go further into which specific behaviors they expected to see at different times of the day.
In the opening slide to their lab report, notice that the hypothesis does not mention the
specific behaviors individually (Figure 6.7). The behaviors the group studied in the end included
grooming, foraging, walking, eating, sitting, climbing, embracing, sleeping, playing,
communicating, and watching. Thus, somewhere along the line, in moments I was not privy to,
the students surrendered their idea of gorilla aggression. This back-and-forth nature of decisionmaking mirrors the work of scientists (NRC, 2012).
Discussion
These cases illustrate how the macro and micro contexts of the LTI are in a dialogic
relationship to one another, in part because teachers engaged students in micro-contexts (talk)
that drew upon the macro contexts of experiences, structures, and texts to make meaning of
particular science practices. While I showed two cases about one scientific practice -- planning

189

an investigation -- the relationships between micro and macro contexts are embedded throughout
the arc of the LTI, involving other practices, in other contexts, with other texts.

Figure 6.7. Introduction Power Point Slide from Carrie’s Gorilla Behavior Group
In both examples, teachers leverage scientific knowledge-making intertextually. That is,
they developed the LTIs across time, using particular texts from which students could draw in
new contexts for meaning making. Inside of these micro contexts, teachers and students were
engaged in multiple language forms as they made decisions about content as well as the practice
of investigation design. The cases also illuminate how teaching the LTI is inherently
heteroglossic. As teachers talked with students in the micro contexts of their discourse, they
leveraged informal forms of talk (i.e., "how clear the water is" v. "clarity") to engage students in

190

the discussions and keep them there. But these language forms were not all about engagement in
the discussion itself, but engagement in the ideas. Carrie explored the idea of aggression using a
conversational style that was a part of the language community of her classroom. Diana
explored turbidity in the same way. And we saw how students' scientific written texts were
closely linked to the discussions from which they derived. This is the dialogism to which I refer
to earlier.
In sum, the work of developing the LTI moves beyond the texts, no matter how wellscaffolded they are to students' needs. Teachers make use of the micro and macro contexts to
leverage the texts for student acquisition of science discourse. This chapter provided a close-up
view of what those contexts have the potential to teach us. I will explore those potentialities in
the final chapter.

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Chapter 7
Language of Science in Long-term Investigations
There has been no lack of interest in inquiry-based teaching in science education.
Reports have been issued, professional development offered, materials created. Yet after more
than at least 30 years of promoting inquiry and researching, there is little agreement about what
constitutes inquiry based teaching (Minner, Levy, & Century, 2010). This may be because the
discourse remains at the level of idealized notions of inquiry-based teaching, not careful
descriptions of what actually happens when traditional, successful, engaged teachers adopt an
inquiry-based perspective.
Of course, there are other reasons why inquiry has not taken root in American
classrooms. Teaching in a more inquiry-oriented way requires teachers and their students to
engage in several modes of d/Discourse (Gee, 2008a). In schools that have been dominated by a
single discourse for hundreds of years, this is no small feat. Further, participating successfully in
science discussions assumes that all interlocutors (teachers and students alike) understand the
specific and technical language of science, or at least are participating somewhat equally in
emergent instantiations of this language. As we have seen here, this involves using a language
that is familiar to them while working toward the more technical forms of the language of
science (Brown & Spang, 2008; Gee, 2008a, 2008b; Lemke, 1990; Rosebery & Warren, 2010).
Pushing forward on that path is not easy.
Yet Carrie, Marilyn, and Diane all teach from an inquiry-based perspective and
thoughtfully lead their students down the path toward acquiring the discourse of science. While I
observed and talked to these teachers during a small portion of their paths, I discovered that LTIs
are more complex than they may seem on the surface. In this chapter, I begin by describing the

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lessons I learned through studying these teachers, and then move to explain these lessons in
terms of the theoretical lenses through which I conducted my interpretive work. I conclude by
exploring the potential contributions for future research and challenges for science education.
Lesson 1: Engagement Over Time
The challenges of developing inquiry-based learning through long-term investigations is
not simply better curriculum materials, nor is it teaching teachers the steps of the LTI or
managing a class discussion or science language. While teachers certainly rely on all of these,
the key to engaging students in an LTI – at least for these three teachers - is also a matter of a
long-range view of the work, a teacher's sensibility of and related perspectives about the
temporal nature of the work.
In one approach to looking at learning over time, Mercer (2008) presents the concept of a
dialogic trajectory that brings attention to developments in how students talk to one another:
"speakers moving together through a series of related interactions within the same institution" (p.
39). Mercer claims that, over time, one can see the "continuities and discontinuities" in the
development of ideas, of the ways that individuals participate over the arc of that activity
(Rasmussen, 2005). Rasmussen (in one of the very few studies drawing from this perspective)
developed the concept of a participation trajectory to describe patterns of children's involvement
in a particular activity from beginning to end. As Mercer (2008) explains, a participation
trajectory and a dialogic trajectory differ in that the former focuses on individuals' participation
in the activity over time, whereas the latter focuses on the movement of talk (and of the
individuals who perform that talk) over time.
I propose that viewing experienced, skilled teachers' work in an LTI has a distinct
temporal sensibility worth studying. For now, there are two elements of teachers' work that

