SUPPORTING THREE-DIMENSIONAL SCIENCE LEARNING:
THE ROLE OF CURIOSITY-DRIVEN CLASSROOM DISCOURSE
By
Wendy Renae Johnson

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
Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior—Dual Major
2017

	

ABSTRACT
SUPPORTING THREE-DIMENSIONAL SCIENCE LEARNING:
THE ROLE OF CURIOSITY-DRIVEN CLASSROOM DISCOURSE
By
Wendy Renae Johnson

The National Research Council’s Framework for K-12 Science Education (2011) presents
a new vision for science education that calls for the integration of the three dimensions of science
learning: science and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas.
Unlike previous conceptions of science learning that separated content and process goals, in the
Framework, “learning is defined as the combination of both knowledge and practice” (2011, p.
254). The Next Generation Science Standards (2013) operationalized the Framework’s vision by
developing learning standards that integrate science and engineering practices, crosscutting
concepts, and disciplinary core ideas into three-dimensional performance expectations. The
Framework and NGSS supporting documents emphasize that three-dimensional learning requires
instruction that centers on explaining natural phenomena.
Instruction aimed at figuring out phenomena requires that questions about the natural
world and a shared drive to answer those questions are at the core of classroom discourse. I call
this curiosity-driven discourse because it is motivated by the desire to explain natural
phenomena. It differs from typical classroom discourse aimed at procedural display, which I call
task-driven discourse, primarily in the purposes that are established for learning activities.
Curiosity-driven discourse is focused on figuring out phenomena by engaging in scientific
practices and applying disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts. Classrooms engaged in
task-driven discourse may engage in many of the same activities, but their purposes for doing so

	

are limited to completing the task at hand, generally with the intention of acquiring some discrete
knowledge or skill.
Through classroom discourse, teachers and students negotiate the purposes of their
activities which orients students toward particular types of learning. My dissertation aims to
describe how a taken-as-shared frame for understanding “What are we doing here?” emerges
through discourse in science classrooms, and how it positions students in terms of developing
and using knowledge. Using a mixed methods approach, I carried out three interrelated studies
within the context of the Carbon Transformations in Matter and Energy (Carbon TIME) project.
I analyzed videotaped lessons and a student survey collected in classrooms that were
implementing an NGSS-aligned curriculum designed to support students’ three-dimensional
learning about carbon-transforming processes in high school biology.
My dissertation advances both theory and practice by conceptualizing curiosity about the
natural world as the driver of productive science classroom discourse that fosters threedimensional learning. Drawing on rich descriptions from diverse high school classrooms, I
describe how curiosity-driven discourse positions students as epistemic agents responsible for
figuring out phenomena as well as how task-driven discourse orients students toward learning
about authoritative science knowledge. My analysis demonstrates the importance of clearly
establishing driving questions about natural phenomena to anchor an instructional unit and
describes teaching practices that scaffold students’ sensemaking and position them as epistemic
agents. My dissertation also uncovers key challenges that teachers face in establishing and
maintaining curiosity-driven discourse. These insights can benefit practitioners, teacher
educators, and researchers as they work to create classroom communities that promote threedimensional science learning.

	

This dissertation is dedicated to my family.
Kevin, thank you for making it possible for me to have it all.
Clara & Hollis, thank you for inspiring me with your curiosity.

	

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply grateful for the many people who have supported me throughout the PhD
program. My dissertation chair, Andy Anderson, made this dissertation possible by allowing me
to pursue my interest in scientific curiosity in classrooms within the Carbon TIME project.
Carrying out my research within this larger project allowed me to ask questions and collect data
that I never would have been able to do on my own. I learned so much about teaching and
learning that will help me become the kind of science teacher I aspire to be. Thank you, Andy,
for pushing me to become a better teacher, writer, and researcher!
I am also thankful for my advisor, Gail Richmond, who guided me through the PhD
program. Her listening ear and wise counsel were invaluable to me as I navigated coursework
and my dissertation. In addition to Andy and Gail, I was fortunate to also have Bethany Wilinksi
and Tom Getty on my dissertation committee. I appreciate their time, encouragement, and
feedback throughout the dissertation process.
Thank you to the entire Carbon TIME team, especially Hannah Miller, Christie Morrison
Thomas, MaryMargaret Welch, Jenny Newell, Elizabeth de los Santos, and Sam Baruah. I am
grateful for the expertise and insight you have shared and the support you have offered. It has
been a pleasure getting to know you!
Finally, I am thankful for the many friends and family members who have encouraged
and supported me. My parents, David and Donna Schroeder, have encouraged my curiosity and
sacrificed to help me reach my goals my entire life. My husband, Kevin, and my daughters,
Clara and Hollis put up with a lot of busy days and late nights as I have pursued my interests and
are my biggest cheerleaders. I love you!

	

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS
	
LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................................... viii	
LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... ix	
INTRODUCTION TO DISSERTATION ...................................................................................... 1	
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 7	
STUDY ONE .................................................................................................................................. 9	
How Curiosity-Driven Classroom Discourse Supports Three-Dimensional Learning................... 9	
INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 9	
Curiosity About the Natural World Drives Three-Dimensional Learning ........................... 10	
CONTEXT AND METHODS .................................................................................................. 11	
RESULTS ................................................................................................................................. 15	
What Students Were Doing .................................................................................................. 15	
What The Teacher Was Doing .............................................................................................. 22	
Comparing Classroom Learning Communities .................................................................... 25	
CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................... 27	
REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................... 30	
STUDY TWO ............................................................................................................................... 32	
Epistemic Framing: Figuring Out Phenomena Versus Learning About Science ......................... 32	
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 32	
Scientific Curiosity ............................................................................................................... 33	
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ............................................................................................ 36	
Purpose.................................................................................................................................. 40	
Epistemic Authority. ............................................................................................................. 41	
Epistemic Agency. ................................................................................................................ 41	
OVERVIEW OF STUDY ......................................................................................................... 43	
METHODS ............................................................................................................................... 45	
RESULTS ................................................................................................................................. 49	
Ms. Nolan’s Classroom: Curiosity-Driven Discourse .......................................................... 54	
Introduction to Activities .................................................................................................. 54	
Questioning Purposes........................................................................................................ 56	
Metacommentary .............................................................................................................. 57	
Teacher’s Purposes ........................................................................................................... 58	
Epistemic Authority .......................................................................................................... 58	
Students’ Questions .......................................................................................................... 59	
Teacher’s Response to Students’ Questions and Difficulties ........................................... 60	
Students’ Epistemic Agency ............................................................................................. 61	
Ms. Wei’s Classroom: Task-driven Discourse ..................................................................... 62	
Introduction to Activities .................................................................................................. 62	
Questioning Purposes........................................................................................................ 64	

	

vi

Metacommentary .............................................................................................................. 65	
Epistemic Authority .......................................................................................................... 65	
Students’ Questions .......................................................................................................... 66	
Teacher’s Response to Students’ Questions and Difficulties ........................................... 68	
Students’ Epistemic Agency ............................................................................................. 68	
Ms. Callahan’s Classroom: Rigor-Driven Discourse............................................................ 69	
Introduction to Activities .................................................................................................. 69	
Questioning Purposes........................................................................................................ 70	
Metacommentary, Epistemic Authority, and Teacher’s Purposes .................................... 72	
Students’ Questions and Teacher’s Responses ................................................................. 73	
Response to Students’ Difficulties .................................................................................... 74	
Students’ Epistemic Agency ............................................................................................. 74	
DISCUSSION ........................................................................................................................... 75	
Understanding Task-driven Discourse .................................................................................. 77	
Prioritizing Engagement ................................................................................................... 79	
Prioritizing Rigor .............................................................................................................. 80	
Assessment Practices ........................................................................................................ 82	
Implications for Future Research .......................................................................................... 83	
Limitations ............................................................................................................................ 84	
Contributions of the Study .................................................................................................... 85	
APPENDIX ............................................................................................................................... 88	
REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................... 95	
STUDY THREE ........................................................................................................................... 99	
Students’ Perceptions of Classroom Discourse ............................................................................ 99	
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 99	
Curiosity-Driven Discourse and Theories of Motivation ................................................... 101	
Measuring Students’ Perceptions of Curiosity-Driven Discourse ...................................... 105	
SURVEY INSTRUMENT ...................................................................................................... 107	
RESULTS ............................................................................................................................... 111	
DISCUSSION ......................................................................................................................... 112	
CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 116	
APPENDIX ............................................................................................................................. 118	
REFERENCES ....................................................................................................................... 126	

	

vii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1. Student Questions in Mr. Smith’s and Ms. Jones’ Classrooms. Conceptual questions
indicated by +…………………………………………………………………………………….21
Table 1.2. Recommendations for practice…...……….………………………………………….29
Table 2.1. Descriptions of the case study classrooms………………………….…...……………46
Table 2.2. Summary of the video coding scheme. The codes in green represent curiosity-driven
framing, the codes in red represent task-driven framing and the codes in yellow are taskdriven or curiosity-driven depending on the context…………………………………………….48
Table 2.3. Summary of discourse in the five case study classrooms…………………………….51
Table 2.4. Summary of curiosity-driven discourse in Ms. Nolan’s classroom………………......76
Table 2.5. Summary of video data from each case study classroom…………………………….89
Table 3.1. Scales measuring key aspects of curiosity-driven discourse included in the survey..109
Table 3.2. Results of the student survey in the case study classrooms…………………………112
Table 3.3. Student Survey Results on Each Scale by Classroom………………………………121

	

viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1. Student learning gains in Carbon TIME classrooms. Error bars represent 95%
confidence intervals. Dashed lines represent (a) no learning and (b) average learning gain for all
teachers………………………………………………………………………...………………...13
Figure 3.1. Key components of curiosity-driven discourse measured by the student survey…..106
Figure 3.2. Student Perceptions of Mastery Goal Structure………..…………………………..123
Figure 3.3. Student Perceptions of Academic Efficacy………………………………………...123
Figure 3.4. Student Perceptions of Academic Press……………………………………………124
Figure 3.5. Student Perceptions of Autonomy………………………………………………….124
Figure 3.6. Student Perceptions of Curiosity in Classroom Discourse…………………………125
Figure 3.7. Student Perceptions of the Role of Their Ideas in Classroom Discourse…………..125

	

ix

INTRODUCTION TO DISSERTATION
The discourse in most high school science classrooms traditionally has focused on
learning about science topics. However, the vision for three-dimensional learning put forth in
the National Research Council’s (NRC) Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2011)
contends that more productive science learning is aimed at figuring out natural phenomena.
Three-dimensional learning requires experiences that engage students in developing and using all
three dimensions of science—practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas—to
explain observable natural phenomena. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS
Lead States, 2013) integrates the three dimensions into performance expectations and asserts
that, “learning to explain phenomena and solve problems is the central reason students engage in
the three dimensions” (NGSS Website, 2016). Therefore, the NGSS represent not just a new way
to package content and process goals for science education, but a new paradigm for science
learning that positions students as epistemic agents who engage in science practices, apply
crosscutting concepts, and develop and use disciplinary core ideas to explain phenomena in
science classrooms.
If figuring out phenomena is central to three-dimensional learning, it raises the question,
how can classroom discourse orient students toward figuring out phenomena rather than simply
learning about science topics? Instruction aimed at figuring out phenomena requires that
questions about the natural world and a shared drive to answer those questions are at the core of
classroom discourse. I call this curiosity-driven discourse because it is motivated by the desire
to explain natural phenomena. It differs from typical classroom discourse, which I call taskdriven discourse, aimed at procedural display (Bloome, Puro, & Theodorou, 1989) primarily in
the purposes that are established for learning activities. Curiosity-driven discourse is focused on

	

1

figuring out phenomena by engaging in scientific practices and applying disciplinary core ideas
and crosscutting concepts. Classrooms engaged in procedural display may engage in many of
the same activities, but their purposes for doing so are limited to completing the task at hand,
generally with the intention of acquiring some discrete knowledge or skill.
Through classroom discourse, teachers and students negotiate the purposes of their
activities which orients students toward particular types of learning. My dissertation aims to
describe how a taken-as-shared frame for understanding “What are we doing here?” in science
classrooms emerges through classroom discourse, and how it positions students in terms of
figuring out phenomena or learning about science topics. Each of the three studies I present
were carried out within the context of the Carbon Transformations in Matter and Energy
(Carbon TIME) project. Carbon TIME is an example of design-based implementation research
(Fishman, Penuel, Allen, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2013), which brings together researchers and
practitioners to address and study issues related to implementation of new pedagogical
approaches. The classrooms in this study were implementing an NGSS-aligned curriculum
designed to support students’ three-dimensional learning about carbon-transforming processes in
high school biology. Thus, my research is aimed both at advancing theory and informing
practice around productive discourse in science classrooms.
The first paper, Supporting Three-Dimensional Learning Through Curiosity-Driven
Classroom Discourse, is aimed at a practitioner audience. It introduces my conceptualization of
curiosity-driven discourse and how it fosters three-dimensional learning. In this study, I
analyzed classroom videos to compare the discourse in two classrooms that demonstrated the
highest and lowest learning gains on Carbon TIME assessments during the 2012-2013 school
year. This was a pilot study in which I developed the coding framework for curiosity driven-

	

2

discourse through grounded theory methods (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Rather than describe the
coding framework in detail in this paper, I used the results to develop a storyline that contrasted
what the students were doing in the two different classrooms and what the teachers did that lead
to those differences. Thus, this paper illustrates the differences between classroom discourse
aimed at figuring out phenomena (in the high learning gains classroom) and learning about
science (in the low learning gains classroom).
The second paper, Framing Classroom Activities as Figuring Out Phenomena Versus
Learning About Science: The Role of Curiosity-Driven Discourse in Three-Dimensional Science
Learning, is the centerpiece of my dissertation. In this study I applied and refined the coding
framework developed in the first study to compare the discourse in five high school classrooms
during the 2015-2016 school year. I was able to dig deeper into classroom discourse by
analyzing three videos recorded during the first Carbon TIME instructional unit from five case
study classrooms. I attended specifically to the purposes that teachers’ and students’ talk and
actions conveyed for Carbon TIME activities throughout the unit, and how those resulted in a
curiosity-driven or task-driven taken-as-shared frame for classroom discourse.
In the second study I conceptualized teachers’ practices related to establishing the
purposes for classroom activities and supporting students in framing activities as a way to figure
out phenomena as an important form of scaffolding in science classroom discourse. In addition,
I conceptualized students’ purposes for classroom activities through the questions that they asked
during lessons. I used students’ questions along with how the teachers’ practices positioned
students with respect to developing and using knowledge to describe students’ epistemic agency
in each classroom. This reflects the notion that student agency is both a product of their own
actions as well as the context within which they act (Bandura, 1997). Thus, in the second study