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appeared to be inherently temporal: the teachers' long-range consideration of students'
participation in the LTI, and shifting of language registers over time. I describe both elements
here.
Engaging a long-range view. Teaching the LTI with a long-range view involves having
an array of strategies at hand, employing them independently, and interweaving them at
appropriate times. It also involves a year-long vision of goals for student learning, such as
successfully writing a report that would be presented publicly at the school science fair at the end
of the school year. A long-range view also involves a teacher's careful layering of inquiry and
investigation skills that build upon each other over time. A long-range view is informed by the
teacher's knowledge of science practices, student needs, and curricular goals.
And the long-range view is highly contextual, and takes many forms. For example,
Carrie developed her LTI over the course of the school year, first developing students' ideas
about inquiry through a series of mini-lessons. She then conducted three whole-group
investigations that developed students' investigation skills and practices (NRC, 2012) across
different investigation types (e.g., field study, design study, and controlled experiment). When
students were finally required to conduct the LTIs independently, they revisited the
investigations from earlier in the school year. Students learned how to troubleshoot and revise
the investigation design to answer new questions.
Marilyn developed the LTI over the course of the school year as well, but took a different
approach than Carrie, in that she provided students with several different short-term experiences
whose purpose was to practice new science inquiry skills (e.g., data collection, conducting
background research, etc.). Her students were then free to investigate science questions of their
own interest using oceanography as a theme. Marilyn's storyline involved teaching discrete

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skills first and relying on their previous experiences from sixth grade to prepare them to conduct
their LTI.
Diana's LTI involved teaching secondary research using a large database. Diana
designed several experiences that helped her students to understand how the data were collected
and the relationships among variables. In this way, the storyline of Diana's LTI was to focus on
the background knowledge that the students would need to conduct their investigations. The
various experiences she provided developed vocabulary and supported students' writing of the
final draft of the LTI report they would present at the school science fair.
Expectations of language registers shift over time. I also looked at the shifts in
teachers' use of language across the arc of the LTI. Specifically, I observed that, over time,
teachers' expectations for students' use of language (in both talk and writing) shifted from
informal registers to a more specific scientific register.
Lee, Quinn and Valdes (2013) state that when students and teachers use the language of
science involving an interplay of different registers "they participate in academic tasks and
activities and demonstrate their knowledge in oral and written forms" (p. 228). In their
discussion about what science teachers do with the language, they outline several different
examples of both written and oral receptive (reading and listening) and productive (writing and
speaking) language forms and registers. All of these involve colloquial and classroom registers,
as well as disciplinary language and terminology. This means that students and teachers are
constantly using their own forms of language - as connected to the cultural community in which
they participate outside of school - as well as their classroom registers and even more technical
language of a discipline.

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The shifts I observed these teachers enact, however, were not linear, but rather, existed in
a tension, which I describe later as a push-pull between two opposing, and yet interwoven,
language forces (Bakhtin, 1981). For instance, Carrie insisted that students revisit a previous
investigation instead of trying something completely new so that she could revisit and refine
students' knowledge of the specific content as well as their participation in scientific discussions.
I heard Carrie often refer to strategies and talk structures from past experiences -- such as how to
write a science question using both the IV and the DV, or how to improve observations in a field
study -- to shift students' use of science language in both spoken discussions and in writing.
Likewise, Diana provided opportunities for students to continually practice new language
forms. And many of these opportunities opened the door for impromptu language work
(Rosebery, Ogonowski, & Warren, 2010). When students debated the scientists' rationale for
continuous monitoring of the Hudson River (as explained in the Carey/AMNH videos), one
student presented the idea of adaptation. In exploring what that term meant, Diana was
challenged to negotiate with that student -- in the service of helping all students in the classroom
learn from this moment -- about what adaptation meant. The student’s explanation was "they get
used to it" (presuming that "it" meant the conditions of the river). And while adaptation was
certainly a part of the story, it did not account for other reasons scientists might conduct
longitudinal studies of the ecosystem. Nevertheless, Diana, working inside of her long-range
view of the work, and her temporal sensibility - that there will be future opportunities to develop
these ideas further, or that students thrive with repeated exposure to new language forms -- used
this moment to highlight a student's thinking.
The register shifts are not only related to speech; they also involve shifts in textual forms.
Throughout this dissertation, I have explored various textual language structures that teachers

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enacted over the arc of the LTI. Teachers helped students develop science vocabulary, practice
using the grammatical structures of science (e.g., nominalization and passive voice) (Gee, 2008b;
Latour & Woolgar, 1986; Lemke, 1990), and write several different kinds of texts (e.g., class
notes, responses to questions on the Do Now forms, and formal lab reports, to PowerPoint©

©

documents for their LTI) (Moje, 2008).
The Do Now forms in Diana's classroom engaged students in a mix of uses of written
language. Students were asked to respond directly to content questions, represent information on
a table, draw graphic representations of relationships between variables, and write portions of
their investigation design through the support of small written prompts, such as sentence starters
for each phrase in a hypothesis (see Figure 6.5). But before writing these responses on the Do
Now, students talked about what they knew first in small groups and later in the whole group
sharing sessions. They revised their written responses based on their classmates' ideas shared in
the whole group discussion - and recorded by Diana on the Smart Board at the front of the
classroom. Their ideas were taken up by their teacher, and transferred from oral to written
language, from productive to receptive forms, from colloquial to formal registers (Lee, Quinn, &
Valdes, 2013).
Lesson Two: Adaptations According to Local Contexts
While the model for the LTI these teachers were using came from the Urban Advantage
PD program, these curricular materials were easily adaptable across contexts. These teachers,
experienced, lead UA teachers, had redesigned the textual materials -- as well as their practice -to meet their students’ needs. This demonstrates that good curricular materials serve as a
framework for which experienced science teachers develop experiences and strategies for
engaging students in the LTI. Teachers in this study adapted the materials in two distinct ways.

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They adapted the textual materials themselves (e.g., the IDD and DSET), and adapted their
teaching practices within the LTI according to the sociocultural needs of their students (i.e., they
had specific ideas about how discussion structures would best support their students' learning).
Textual adaptations. One way that teachers constructed the macro contexts, or the
larger structure for the LTIs was to adapt curricular materials. They developed their own
variations on the IDD form and deconstructed parts of the form into other texts that helped their
students with investigation design. All three teachers used a Do Now exercise at the beginning
of class to set the frame for the day’s lesson. Diana, in particular, stayed close to the Do Now as
she developed daily paper-and-pencil tasks. She followed the format of the Do Now handout
every day during her whole class lessons, while Carrie and Marilyn engaged students in brief
discussions - sometimes only 15 minutes - that situated the lesson’s topic, but did not structure
the entire lesson as it did for Diana's class. Some differences between Diana's use of the Do
Now and Carrie’s and Marilyn's had to do with individual teaching style, some with the
particular type of lesson, and some differences had to do with their students' needs.
For example, Diana supported her students' language development through several
scaffolding questions on the Do Now sheets that asked about vocabulary and the meaning of
variables. She represented these ideas in several different ways: in charts, in drawings of food
webs, in questions that directly related to the case study videos of the Carey Institute study, in
graphs representing the different variables. She drew upon a field trip during which students
gathered data on the water quality of the Hudson River in much the same ways as the biologists
in the case study had. She asked them to generate their own food webs and label the
relationships and explain them in writing.

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Adaptations concerning sociocultural factors. As much as they worked to engage
students in class discussions, some social factors were beyond the teachers' influence, but
impacted some of the LTI work as reported in interviews. Diana reported that her students were
mostly Spanish-speaking children of Mexican immigrants, and were generally shy about their
language use, embarrassed about how they sounded. She noted that the Mexican American
students often relied on each other during class discussions to help with understanding the
language, and thus, the concepts. Therefore, she conducted many whole group conversations in
which students were able to participate when they felt comfortable, but also balanced the whole
group lessons with the small group activities so that students could have opportunities to share
their language with each other in less high-stakes circumstances.
Meanwhile, the social constraints on student engagement were different for Carrie and
Marilyn. They often cited student competition and a need for "being right" as their main social
concern. Therefore, their small group activities often involved students working with others who
they felt most comfortable with, but both teachers were careful about constructing small groups
that challenged students to work with those they did not know as well. For example, Carrie cited
one case in which one particular student shared much more often in the small group he worked
with because he happened to be the most academically strong student in that group. But, place
him in another group of boys - sitting just across the room from him - and this same student
would have fallen into the background, allowing the other students to take over the activity.
Because Carrie placed him in this particular group, he naturally took on a leadership role,
participated in more meaningful ways, which benefitted him and the other group members.
Marilyn also adjusted activities for her students’ needs. In an early lesson, she developed
science vocabulary on geology. She recognized that the text they were to read was more difficult

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than she had wanted. So she developed a graphic organizer and a small group participation
structure (e.g., a jigsaw group) that would afford students the opportunity to grapple with new
concepts with each other before presenting them to a new group of students. She also worked
with each and every group, making sure that the students understood the content. To ameliorate
the effects of competition, Marilyn and Carrie both had students working in different
configurations often, and talked with them openly about not being concerned about their grades.
Lesson 3: Different Views of the Macro and Micro Dialogic
Examining the data through micro and macro lenses allowed me to interpret various
levels of interaction. I found that inside of the basic structures of the LTI -- formed through texts
and larger social contexts -- the activity of each teacher's LTI looked vastly different from each
other. By activity I mean the moment-to-moment interactions between teachers and students.
These activity spaces, bound to a particular macro context, or practice (data collection, for
example) engendered various kinds of talk. In other words, the structure of the LTI laid the
groundwork for the diverse interactional experiences as teachers and students engaged with each
other (Erickson & Shultz, 1981).
But within this structure, teachers' strategies for engaging the micro and the macro
differed. Teachers employed different strategies for engaging students in talk about science, they
cared about different aspects of the work (as we saw in the previous section), they highlighted
different kinds of language structures. Yet, some similarities existed too. They generated very
similar science process vocabulary across all lessons. Terms like, "IV" and "DV" and "evidence"
were used often in all three classrooms. Committed to the UA framework for inquiry-based
science teaching, teachers helped students develop final project display boards that included the

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same elements, such as a research question and hypothesis that includes the IV and DV and
background knowledge about the phenomenon of study.
One reason for the differences is that teachers were challenged to respond to what
students brought to the interactional space, the micro contexts: their social ways of being, their
language, their ideas, their questions. The sociocultural differences between Diana's school and
Carrie and Marilyn's school provide an explanation for these micro contexts (the classroom
interactions) to be vastly different from one another.
These micro contexts challenged teachers to think carefully about managing and directing
the flow of the conversation (NRC, 2007). To better manage these contexts, teachers structured
the interactional spaces through a series of whole group and small group activities, for example.
Using these structures allowed for some sense of predictability for which teachers had strategies,
such as moving from group to group to check in on progress, various questioning strategies, and
strategies for keeping all students accountable for their work.
Managing group work was one similarity among all three teachers. Teachers were
intentional about when to organize the LTI work in small groups or in whole group
conversations. Diana, Carrie and Marilyn all remarked that whole group discussions were easier
to manage than small group work because it was easier to keep the conversation "on track" and
focused on content. They valued small group work, however, and found it useful for assessing
students' knowledge and individual needs. All three teachers also believed that small groups
afforded important opportunities for students who were less apt to participate in classroom
discussions. They believed that talking about science helped students understand it, and
provided students with daily opportunities to do so.