	

3

describes in detail specific features of classroom discourse and how these orient students either
toward figuring out phenomena or learning about science.
I found that only one of the five case study classrooms achieved curiosity-driven
discourse aimed at figuring out phenomena. This supports the notion that sustaining curiositydriven discourse in science classrooms is complex and challenging and speaks to why it is
presently relatively uncommon. This study contributes rich descriptions of curiosity-driven and
task-driven discourse in well-managed classrooms lead by competent teachers who faithfully
enacted the Carbon TIME curriculum. My analysis demonstrates that NGSS-aligned curriculum
is not sufficient to ensure three-dimensional learning aimed at figuring out phenomena. The
study suggests key practices that teachers engage in to support curiosity-driven discourse and
illuminates some of the challenges associated with establishing and maintaining it.
The third paper, How Do Students Perceive the Discourse in Their Science Classrooms?
represents my foray into the educational psychology literature to better conceptualize curiositydriven classroom discourse and its influence on students’ motivation to learn science. The paper
describes how my theoretical framework for curiosity-driven classroom discourse relates to key
constructs in the educational psychology literature and the student survey that I developed to
measure these constructs. The survey consisted of multiple scales and was administered to the
students in each of the five case study classrooms (from study 2) when they had finished
implementing the Carbon TIME curriculum. I had two main goals in developing, administering,
and analyzing the survey: (1) compare students’ perceptions of classroom discourse across the
case study classrooms to my findings from the video analysis, and (2) determine whether
students’ responses on the survey could be used in place of more time-intensive observations of
classroom discourse.

	

4

My analysis of the student survey yielded somewhat surprising results. First, I found that the
mean scores for each scale revealed the same pattern across the classrooms. This suggests that
the scales were not measuring discrete variables as described in the educational psychology
literature, but rather that each of the scales are measuring aspects of the same construct. In
addition, analysis of the survey total scores indicated that students’ perception of the discourse in
their classrooms did not align with my conclusions about which classrooms were more curiositydriven and which were more task-driven. These differences are likely due to the fact that
students’ perceptions of classroom discourse are primarily influenced by their other classroom
experiences. Thus, the results of this study raise serious concerns about the legitimacy of claims
made by studies that rely only on student surveys. While I was not able to clearly link classroom
discourse with students’ perceptions and their motivation to learn, developing the survey was
helpful for conceptualizing the affective dimensions of curiosity and how curiosity-driven
discourse influences student motivation. In addition, the results suggest that, as a whole,
students in all five Carbon TIME classrooms were motivated to learn and had positive
perceptions of the discourse in their classrooms.
Overall my dissertation advances both theory and practice by conceptualizing curiosity about
the natural world as the driver of productive science classroom discourse that fosters threedimensional learning. Drawing on rich descriptions from diverse high school classrooms, I
describe how curiosity-driven discourse positions students as epistemic agents responsible for
figuring out phenomena as well as how task-driven discourse orients students toward learning
about authoritative science knowledge. My analysis demonstrates the importance of clearly
establishing driving questions about a phenomenon to anchor an instructional unit and describes
teaching practices that scaffold students’ sensemaking and position them as epistemic agents.

	

5

My dissertation also uncovers key challenges that teachers face in establishing and maintaining
curiosity-driven discourse. These insights can benefit practitioners, teacher educators, and
researchers as they work to create classroom communities that promote three-dimensional
science learning.

	

6

REFERENCES

	

7

REFERENCES
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: W.H. Freeman and
Company.
Bloome, D., Puro, P., & Theodorou, E. (1989). Procedural display and classroom lessons.
Curriculum Inquiry, 19(3), 265-291.
Fishman, B. J., Penuel, W. R., Allen, A.-R., Cheng, B. H., & Sabelli, N. (2013). Design-based
implementation research: An emerging model for transforming the relationship of
research and practice. National Society for the Study of Education, 112(2), 136-156.
Glaser, B. G. & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for
Qualitative Research. London: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson.
National Research Council (NRC). (2011). A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices,
Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Retrieved from
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13165/a-framework-for-k-12-science-education-practicescrosscutting-concepts
NGSS Lead States. (2013). Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. Retrieved
from https://www.nextgenscience.org
NGSS Website (September, 2016). Using phenomena in NGSS-designed lessons and units.
Retreived from
http://nextgenscience.org/sites/default/files/Using%20Phenomena%20in%20NGSS.pdf

	

8

STUDY ONE
How Curiosity-Driven Classroom Discourse Supports Three-Dimensional Learning
INTRODUCTION
The National Research Council’s (NRC) Framework for K-12 Science Education (2011)
and the resulting Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States, 2013) call for
the integration of science practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas into threedimensional learning experiences to prepare scientifically literate citizens. Therefore, the NRC
Framework and the NGSS advocate curricula and instruction in which the main goal is to help
students develop scientific explanations of natural phenomena. Students should engage in the
work of scientists (scientific practices) while applying scientific habits of mind (crosscutting
concepts) to develop and use scientific knowledge (disciplinary core ideas). This contrasts with
the science instruction typical in most classrooms which “emphasizes discrete facts with a focus
on breadth over depth, and does not provide students with engaging opportunities to experience
how science is actually done” (NRC, 2012, p. 1). Thus, the NGSS represent more than just a new
set of standards, but a new paradigm for science teaching and learning that reorients classroom
discourse from “learning about a topic to figuring out why or how something happens” (NGSS
Website, 2016).
The notion of three-dimensional learning is supported by research from the learning
sciences and from science studies, which seeks to understand of the work of scientists through
social, historical, and philosophical lenses. Three-dimensional learning reflects the aim that
Duschl (2008) refers to as “harmonizing conceptual, epistemological, and social learning goals”
(p. 269). As Duschl points out, this represents “a shift from teaching about what to teaching
about how and why” (p. 270). Emphasizing how and why science is done requires attention to

	

9

what counts as knowledge and how it is validated as well as to how people work together to
address scientific questions and negotiate meaning. Therefore, in order for three-dimensional
learning to occur, classrooms must become communities of practice in which students are
making sense of the natural world.
Curiosity About the Natural World Drives Three-Dimensional Learning
An underlying assumption of phenomena-driven, three-dimensional learning is that the
work of scientists is driven by curiosity about the natural world and that students are also
inherently curious about the world around them. The NRC Framework asserts that, “many
scientific studies, such as the search for the planets orbiting distant stars, are driven by curiosity
and undertaken with the aim of answering a question about the world or understanding an
observed pattern” (p. 47). In addition to emphasizing the role of curiosity in the work of
scientists, the NRC Framework contends that children are innately curious about the world. The
Framework suggests that building on their curiosity provides intrinsic motivation to learn science
because “The actual doing of science or engineering can pique students’ curiosity, capture their
interest, and motivate their continued study” (p. 43). Thus, curiosity about the natural world is at
the root of three-dimensional learning, both because it reflects the aims of scientific inquiry and
because of its role in motivating students’ science learning.
When I say that curiosity drives three-dimensional learning, I have a specific meaning in
mind. Instead of thinking of curiosity as an individual personality trait or mental state, I am
using curiosity as a description of the motivation for particular activities in a community of
practice (e.g. a classroom or a group of scientists). So, in this sense, curiosity about the natural
world motivates the group to ask questions about natural phenomena and engage in scientific
practices in order to develop answers to those questions. Therefore, if students are to engage in

	

10

three-dimensional learning, classroom activities must scaffold their personal and collective
curiosity about natural phenomena as well as their use of each of the three dimensions to develop
personally meaningful answers to their questions.
Curiosity-driven three-dimensional learning as I have defined it above happens through
classroom talk and activities (which I summarize with the term, “discourse”) that orient the work
of students towards figuring out phenomena. In this study I compared the discourse in two
classrooms that were alike in some important ways—both were well-managed and engaged in
the same lessons from the same NGSS-aligned curriculum—but very different in terms of
students’ three-dimensional learning. My findings point to curiosity—a shared drive among
members of the classroom community to make sense of the phenomena that the lessons focused
on—as a key difference between the classrooms. In this article I describe the differences in the
discourse of the classrooms, and what the teachers did that led to those differences. While there
are many potential reasons for the differences in classroom discourse including the prior
experiences and knowledge of the teachers and students, here I focus on describing how the
discourse differed and its effects on students’ opportunities to learn.
CONTEXT AND METHODS
The Carbon Transformations in Matter and Energy (Carbon TIME) project is a
collaboration between researchers and teachers that began in 2010 and has been funded by the
National Science Foundation. Carbon TIME is an example of design-based implementation
research (Fishman, Penuel, Allen, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2013), which brings together researchers
and practitioners to address and study issues related to implementation of new pedagogical
approaches. A key piece of the project has been developing and refining a three-dimensional
curriculum for teaching about processes that transform matter and energy in organisms,

	

11

ecosystems, and global systems including: combustion, photosynthesis, cellular respiration,
digestion, and biosynthesis. The Carbon TIME curriculum (freely available online at
http://carbontime.bscs.org) consists of six phenomena-based units in which students learn about
carbon-transforming processes in order to explain the functioning of plants, animals and
decomposers as well as ecological and global carbon cycling. In addition to curriculum
development, the development and validation of three-dimensional assessments of students’
understanding of carbon-transforming processes has been a central component of the Carbon
TIME project (Mohan, Chen, & Anderson, 2009; Jin & Anderson, 2012).
Assessment data indicates that the Carbon TIME curriculum substantially increases
students’ understanding of carbon-transforming processes. However, we have also found that
student learning gains differ significantly among classrooms implementing the curriculum.
Figure 1.1 shows the learning gains (change in score from pre to post test) on the overall Carbon
TIME assessment for one cohort of classrooms during 2012-2013 school year. The confidence
intervals for the two teachers whose classrooms I investigated are circled on Figure 1.1. I have
given them the pseudonyms of Ms. Jones (Teacher #1) and Mr. Smith (Teacher #18).

	

12

Figure 1.1. Student learning gains in Carbon TIME classrooms. Error bars represent 95%
confidence intervals. Dashed lines represent (a) no learning and (b) average learning gain for all
teachers.

Mr. Smith’s
Class
Ms. Jones’
Class

Each of the participating teachers videotaped one lesson from each of three different
Carbon TIME units. In this article I report on a comparison of the videotaped lessons from Ms.
Jones’ and Mr. Smith’s classrooms—the teachers whose students demonstrated the lowest and
highest learning gains.
Ms. Jones and Mr. Smith provided videotapes of the same lessons from three different
Carbon TIME units: the burning ethanol investigation (Systems and Scale unit), the digestion and
biosynthesis modeling activity (Animals unit), and the photosynthesis modeling activity (Plants
unit). The videos from Mr. Smith’s classroom were between 40 and 60 minutes in length. Ms.
Jones’ videos were 20 – 40 minutes in length due to shorter class periods at her school as well as
the fact that she recorded only the specific Carbon TIME activities rather than the entire class
period. In the videos both teachers faithfully enacted the Carbon TIME curriculum and ran wellmanaged classrooms. The students in both classrooms appeared attentive and engaged in the

	

13

activities. In addition, the videos from both classrooms demonstrate much more teacher-talk
than student-talk. Both teachers engaged students in whole class-discussions primarily through a
call-and-response format in which the teacher posed a question and the students provided words
or phrases in response.
The teachers and students also differed in important ways. Mr. Smith had used the
Carbon TIME curriculum previously, while Ms. Jones had not. In addition, Mr. Smith and Ms.
Jones taught at different schools which differed in their demographics. Mr. Smith taught a
suburban high school serving approximately 1,700 students in Washington state, while Ms. Jones
taught a rural high school serving approximately 1,000 students in California. While both
classrooms were introductory biology courses, Mr. Smith’s students were primarily 9th graders,
while Ms. Jones’ students were primarily 10th graders. Both schools had significant minority
populations, but Mr. Smith’s school had notably fewer economically disadvantaged students than
Ms. Jones’ school.
Although these differences between the teachers and the students likely contributed to the
differences in classroom discourse and student learning outcomes, there is real value in looking
closely at how the talk and actions differed in these two classrooms and how these created
opportunities for different types of learning. To characterize differences in discourse—the
purpose and substance of the conversation for the participants—I analyzed the videos through an
iterative process of coding the talk and actions of the teachers and students (Miles, Huberman,
and Saldana, 2014). Using StudioCode software I marked specific instances of teacher and
student talk and actions, producing a corresponding timeline for the lesson. After coding the
classroom discourse in the six videos, I used the timelines to compare and contrast the discourse
in Mr. Smith’s and Ms. Jones’ classrooms.

	

14

RESULTS
My comparison of the discourse in Mr. Smith’s and Ms. Jones’ classrooms includes three
key parts:
1. What students were doing: The learning gains scores show that students’ learning was
very different in the two classrooms. I think that these results can be explained by
looking at what the students were doing. I looked in particular at the kinds of questions
the students were answering, the kinds of questions that students were asking, and the
roles that they played as learners in the classroom.
2. What the teacher was doing: What students do in the classroom is largely the result of
the expectations set by the teacher. I looked in particular at how teachers framed the
purposes for activities in their classrooms, how they scaffolded students’ talk and work,
and the sources of authority they appealed to support knowledge claims.
3. Comparing classroom learning communities: I conclude by putting it all together,
describing how teachers and students together constructed two very different kinds of
classroom communities while studying the same content and using the same teaching
materials. One classroom constructed a curiosity-driven community focused on figuring
out phenomena, while the other constructed an task-driven community focused on
learning about scientific information.
What Students Were Doing
In both Mr. Smith’s and Ms. Jones’ classrooms there were two main structures for
students’ participation: whole-class discussions and small-group work. Because the cameras
were positioned in one location in the room, whole-class discussions were better captured than
small group work. So, while my analysis of what students were doing draws on both, I have

	