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However, as I presented elsewhere in this study and in the above section on the
sociocultural adaptations teachers made to the LTI work, the differences among the teachers
appeared more connected to the moment-to-moment interactions, which, of course, are
connected to teaching style, and not necessarily a result of differences in curriculum or training.
That is, though curriculum materials, like the UA materials, structure the macro frame for
teachers (e.g., content topic, supports for engaging in discussion, supports for assessment, etc.),
the micro contexts in which teachers and students engage are impactful, and therefore, ought to
be studied for the affordances and constraints of individual adaptations that teachers make to the
materials to fit the needs of their students.
A "Push-Pull" Language: Heteroglossia and Teacher-Student Interactions in Science
In chapter six I introduced the Bakhtinian (1986) notion that the language of the science
classroom is inherently heteroglossic, that is, that generating knowledge in science classrooms
involves multiple language forms and meaning-making strategies (Gee, 2008a, 2008b; Warren,
Ogonowski, & Pothier, 2005; Rosebery & Warren 2008; Rosebery, Ogonowski, DiShino, &
Warren, 2010). Bakhtin (1986) theorized that all language is created in other language, that any
momentary utterance -- loosely defined as a complete idea expressed by a speaker or writer -- is
borne of the language that comes before, at the same time that it "populates" future language.
But this process is also inherently, and necessarily, tension-filled, and perhaps it is through this
tension that language forms are created and become stratified.
The tension to which Bakhtin refers is that between a unifying or centralizing language
which interlocutors experience, or produce, and a stratified, or outward-moving language. Like
the centripetal force in physics, in which matter is pulled toward the center of a spinning object,
language that is influenced by the centripetal is language that is pulled to be more centralized or

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unified (or in linguistic terms, the "standard"). The language of science is an example of a
centralized or unified language, as it includes highly structured, specific vocabulary, strategies
for argumentation and expectations about how to communicate knowledge (Lemke, 1990). In
classrooms, however, science discourse does not dominate, which may help to explain why
science has struggled to get a foothold in American classrooms. There are always competing
discourses, deemed more relevant at particular times, for particular reasons. Achieving a science
discourse -- something that takes up only part of a child's school day -- is particularly difficult.
But teachers develop several strategies for developing the language of science, in both
macro and micro contexts, working within the push-pull of language forms. They consider the
forms of vocabulary (Gee, 2008b; Nagy & Townsend, 2012; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008;
Snow, 2008), phrases and clauses that promote a particular logic in science (Bakhtin, 1981;
1986; NRC, 2011; Moje, 2008), and writing in the standardized forms of scientific
communication most often practiced in schools (Gee, 2008b; Latour & Woolgar, 1989; NRC,
2011; Moje, 2008). I demonstrated how teachers worked diligently to support students' emergent
science language over time.
But, according to Bakhtin (1986), the centralizing forms are in constant tension with
diverging, or centrifugal forms as well. He states,
But the centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a “unitary language,”
operate in the midst of heteroglossia. At any given moment of its evolution, language is
stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word (according to
formal linguistic markers, especially phonetic), but also – and for us this is the essential
point – into languages that are socio-ideological: language of social groups,

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“professional” and “generic” languages, languages of generations and so forth. (pp. 2712).
Some would argue that these socio-ideological forms of language are colloquial, or not of the
mainstream forms in any given language community -- such as in classrooms (Brown & Spang,
2008; Heath, 1983; Hymes, 1980).
On the other hand, the centrifugal forms are those that pull the standardized, or unified
(Bakhtin, 1986), forms outward, away from the center. They are the forms responsible for the
diversification among languages across and within cultures. They are inherently responsible for
heteroglossia. In Bakhtin's words:
The processes of centralization and decentralization, of unification and disunification,
interest in the utterance; the utterance not only answers the requirements of its own
language as an individualized embodiment of a speech act, but it answers the
requirements of heteroglossia as well; it is in fact an active participant in such speech
diversity. (p. 272)
The centripetal and centrifugal, which together comprise heteroglossia, are always in
tension, pushing and pulling against one another from utterance to utterance, resulting in
(sometimes) the construction of diverse language forms, and ways of participating. We saw
examples of these forms in tension in teachers' discussions with students, especially around
concept development.
For example, at times Diana presented information using a word choice that favored the
informal forms of language, or the more colloquial forms of the language of her students'
community (see below, when she chooses the word "murky" instead of "turbulent" to help
students make the connection to "turbidity" in the zebra mussel study.) Yet at other times, Diana

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chose the most formal variation of the language with her students (recall when she repeatedly
used "nutrients" instead of "food" in the discussion of what bacteria need to survive).
Importantly, the centripetal and centrifugal co-exist. Consider a brief example when
Diana attempts to develop the idea of turbidity with her class. She asks numerous questions of
her students to get them to understand that the term "turbidity" is a relatively easy concept for
them, and that it involves information they already know. Watch as Diana and her students
move back and forth from the terms that the students provide using informal terms (or level 2)
(Snow, 2008), as she takes up these ideas to move their language toward the most formal
vocabulary term, "turbidity" (or a level 3 term). I should point out that this excerpt begins with
Diana taking up the term that a student used to describe why the scientists would not be able to
see the Secchi disk when it is lowered to a particular depth.
1

Diana:

Because it's murky?

2

Is that the word you used?

3

Okay can anyone else put it in their own words?

4

Adrian?

5

Adrian:

Because it has high turbidity.

6

Diana:

Because it has high turbidity.

7

Okay we can say it means that there's high.. turbidity..

8

we can say that the water looks murky.

9

Why does it look murky, Adrian? Why does the water look murky?
((Adrian provides an inaudible answer, the conversation continues.))

10 Diana:

Alright. That isn't wrong. Michelle?