15

more evidence about the discourse during whole-group discussions. In particular, I noted how
students answered their teacher’s questions as well as the questions that they posed. Whole-class
discussions in both classrooms were structured similarly in that the teacher asked a series of
questions to which the students responded, typically by calling out words or phrases. At first
glance, these whole-class discussions looked very similar. However, upon a closer look it
became clear that the role of the students differed in the two classrooms. In Ms. Jones’
classroom the students were positioned as receivers of knowledge as they learned about
scientific topics, while in Mr. Smith’s classroom the students were positioned as developers and
users of knowledge as they figured out phenomena.
For example, in both classrooms the photosynthesis modeling activity was preceded by a
whole class discussion in which the students called out answers to the teachers’ questions. One
part of this discussion involved identifying where the elements that make up organic compounds
in a plant come from. In Ms. Jones’ class she used the Carbon TIME PowerPoint slides to ask a
series of questions about the elements making up glucose:
Ms. Jones: A question that we want to think about is, where does the sugar come
from? So, just think about that for a second. Where does the sugar come from?
Female student: [immediately raises her hand and teacher indicates that she can
respond] the carbon and light energy
Ms. Jones: The carbon and light energy and probably what is the third thing?
Students: Water
Ms. Jones: Water, because a sugar has what three elements in it?
Student: Glucose
Ms. Jones: Glucose is the name of the sugar, but what are the atoms?
Male student: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen
Ms. Jones: Carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. So carbon dioxide has what?
Students: carbon and oxygen
Ms. Jones: Carbon and oxygen. So is that enough to make a sugar?
Students: No
Ms. Jones: No. So it has to get that hydrogen from somewhere else, right? It is
important to try to figure out. We will get to it, just think about it. [moves on to
discuss organic versus inorganic]

	

16

At the end of this exchange Ms. Jones indicated that it is important to figure out where
the hydrogen in glucose comes from. However, she immediately followed that statement with,
“We will get to it, just think about it.” and then moved on to a different line of questioning.
Thus, the question of where the hydrogen in glucose comes from was a rhetorical one, and not
something that the students were responsible for figuring out. Rather, their job was to learn
scientific information when it was presented to them. Although it had already been established
that carbon dioxide, water, and light were necessary to make glucose, and that glucose is made
up of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, the teacher did not ask students to reconcile these two facts.
The class did not come back to the question of where the hydrogen in glucose comes from during
the rest of the lesson.
After discussing the reactants and products of the photosynthesis reaction as a class, Ms.
Jones said:
So, overall process is… we have water going from the roots into the plant up to
the leaves, because leaves are where photosynthesis is taking place, right? And
carbon dioxide from air to leaves. It goes into the tree and then we have sugar
that is created and oxygen that is released. Now you guys are going to model that
process with the actual molecular compounds. So, I’m going to give you your
modeling poster and your kits.
The students followed the instructions on the printed handout to build the reactants and
products of photosynthesis with molecular modeling kits. Thus, their role in the modeling
activity was to follow directions and practice naming the reactants and products of the reaction.
In both of the other videos of lessons in Ms. Jones’ classroom the role of the students was the
same: to follow directions and complete tasks that allowed them to learn scientific information
that was already known.
In Mr. Smith’s class a similar discussion about where the atoms in organic molecules
come from occurred before the photosynthesis modeling activity. However, Mr. Smith used a

	

17

children’s book (which was not part of the Carbon TIME curriculum) to contextualize the
process using the phenomenon of a tree growing:
Mr. Smith: So they [trees] are made out of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. But
where does that stuff… where do the atoms come from in order to make those
things?
Students: air
Mr. Smith: Yeah, from the air right? Somewhere in this book there is a nice little
breakdown. If you separated a 4,000 pound tree into atoms, you would find
[writing on board]… 1760 pounds of carbon. The same number, 1760 pounds of
oxygen. Where did that oxygen come from?
Students: Carbon dioxide
Mr. Smith: Yeah, carbon dioxide… maybe… where is the other source it could
come from?
Students: water
Mr. Smith: It could have come from water. So we haven’t really identified the
exact source of it [oxygen]. But, how much do you think is hydrogen?
Students: less
Mr. Smith: 240 pounds of hydrogen. What else do I need to add to the mix here?
I’ve got carbons, oxygens, hydrogens… what else do we need?
Students: nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur [students calling out, teacher repeats each
as he hears them]
Mr. Smith: As it turns out about 240 pounds of the tree are these other things.
We can call these other things minerals. Where do those minerals come from?
Students: Soil
Mr. Smith: Yeah… from the soil, right. We saw that when those plants
increased in mass, they did take something from the soil. So it must be that, that
mineral stuff. What are they using the nitrogen for? [Silence for 7 seconds] What
molecule are they incorporating nitrogen into?
Students: proteins
Mr. Smith: Yeah, into proteins right. If you look at this protein here [pointing to
a picture on the board] it has nitrogen present in it.
Although the students in Mr. Smith’s class were supplying words or phrases to answer
the teacher’s questions just as in Ms. Jones’ classroom, the discourse in Mr. Smith’s class
differed in a number of important ways. First, the conversation was broader in that it focused not
just on the atoms in glucose, but the atoms in carbohydrates, fats, and proteins that make up a
tree. It was therefore connected to a larger phenomenon—plant growth— that gave the
discussion meaning. Second, the students were responsible for figuring out where the atoms

	

18

making up the tree come from. Mr. Smith’s questions built on each other to carefully scaffold
their responses, but the sense is that students were figuring out where the mass of the tree comes
from by answering his questions. Mr. Smith fostered this focus on sensemaking by pointing out
uncertainty and asking students to make predictions. For example, when students said that the
oxygen in a tree comes from carbon dioxide he agreed, but also asked for other possibilities.
When students suggested that the oxygen could also come from water pointed out that, “We
haven’t really identified the exact source of it” and then asked students to make a prediction
about the relative amount of hydrogen in the tree.
After the whole-class discussion of the reactants and products in the photosynthesis
reaction, Mr. Smith said, “So, how do we get from carbon dioxide and water to glucose and
oxygen? Your job is to show me how it’s done.” Thus, the students were expected to use the
molecular model kits to figure out what was happening to the reactants and products on an
atomic-molecular scale that resulted in the production of glucose (and eventually other organic
molecules) in a tree. In both of the other lessons in Mr. Smith’s classroom the role of the
students was the same: to figure out the hidden mechanisms responsible for a particular
phenomenon.
The differing roles that students played in the examples above are representative of the
broader pattern of discourse in these classrooms, summarized in Table 1.1 below. In Mr.
Smith’s classroom nearly all of the instances of teacher questioning (19 out of 23 total)
positioned students as making sense of phenomena. However, in Ms. Jones classroom the
students’ role in most instances of teacher questioning (13 out of 15 total) was to supply correct
answers to the teacher’s questions. In addition, the students’ own questions demonstrate a
similar pattern. In Mr. Smith’s classroom the students asked 13 questions across the three

	

19

lessons, 11 of which were conceptual in nature. In Ms. Jones’ classroom the students asked nine
questions total, two of which were conceptual in nature, while the rest were procedural or factbased. Conceptual questions indicate that students are trying to make sense of phenomena or
scientific models, while procedural questions indicate that students are focused on using correct
vocabulary or following directions. To distinguish conceptual questions from other types I used
the context in which the question was asked, the words the student used, and the teacher’s
response to understand the meaning that the question conveyed within the classroom community.
In summary, the students played very different roles in these two classrooms. In Ms.
Jones’ classroom the students’ role was to follow directions and learn scientific information.
Thus, their questions focused on facts and procedures. In Mr. Smith’s classroom the students
were collectively curious, working with the teacher to figure out phenomena and asking
conceptual questions to help make sense of what they were learning. The students’ posttest
performances suggest that these differences had consequences for three-dimensional science
learning. In the next part we look at how differences in the students’ roles were connected with
differences in how the teachers framed and scaffolded the activities.

	

20

Table 1.1. Student Questions in Mr. Smith’s and Ms. Jones’ Classrooms. Conceptual questions
indicated by +.
Lesson
Mr. Smith’s Classroom
Ms. Jones’ Classroom
+ Why is the H to the right of the
oxygen? [asking about OH group
in molecular formula of ethanol]
+ What chemical is in the fire
extinguisher?
- Do we put the glass on top [of the
burning ethanol]?
+ Wouldn’t this be H-6 [asking why
ethanol was written as C2H5OH]?
+ Do we take this apart [molecular
model] and put it back together
again?
+ Do the extra bonds form light and
heat energy?
+ What happened to the hydrogen?
Digestion &
- Does this look good [asking
biosynthesis
teacher to check model]?
modeling
+ Isn’t it poisonous to breathe in
activity
CO2?
Photosynthesis + Why can’t plants get nitrogen from
modeling
the air?
activity
+ Do [real] molecules fall apart that
easy [as our models do]?
+ If we burn glucose, what will
happen… because it is organic?
+ So can you actually burn it
[glucose]?
Burning
ethanol
investigation

	

	

21

+ Won’t putting the lid on put out
the ethanol?

- Is diffusion from polymers to
monomers [clarifying
vocabulary terms]?
+ Wouldn’t carbon-hydrogen
bonds be a little lower energy
[than carbon-carbon bonds]?
Students asked the following
questions while modeling the
reaction. The teacher responded
with procedural information.
- What color is oxygen [in the
molecular modeling kit]?
- Do we put these all together [the
atoms in the glucose molecule]?
- What do you mean oxygen gas?
- How many oxygens are we
supposed to need?
- How many atoms do you begin
with?
- Do you need to make this bigger
or smaller [to balance the
equation]?

What The Teacher Was Doing
The students in Ms. Jones’ and Mr. Smith’s classrooms carried out different roles
because the teachers established different purposes for the activities and supported students in
different ways. The main difference was how the teachers framed the purpose of the activities in
which students engaged. Although both classrooms carried out the same activities, the teachers
indicated different purposes for these activities in the way that they introduced them and in how
they shared the procedures with students. Mr. Smith framed each activity as a way to answer a
driving question about a phenomenon and expected the students to use empirical evidence and
scientific models to figure out a scientific answer to that question. In contrast, an explicit
purpose was never stated for activities in Ms. Jones’ classroom. Instead, the implicit purpose
conveyed for each activity was to learn complete the activity to learn scientific information.
Mr. Smith explicitly identified the purpose of each lesson by stating a question about a
specific observable phenomenon within the first 10 minutes of the class period. In addition, he
reiterated this driving question at key points during the lesson. For example, Mr. Smith started
the ethanol investigation by explaining that students were going to apply what they learned about
changes in matter in the previous investigation of soda water losing its fizz to answer the
question, “What happens when ethanol burns?” He restated this question at two other key points
in the lesson. One was when a student asked whether they should place a container over the
burning ethanol. Mr. Smith confirmed that they should cover the dish of burning ethanol and
then said, “We are interested in knowing what is happening to the ethanol right? Otherwise,
whatever is happening to it will just go up into the air.” Mr. Smith chose not to give students the
Carbon TIME handout with the procedure for the investigation, but instead lead a discussion of
how they could adapt the procedure they had used to study soda water losing its fizz to answer

	

22

their new question about ethanol burning. The students recognized that they needed to record the
mass of ethanol before and after burning it and that they could use bromothymol blue (BTB) to
test for the presence of carbon dioxide.
While the students waited for the results of the ethanol investigation they began to build
molecular models of the reactants in the combustion of ethanol. Mr. Smith related the modeling
activity back to the same driving question for the investigation by saying, “There may be some
things that we are not seeing that may be useful to us in terms of being able to explain what
happens to ethanol when it burns.” He explained that using the molecular models would help
them better understand what was happening to the ethanol at a scale too small to see. In addition
to making this conceptual connection, Mr. Smith framed the modeling activity as a way to figure
out an unknown product of the combustion of ethanol. After the students built the reactants
(ethanol and oxygen molecules), he asked them to observe what was happening in the container
in which they had placed the burning ethanol. When a student stated that the BTB was turning
yellow, Mr. Smith asked a series of questions that helped establish that carbon dioxide was being
produced as ethanol burned.
After establishing that carbon dioxide was one of the products of the reaction, Mr. Smith
told students to use their molecular models to determine “how many carbon dioxides are formed
and what is this other molecule that is forming and give me a number too. Use your models to
tell me.” Thus, Mr. Smith framed the investigation as a way to collect empirical evidence to help
answer the question “What happens to ethanol when it burns?” then used the modeling activity to
figure out the unknown product (water). Mr. Smith positioned the students to figure out what
happens when ethanol burns by clearly stating the driving question, “What happens to ethanol
when it burns?” multiple times during the lesson. In addition, he established the source of

	

23

authority for answering that question as empirical evidence and scientific models. Mr. Smith’s
conceptual questioning throughout the lesson helped students to clearly connect the procedures
to the driving question and scaffolded their sensemaking about the empirical evidence they
collected and the models they were using. This pattern of clearly stating a question about a
phenomenon, relating the procedures for the activity to that question, and emphasizing the role of
empirical evidence and scientific models in answering the question was also evident in the other
two videos from Mr. Smith’s class.
In Ms. Jones’ classroom an explicit purpose for each lesson was not captured in the
videos. Instead, facts and procedures were emphasized. For example, after students wrote
predictions for the ethanol burning investigation, the teacher turned on the camera and said, “Go
ahead and turn your paper over from the predictions side. On the back side are the procedures to
follow for actually doing the burning ethanol investigation.” It was clear that students had
written their predictions on the worksheet, but it is not clear whether or not they discussed their
predictions. The driving question suggested in the Carbon TIME Teacher’s Guide, “What
happens when ethanol burns?” was never stated during the recorded portion of the lesson, nor
was there any reference to the students’ predictions. Instead, the teacher emphasized following
the procedure on the handout. She read the procedure aloud to students and asked a series of
questions to check that students knew what they were expected to do.
Like Mr. Smith, Ms. Jones chose to move on to the modeling activity while students
waited for the results of the burning ethanol investigation, but for Ms. Jones this seemed to be
purely a logistical decision. She told the students to return to their seats for the modeling activity
once they had set up the investigation. Unfortunately, I don’t have any information about the
discourse during the modeling activity because she turned off the camera once the students had

	