11 Michelle: Turbulence.

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12 Diana:

'Cause of turbulence?

13

Okay, why would turbulence make the water murky?

14 Adrian:

Because it's mixing it up.

15 Diana:

Because it's mixing what up?

16 Adrian:

The dirt and the chlorophyll.

17 Diana:

The dirt, the ((unclear)).

18

One thing, Marlyse, that would make, um, the water murky or dirty

19

could be little particles or sediment.

20

Marlyse, what else in the water makes it difficult?

21 Marlyse: Plankton and plants.
22 Diana:

Plankton. If there's a lot of plankton in the water it's also hard to see.

23

Okay?

Diana continues the conversation to incorporate the concept – and language – of
photosynthesis. Many words are being tossed about here: "murky" and "turbidity,” "turbulence .
. . mixing . . . dirty . . . . particles . . . sediment.” Here, Diana uses both registers she pushes
students to move from what some psychologists have called a “naïve” view of the process to one
that uses scientific language and explanations.
Heteroglossia does not only explain diversity in terms of spoken language, but also the
ways that written language forms become diversified. Part of this process is through
intertextuality. As I described above, intertextuality is the process by which people make sense
of texts (written or social) through their understandings of related texts. It includes the notion
that former texts inform, or construct, the ideas in new texts. In the Bakhtinian sense, the former
texts "populate" the newer texts.

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I have showed how this process occurred as I presented the various ways that the teachers
used multiple texts over time to support the learning that occurred in the most current text. In
other words, in a lesson in which Carrie's students were planning their investigations, she asked
them to use a considerations sheet as well as to draw upon previous experiences
(intercontextuality) to make important decisions about the plans for the most current LTI.
Diana's and Marilyn's students did so as well. In Diana's classroom, students used the video case
studies and the accompanying readings to develop their hypotheses and food web diagrams.
Marilyn's students used their knowledge of investigation design -- from other experiences early
in the school year -- as well as emails from the UA scientists, websites, and the like to make
well-informed decisions about their designs. None of this work could have happened without the
flexible use and integration of other texts and experiences (contexts) (Erickson & Shultz, 1981;
Gee, 2008b).
But what does it mean to identify these forms of the language? What does this
description buy us in terms of future teaching, teacher education, or science education research?
I would first argue that the description of how language forms are used, through a Bakhtinian
framework, may inform teachers' ideas about language so that they can develop other possible
ways of interacting that are equally, if not more, successful in engaging students in the LTI, and
to learn the language of science. It is not enough to recognize that there are heterogeneous forms
of language that can act as pathways toward the most specific forms of scientific language use;
rather, students' meaning making depends on the ways that teachers use this knowledge.
For instance, helping teachers to think about the arc of language use over the course of
the year (at the macro level) or helping them anticipate the naïve language students might first
use (across communities) that is relevant to specific scientific language (just as elementary

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teachers need to understand that “borrowing” in mathematics is not the same as borrowing a cup
of sugar), perhaps science teachers need to learn that students will think of ideas of "dirty" or
"murkiness" when first encountering the phenomenon of turbidity.
This line of reasoning evokes the literature that details why teachers of all subjects should
have greater awareness of language diversity and language development (Adger, 2003; Adger,
Snow & Christian, 2002; Adger, Wolfram, & Christian, 2007; Cazden, 2001; Denham &
Lobeck, 2010; Lucas, Vilegas, & Freedson-Gonzales, 2008: Nagy & Townsend, 2012). Drawing
from studies in linguistics and children's development of language (Lindfors, 1997), this work
provides teachers with basic understandings of linguistics and language awareness and the ways
that knowledge of language - the primary source of information sharing in classrooms - and
metalinguistic awareness influences learning. In response to recent calls in science education for
increasing awareness of language and cultural diversity in classrooms (Lee, Quinn, & Valdes,
2013; NGACBP, 2012; Rosebery, Ogonowski, & Warren, 2010), we might do well to develop
specific tools that help teachers engage students in purposeful experiences with language in
science -- in a sense, a refining of the practices around language observed in this study.
Final Thoughts
I close with some thoughts about the future work and implications to which this study
contributes. I consider the ways that the results may influence professional development in
science, and discuss the challenges of this work, especially with respect to the Next Generation
Science Standards (Achieve, Inc., 2013).
For more than 30 years, education researchers and classroom ethnographers have
attempted to understand the interactional space of the classroom (Heath, 1983; Hymes, 1980;
Phillips, 1982). Warren and Rosebery's work in science classrooms has taught us that students

208

from non-dominant language communities oftentimes have sophisticated reasoning strategies in
science, but that it is the role of the teacher to open up the classroom space for authentic dialogic
discussion, and to take up and extend students' ideas (Rosebery, Ogonowski, DiShino, &
Warren, 2010; Rosebery & Warren, 2000, 2008; Warren & Rosebery, 1993). This requires that
teachers develop intuitive and responsive skills that support students' ideas as they work toward
learning the formalized language of science.
Following this perspective, this study opens the door for further questions and microanalysis about teacher responsiveness. To what extent are teachers' responses to students'
thinking connected to students' decision making during long-term investigations? In other
words, what responses promote independent thinking in students, and which responses engender
students in merely repeating the teacher's ideas? Another question this study opens is: to what
extent is the investigation design phase connected to the development of student content
knowledge?
Other potential implications of this work is that it may inform our ideas about how best to
structure LTIs, especially with regard to the NGSS. With the new language about science
practices, how might long-term investigations look different? Windschitl and Thompson (2008)
have proposed that science teaching should involve model-based inquiry (MBI). They proposed
MBI as an alternative approach to the more typical investigation process (or, The Scientific
Method) by which students create from their data visual models that lead to more meaningful
reasoning about science concepts (e.g., connections between variables, explanations of
phenomena, explanations of findings, etc.). Instead of The Scientific Method, the researchers
propose that we ask students to design investigations based on their conceptual development of
models or simulations of the phenomena of study. These models would generate stronger