24

set up the investigation. However, when the video camera was turned back on while students
collected their data from the burning ethanol investigation, there was no mention of the modeling
activity that they had been engaging in while the camera was off. (Ms. Jones likely turned the
camera off during the modeling activity because she did not view it as part of the investigation,
which we had asked teachers to record.)
Although Ms. Jones followed the directions in the Carbon TIME Teacher’s Guide, she
did not help students connect the procedures for the activities to the phenomena they were
learning about. In addition, Ms. Jones placed a strong emphasis on following directions. She
relied heavily on the printed directions for activities, and when students seemed to be struggling
her first response was to remind them to read the directions. This emphasis on following
directions, coupled with Ms. Jones’ fact-based questioning positioned the curriculum materials
as the source of authority in the classroom and established role of the students as receivers of
scientific information. Although they were expected to be actively engaged in the discussions
and activities, their role was to complete activities to learn about scientific ideas rather than to
figure out scientific phenomena.
Comparing Classroom Learning Communities
Ms. Jones’ and Mr. Smith’s classroom discourse provide concrete examples of the
differences between learning about scientific topics and figuring out phenomena. Ms. Jones’
classroom discourse established a task-driven community that made learning scientific facts the
main purpose for each activity, invoked the curriculum materials as the source of authority, and
positioned the students as responsible for following directions and reciting scientific information.
In contrast, Mr. Smith’s classroom discourse established a curiosity-driven community that made
answering questions about the natural world the main purpose for each activity, invoked

	

25

empirical evidence and scientific models as the source of authority, and positioned students as
responsible for figuring out an answer to the driving question.
The presence of a clear driving question about phenomena appears to be the key
difference between Mrs. Smith and Ms. Jones’ classrooms. By establishing a driving question
about a phenomenon as the purpose of each learning activity, Mr. Smith engaged students’
curiosity and framed activities as a means for answering scientific questions. Thus, in Mr.
Smith’s classroom students were positioned as developers and users of scientific information
responsible for figuring out phenomena. In contrast, in the absence of a driving question in Ms.
Jones’ classroom, students were positioned as receivers of scientific information responsible for
completing tasks and learning about science.
While establishing a driving question for lessons is essential, it would be a mistake to
conclude that simply stating a driving question would significantly alter classroom discourse. It
is important to recognize that Mr. Smith did a number of things that continually emphasized the
driving question and supported students in figuring out the answer. He clearly connected the
procedures for activities back to the driving question, established empirical evidence and
scientific models as the source of authority for answering the driving question, and scaffolded
student thinking through carefully sequenced questions that lead them to important conceptual
connections. Students responded with interest and a sense of collective curiosity, as indicated by
how they contributed their own conceptual questions to class discussions.
The fact that students in Mr. Smith’s classroom achieved significantly higher learning
gains on the three-dimensional Carbon TIME assessment is not surprising given that these
students were engaged in three-dimensional reasoning about phenomena during classroom
instruction. While Ms. Jones’ students also learned content knowledge, their assessment results

	

26

suggest that they were less prepared to apply their knowledge to new situations and had a less
robust understanding of the principles of matter and energy that underlie carbon-transforming
processes. The fact that Mr. Smith’s students achieved significantly higher learning gains than
Ms. Jones’ students suggests that the curiosity-driven discourse established in his classroom
better fosters three-dimensional learning.
CONCLUSION
Most teachers want their students to be curious about the science they are studying, and
to engage in figuring out rather than learning about science. This close look at two teachers’
classrooms shows us some key teaching strategies that helped Mr. Smith to achieve this goal. In
Mr. Smith’s classroom, the discourse established a curiosity-driven community that started with
questions about phenomena and positioned students as active inquirers and explainers. Although
both teachers were implementing the same NGSS-aligned curriculum, Mr. Smith organized each
class around an explicit driving question about phenomena and emphasized the role of empirical
evidence and scientific models in answering those questions. Thus, his students were able to
apply what they learned to explain similar phenomena on the Carbon TIME post-test. The
absence of a driving question in Ms. Jones’ classroom and a corresponding emphasis on facts
and procedures positioned her students in a way that lead to a different type of learning.
Students learned facts and procedures, but were not well prepared to apply the principles of
matter and energy to explain phenomena.
With many states and districts shifting to NGSS, much attention is given to the need for
curriculum materials that are aligned to these new goals. However, as Mr. Smith’s and Ms.
Jones’ classrooms demonstrate, aligned curriculum is not sufficient for ensuring threedimensional learning. The shift from learning about science to figuring out phenomena requires

	

27

creating a curiosity-driven classroom community that engages students in developing their own
answers to scientific questions and emphasizes the role of empirical evidence and scientific
models as the source of authority. Table 1.2 describes the recommendations for instruction
based on the findings of this study and the goals of NGSS. The recommendations are drawn
from the results of this study (How column), while the rationale (Why column) references the
NGSS supporting document titled “Using Phenomena in NGSS-Designed Units and Lessons”
(NGSS Website, 2016).

	

28

Table 1.2. Recommendations for practice.
What
Engaging with
specific
phenomena

Explicit
driving
questions
articulated and
emphasized

Authority for
claims comes
from empirical
evidence &
scientific
models

Students
positioned as
sensemakers

	

How
Teacher clearly identifies a specific
phenomenon and gives students the
opportunity to observe and discuss it.
Teachers must guide students toward what to
look at, what to look for, and what a
scientific explanation would include.
While students may be involved in
formulating questions about the phenomenon,
the teacher clearly articulates which
question(s) are being addressed in each
activity.

The teacher clearly articulates how empirical
evidence and scientific models support
scientific claims. The teacher scaffolds
students in collecting and analyzing evidence
and developing and using models to answer
driving questions about phenomena. The
teacher presses students to support claims
with evidence and relate scientific models to
observations of phenomena.
1. Teacher states the driving question
multiple times during a lesson and frames
activities as a means for answering those
questions.
2. Questions posed to students are carefully
sequenced to scaffold students’ thinking
rather than to evaluate their knowledge.
3. Students are given opportunities to discuss
their ideas in small and large group
discussions and encouraged to ask conceptual
questions.
4. Teachers respond to students’ questions by
scaffolding their sensemaking rather than
simply stating facts.

29

Why
“Anchoring the development of
general science ideas in
investigations of phenomena
helps students build more usable
and generative knowledge” (p.
3).
“There could potentially be
many different lines of inquiry
about the same phenomenon…
Teacher guidance may be
needed to help students
reformulate questions so they
can lead to grade- appropriate
investigations of important
science ideas” (p. 2).
Students develop an
appreciation for how scientific
knowledge is developed and
used. “The goal of building
knowledge in science is to
develop general ideas, based on
evidence, that can explain and
predict phenomena” (p. 1).
“Students who come to see how
science ideas can help explain
and model phenomena related to
compelling real world situations
learn to appreciate the social
relevance of science. They get
interested in and identify with
science as a way of
understanding and improving
real world contexts” (p. 1).