209

rationale for the decisions that students make in the design process. But because this work was
done prior to the new NRC (2012) practices and NGSS (NGACBP), and involves research on
new teachers and the extent to which they enact the MBI system, we may need descriptive
studies of experienced teachers who use model-based thinking during LTIs so that we can trace
the impact of model based inquiry with the NGSS practices in mind. This study has the potential
to contribute to this line of work as well.
Further, this study involves a small sample of three teachers to represent one case of the
LTI. It would be useful to expand this work to several teachers who teach in linguistically
diverse classrooms to better understand how teachers develop practices about language in
science and literacy practices, especially in light of the NGSS. Since many of the goals of NGSS
involve a clear cross-over between literacy skills and science language, we may benefit from
larger descriptive studies that trace how teachers who are learning to incorporate the NGSS
practices into their teaching also learn to respond to the linguistic demands of teaching science.
Along with such a study might be one which investigates teacher knowledge of language and
teacher attitudes about language diversity as it impacts teaching the language of science inside of
teaching the practices (NGACBP).
Another potential contribution of this study is to pursue more examples of LTIs that
occur over time, to trace the development of an investigation as a trajectory of engagement, to
develop more examples of what such a trajectory may entail. Doing so would help us to imagine
long-range curriculum planning in light of LTIs, and to develop strategies for researching the
development of an LTI in terms of language development.
Of course, this new work invites challenges as well. Researching teachers' incorporation
of the practices into their science classroom investigations challenges us to steer clear of

210

definitions of practice that do not fully consider how students and teachers from non-dominant
language communities might practice them. A caution then, would be for the field to continue to
look for diverse examples of science practices that are inclusive of many cultural perspectives
(Nasir, Rosebery, Warren, & Lee, 2006).
Another challenge is that researching language is cumbersome work. And, as has been
noted in the past by Gee and Green (1998) and more recently by Moses (2012), discourse
analytic research involves the integration of theoretical perspectives that consider how groups
use different cultural tools to communicate and make meaning. In general, this means that as we
develop strategies for recognizing the NGSS practices and cross-cutting concepts as they are
practiced in classrooms with experienced teachers, we might also be wise to develop new
methodological strategies for discourse analysis that consider cultural practices in science (Bang,
Medin, & Altran, 2007; Hakuta & Santos, 2012; Lee, Quinn, & Sanches, 2013; Nasir, Rosebery,
Warren, & Lee, 2006).
In sum, this dissertation provides a careful description of the ways that teachers and
students interact across time in a focused scientific investigation, or LTI. I developed a model
for considering the on-the-ground work of teachers during such investigations, which involved
both macro and micro contexts. Within these contexts, we were able to see the complexity of the
interactional work, that, perhaps most clearly, curricular texts played a very small part in the
production of knowledge. Rather, it was through discussion, and the intuitive, responsive,
content-focused behaviors of the teachers that students engaged in the LTIs. And spoken and
written language was a predominant theme of this work as teachers developed students'
awareness and application of the language of science through two layers of interaction: as
metalinguistic work in which teachers made clear the language goals of each task, and through

211

more intuitive, tacit understandings about language - especially in using the language of their
local community - to promote engagement in science.

212

APPENDICES

213

Appendix A
Text Translation for Figure 4.4

Exploratorium 9: Lab Report Peer Review May 21, 2012
Do Now: What’s Good about and what needs to be changed for the following?
A)




It needs the title
It needs the time unit
The x-axis needs equal intervals




The y-axis is labeled
The x-axis is labeled

B)
1. Theodora started the stopwatch – the stopwatch was started
2. = was good
3. We recorded the data on an ethogram – the data was recorded on an ethogram
4. = was good

C)
Made connection between hypothesis and results
Needs to switch “correct” to “supported”

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Appendix B
Interview 1
Thank you for setting aside some time to talk with me today. This is the first of three interviews
we’ll have together over the course of the school year. The purpose today is to discuss your
background and experiences as a teacher. I hope to audio record this interview today for
accuracy. Is that okay with you? (Get consent before turning on the tape. If teacher consents, turn
on recorder, if not, then write responses by hand.)
Remember that as a participant in this study, you can choose not to answer any question, or to
stop the interview at any time for any reason without having to explain it to me. Also, you may
ask me to turn off the recorder at any time (if recording).
BACKGROUND
1. Let’s first talk briefly about your experiences as a teacher. Tell me about your teaching
background, particularly how you came to be a science teacher.
Probes:
 How long have you been a science teacher? In same school? Grades?
 What do you enjoy most about being a science teacher?
 Have you worked as a professional a scientist? If so, how/why did you decide to
become a teacher?
2. How did you get involved in Urban Advantage?
Probes:
 How many years involved?
3. (if not answered in Q2) Talk a little about your experience(s) as a UA lead teacher. How did
you become a lead teacher? How long have you been a lead teacher?
4. What are your responsibilities as a UA lead teacher?
Probes:
 Any special responsibilities specific to your role at your specific school that other
lead teachers may not have?
 Talk about your work with the partner institutions: Do you work with other program
staff? If so, in what ways?
CURRENT TEACHING CONTEXT
5. Describe your current school. How many teachers? Students? How many science teachers?
What is the general make up of the student body? How long have you taught at your current
school?
6. Describe your current teaching assignment. How many classes do you teach? How long is
each class? Approximately how many students are there in each class? How many preps?
7. Do teachers in your school work in teams to create curriculum plans, map out science units
together, or collaborate on planning, or in using the curriculum in any other ways?

215

(Appendix A Cont’d.)
8. How much do you use the UA curriculum materials? To what extent do they work alongside
your school’s curriculum?
9. Do you have any students from minority language communities in your classroom? If so,
about what percentage of your classes makes up this population? What languages or
countries are represented in your classes?
10. Do you speak any languages other than English? If so, what? If so, do you use that language
as a teacher? If so, in what ways?
TEACHING SCIENCE
11. As you know, teaching science with an inquiry stance is a central part of the UA program.
How do you describe teaching science through inquiry? How do you approach teaching
science through inquiry in your classroom?
12. What has teaching in a classroom where students speak many languages taught you about
teaching science, or about teaching more generally?
13. Inquiry-based teaching often involves students talking with each other to share ideas. How
often do you ask students to participate in activities in pairs? Small groups? As members of a
whole group discussion? Talk about when and why you decide to use each kind of group
configuration. From your experience, how does each kind of group configuration support
students in sharing what they know?
14. How do you encourage students to participate orally (or to discuss their ideas) in discussions
in class (either in pairs, small groups, or in whole class discussions)?
15. (if not addressed in other questions) Has your work as a leader in UA impacted how you
think about science inquiry? If so, in what ways?
16. Thank you for your time today. Is there anything else you’d like me to know about your work
as a UA lead teacher, or as a science teacher in general?

216

Appendix C
Interview 2
Note: This interview will involve listening to audio clip(s) of less than 2 minutes in which
students are engaging with each other in a science lesson. The first set of questions focus on
that excerpt specifically. The last set of questions are about your general teaching practices.
I will provide a transcript of the discussion.
AFTER REVIEWING THE CLIP(S) TOGETHER:
1. How would you describe your students’ engagement here? (e.g., who's engaged most?
why? is this typical?) If we focus in on the students from non-mainstream language
communities for a moment (e.g., ELLs or students who speak minority varieties of
English like African American English), how would you describe their engagement?
What examples from this recording help you with this description?
(Alternative: Are there any ELLs or former ELLs in this group that you can identify?
Tell me about their engagement.)
2. When did your students in this(these) clip(s) seem to be communicating in the most
meaningful ways? When and how did students seem to be learning the most about
science through their communication (either oral or written)?
3. What else would you like me to know about this(these) clip(s)?
GENERAL QUESTIONS (not related to the specific audio sample):
4. What are you listening for when your students are sharing ideas in the whole class
discussion format? Do you listen for different things when they are working in small
groups? One-on-one? Why?
5. How do you decide when to use whole group, small group, or one-on-one (or other)
discussion tasks? From your experience, in what ways does each kind of configuration
seem to help students learn about and do science inquiry?
6. (if applicable) Your classroom has many students who speak minority languages. From
what you have observed, how does this language diversity impact how all students
participate in your class?
7. What else would you like me to know?

217

Appendix D
Interview 3
Thank you once again for meeting with me. Today’s interview will be more brief than the first
two. The goal for today is to check in with you about how things are going since it has been
some time since we’ve been in touch. I wanted to get a sense about how you are thinking about
teaching and student engagement especially in light of our second interview and what may have
occurred to you since then.
INTRODUCTORY QUESTION
1. We had a wonderful conversation during the second interview in which you talked about
the audio recordings of your students. Since then have you had any further thoughts
about those students' participation? The recordings in general?
2. One of the things that I am trying to understand is how you think about how students
participate in discussion about their science ideas in your classroom. Now that I have had
a chance to listen to our interviews, I wanted to check with you about my understanding
of your views. Based on those interviews, it sounds to me like you see discussion . . . .
[provide a summary of ideas from past interviews] Is my interpretation close to how you
think about this? Is there anything I should change?
3. Is there anything that I have missed?
UA-SPECIFIC QUESTIONS (to tap their expertise as UA leaders and how it influences their
classroom practice)
1. As you know, I was able to observe a few classes when you had students working on
their Exit Projects. Can you explain your process of guiding them through the project?
With what aspects of this project do your students typically need the most help? What
specific things do you do to guide them through the challenges?
2. Tell me about having students working in small groups to do the Exit Project. (probe:
Why?) How do students work together? (Probe: Do they have specific roles? How
much do you structure the small group’s work?) What do students learn working in the
small groups that they might not learn working individually?
3. Tell me a little about working to help students to conduct exit projects in a class in which
students come from diverse language communities. When (during what tasks) are
students most successful and when might they might need more help? What specific
things do you do to help? Can you think of a particular child who you worked with and
tell me the story of how he/she experienced working on the exit project?
GENERAL REFLECTION QUESTIONS
4. What, in your opinion, is the value of having students discuss ideas in science class?
How do you structure your class for discussion?

218

(Appendix C Cont’d.)
5. Describe a moment from this past school year that taught you something important about
engaging students in discussions in classrooms where not everyone speaks the same
language (particularly related to science learning).
(Alternate for teachers who do not have English Language Learners: Describe a moment
from this school year that taught you something important about engaging students in
discussions in science.)
6. What are the challenges of teaching science in classrooms where there is quite a bit of
cultural and language diversity? How do you specifically address these challenges? What
are the positives?
7. Is there anything else you would like me to know that we haven’t already had the chance
to discuss?

219

Appendix E
Table 1. Interpretive Codes
Code
Directions
Manage Progress
Manage Behavior
Manage Materials

Abbreviation
DIR
MAN-P
MAN-B
MAN-M

Explain
Process

EXPLAIN
PROCESS

Nature of Science

NOS

Metalinguistic/Metacognitive META

Language

LANG

Literacy

LIT

Student-Initiated Questions
Interruption

SIQ
I

Talk

TALK

Check-In

CHECK

Content

CONTENT

Repeat
Humor

REP
HUMOR

Revoice

REVOICE

Question About Real Life

Q REAL

Problem Solving

PROB SOLV

Description
Teacher gives directions about a task.
Teacher manages the progress of group work.
Teacher manages student behavior
Teacher discusses how to manage materials
(e.g., passing out papers, or science
equipment).
Teacher explains a scientific concept.
Teacher discusses science process skills (may
also be practices).
Teacher presents an idea that involves thinking
about the nature of science.
Teacher talks about one’s own thinking or
language as she does a task, or asks students to
engage in a task.
Teacher talks about the language (spoken or
written) that one uses in science*
Teacher discusses how to write or read science
texts*
Student approaches a teacher to ask a question.
When working with a small group, teacher gets
interrupted by a student from outside of the
group
Teacher specifically asks students to talk to
one another, encourages discussion.
Teacher checks in on students when working in
a small group (different than MAN-P, in that
MAN-P is usually a directive. CHECK is
usually provided as a question or an opener.)
Teacher discusses or asks a question about
science content.
Teacher repeats what a student says
Teacher uses humor related or not related to
science.
Teacher revoices something she has heard
before (e.g., “they were like, ‘we have to do
this over to get better data.’”).
Teacher asks a question about how a specific
science concept relates to students’ lives.
Teacher helps students to solve a problem,
either socially, or conceptually.

220

(Table 1 Cont’d.)
Technology

TECH

Teacher talks about how to use technical
equipment (e.g., computers or science
equipment).
Identity
IDENTITY
Teachers talk about taking on the identity of a
scientist, or refers to students as scientists.
Press
PRESS
Teacher presses students for more information
about their conceptual knowledge (See
Windchitl & Thompson, 2008).
Information with
ANS Q
Student gives information using a questioning
Questioning Tone
tone, as if to be unsure of one’s answer.
* These codes were later broken into subcodes for one analysis because they were so numerous.

221

Appendix F
Table 2. Codes for Literacy in Science Practices
Code
Notetaking

Abbreviation
NOTE

Description
taking notes during a lesson or from reading
science texts
Organization
ORG
organizing notes or data gathered during an
investigation
Meaning Making
MEANING
reading for meaning from science texts,
discussing the meaning of science terms
Precise/Domain Specific
LANG
using specific words, phrases, grammatical
Language
conventions for writing in science
Gather Information
GATHER
conduct background research from texts (e.g.,
video, audio, written texts, etc.) on specific
science topics relevant to investigations
Intertextuality
INTER
Comparing information from one text to the
information gathered in another
Formal Style
FORMAL
writing in a formal tone of voice (e.g., using
passive voice and past tense verbs in writing
procedures)
Conclusion
CONCL
writing a well-reasoned conclusion to an
investigation that makes use of background
information
Claims
CLAIM
writing or determine/identify a scientific
claim from a text
Evidence
EVID
writing or determining/identifying scientific
evidence
Reasoning
REAS
writing or determining/identifying scientific
reasoning using evidence
Explain Content
CONT
written or spoken explanations about content
ideas gained from texts
Procedure
PROC
writing or following (reading) a scientific
procedure
Review/Revise
R/R
engaging in or talking about the revision
process, in writing about science or in writing
procedures based on exploration.
Technology
TECH
using technology tools to write, organize, or
gather information about science.
Conventions
CONV
Teachers discuss grammar conventions with
students (e.g., spelling, verb tense agreement,
etc.)
Adapted from two areas of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts:
Literacy in History, Science, and Technical Subjects, and Writing in History, Science, and
Technical Subjects (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, 2012) Grades 68.
222

Appendix G
Table 3. Codes for Science Practices
Code
Ask Questions and
Define Problems

Abbreviation
QUES

Develop and use
Models

MODELS

Planning
Investigations

PLAN

Carrying out
Investigations

CARRY OUT

Analyze and
Interpret Data

ANALYZE/INTERPRET

Use Mathematics
and Computational
Thinking
Constructing
Explanations

USE MATH

EXPLANATIONS

Description
Teacher discusses how to compose
(written or spoken) a researchable science
question.
Teacher describes how to develop a model
or how to interpret how a model works to
represent a particular phenomenon.
Teacher talks about how to make a
scientific plan. (Including calling this a
“procedure.”)
Teacher talks about specifics of carrying
out a procedure (i.e., discusses how to use
a Secci disk, or how to make sure data is
collected correctly.)
Teacher discusses how to analyze and
interpret data (i.e., how to interpret
information on a graph or other visual.)
Teacher discusses how to use math to
make a measurement, or calculation.

Teacher discusses how to compose
(written or spoken) a scientific explanation
(e.g., part of the DSET)
Engage in
ARGUE
Teacher discusses how to compose a
Argument from
scientific argument (e.g., part of the
Evidence
DSET).
Obtaining
OBTAIN (GATHER) INFO Teacher discusses gathering background
Information
information to support a hypothesis,
explanation, or argument, or as a regular
practice in understanding variables.
Evaluating
EVAL INFO
Teacher discusses evaluating information
Information
for its accuracy, precision, or usefulness
(e.g., asking students if they think what
they read is useful for an argument, or
asking students to evaluate the claims of
others).
Communicating
COMM INFO
Teacher discusses how to communicate
Information
(either in writing or orally) idas in science
(e.g., putting information in final form for
the LTI display boards, or giving an oral
presentation).
Adopted from The Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012).

223

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