REFERENCES

	

30

REFERENCES
Duschl, R. (2008). Science education in three-part harmony: Balancing conceptual, epistemic,
and social learning goals. Review of Research in Education, 32(1), 268-291.
Fishman, B. J., Penuel, W. R., Allen, A.-R., Cheng, B. H., & Sabelli, N. (2013). Design-based
implementation research: An emerging model for transforming the relationship of
research and practice. National Society for the Study of Education, 112(2), 136-156.
Miles M.B., Huberman, A.M, & Saldaña, J. (2014). Qualitative Data Analysis: A Methods
Sourcebook, Third Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
National Research Council (NRC). (2011). A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices,
Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Retrieved from
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13165/a-framework-for-k-12-science-education-practicescrosscutting-concepts
NGSS Lead States. (2013). Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. Retrieved
from https://www.nextgenscience.org
NGSS Website (September, 2016). Using phenomena in NGSS-designed lessons and units.
Retreived from
http://nextgenscience.org/sites/default/files/Using%20Phenomena%20in%20NGSS.pdf

	

31

STUDY TWO
Epistemic Framing: Figuring Out Phenomena Versus Learning About Science
INTRODUCTION
The National Research Council’s (NRC; 2011) Framework for K-12 Science Education
lays out a new vision for science education that calls for the integration of the three dimensions
of science learning: science and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary
core ideas. Unlike previous conceptions of science learning that separated content and process
goals, in the NRC Framework, “learning is defined as the combination of both knowledge and
practice” (p. 254). The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States, 2013)
operationalized the NRC Framework’s vision by creating learning standards that integrate
science and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas into threedimensional performance expectations. The NRC Framework and NGSS supporting documents
emphasize that three-dimensional learning requires instruction that centers on explaining natural
phenomena.
The word phenomena, and its singular form, phenomenon, occur 114 times in the NRC
Framework. Phenomena are defined as “observable events that occur in the universe and that we
can use our science knowledge to explain or predict” (Achieve, 2016). The emphasis on
explaining phenomena in science classrooms reflects that the goal of scientists is to use empirical
evidence to explain and predict phenomena. NGSS supporting documents make the connection
between three-dimensional learning and explaining natural phenomena explicit by asserting that,
“Learning to explain phenomena and solve problems is the central reason students engage in the
three dimensions of the NGSS” (Achieve, 2016).

	

32

Thus, the defining feature of three-dimensional science instruction is that students engage
in the three dimensions to explain a phenomenon or solve a problem. “Engineering involves
designing solutions to problems that arise from phenomena, and using explanations of
phenomena to design solutions.” Therefore, engineering can provide a context for science
learning and help students to develop an appreciation for the connections among science,
technology, and society. Centering instruction around investigating and explaining natural
phenomena shifts the purpose in science classrooms from learning about science ideas to
engaging in scientific ways of thinking to figure out phenomena. NGSS supporting documents
explain that “By centering science education on phenomena that students are motivated to
explain, the focus of learning shifts from learning about a topic to figuring out why or how
something happens” (NGSS, 2016).
Scientific Curiosity
I suggest that curiosity is at the heart of the distinction between learning about science
and figuring out phenomena, and explains why the latter is more effective in terms of both
affective and cognitive outcomes. Curiosity is commonly defined as “the desire to learn or
know” (Dictionary.com), and has been described as a key factor in intrinsic motivation to learn
(Ryan & Deci, 2000). While it is often conceptualized as an individual personality trait or
mental state (Loewenstein, 1994), curiosity can also be conceptualized as a social practice. In
his book, The Practice of Theoretical Curiosity (2012), Mark Zuss asserts that, “curiosity is the
spirit of an abiding inquisitiveness realized in distinct social practices” (p. vii).
Curiosity is not simply a generic desire for any knowledge, but rather, it always has a
particular object (Inan, 2012; Schmitt & Lahroodi, 2008). For natural scientists, the object of
curiosity is natural phenomena. Their main objective is to develop naturalistic explanations for

	

33

phenomena supported by empirical evidence (Pennock, 2011). The NRC Framework asserts that
scientific studies
are driven by curiosity and undertaken with the aim of answering a question about the
world or understanding an observed pattern. For science, developing such an explanation
constitutes success in and of itself, regardless of whether it has an immediate practical
application (2011, pp. 47-48).
Scientists own accounts support this view of science as driven by curiosity about the world. For
example, Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman (1999) describes the “pleasure of
finding things out” (p. 12) and says that as scientists, “we’re exploring, we’re trying to find out
as much as we can about the world” (p. 23). Feynman’s account of science highlights both a
cognitive dimension—finding out—as well as an affective dimension—pleasure—of scientific
curiosity.
The cognitive and affective dimensions of curiosity are supported by many other
accounts of scientific work (e.g. Sacks, 2002; Shubin, 2009; Watson, 2001). They emphasize
that the goal of science is figuring out how the natural world works and reflect the enjoyment
inherent in satisfying one’s curiosity. In her biography of Barbara McClintock, Evelyn Fox
Keller observes that, “Good science cannot proceed without a deep emotional investment on the
part of the scientist” (Keller, 2003). This emotional investment is largely driven by curiosity and
the gratification that scientists get from the process of satisfying their curiosity. In addition to
providing individual motivation for scientific work, curiosity is taken as a shared value among
scientists that shapes their practices. Not only is curiosity the driving force behind asking
scientific questions, it motivates the other practices that scientists engage in to answer those
questions. For example, planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting
data, developing and using models, and constructing explanations are means to satisfying
curiosity about the natural world.

	

34

The practices in which scientists engage discipline their curiosity by “coupling it with a
method for establishing reliable facts empirically and using them to formulate hypotheses and
interpretations” (Ball, 2013, p. 396). Thus, scientific curiosity reflects not only a shared purpose
aimed at figuring out how the natural world works, but also an “epistemic value commitment to
the authority of empirical evidence” (Pennock, 2011, p. 199). Scientific explanations must be
supported by empirical evidence, which reflects scientists’ shared conviction that the natural
world operates in consistent ways that can be explained through careful observation and
experimentation. Scientific models integrate empirical evidence with inferences to represent
“current understanding of a system (or parts of a system) under study” (NRC, 2011, p. 57), and
are thus an important means of consolidating and communicating the reasoning that supports
scientific explanations.
Although scientific studies are often carried out by individuals and small groups, their
findings are subject to the scrutiny of the larger community of practice. The knowledge
produced by individuals and small groups is subject to peer review and corroboration with other
lines of evidence before it is accepted by the field. This holds scientists accountable to shared
model-based reasoning and the epistemic commitments of the community of practice in which
they participate. Therefore, scientists’ curiosity is shaped by their community through a shared
purpose of explaining natural phenomena and the shared commitment to the epistemic authority
of empirical evidence. However, the “pleasure of finding things out” is personal. In addition,
individual scientists exercise personal agency by engaging in scientific practices to contribute
knowledge to the field. Thus, I propose three key features of scientific curiosity:
1. Purpose: The shared goal of the scientific community is explaining natural
phenomena.

	

35

2. Epistemic Authority: The scientific community demonstrates a shared epistemic
commitment to the authority of empirical evidence.
3. Epistemic Agency: Individual scientists engage within the larger social structure
of science to carry out scientific practices, and are often motivated by a personal
desire to satisfy their own curiosity about the natural world.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The NRC Framework is built on the assumptions that science is driven by curiosity about
the natural world (p. 47-48) and that children are naturally curious about their world (p.11).
Science for All Americans linked scientists’ curiosity with students’ curiosity saying,
Scientists thrive on curiosity—and so do children. Children enter school alive
with questions about everything in sight, and they differ from scientists only in
not yet having learned how to go about finding answers and checking to see how
good those answers are. Science education that fosters curiosity and teaches
children how to channel that curiosity in productive ways serves both students and
society well (AAAS, 1989, Ch. 12).
Science for All Americans points out that students require support to refine their natural
inquisitiveness into scientific curiosity. Although children are naturally curious about the world,
scientific curiosity is disciplined by scientific practices and habits of mind that must be learned.
The NRC Framework lays out a vision for how engaging students in the science and engineering
practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas to explain phenomena can guide
students “toward a more scientifically based and coherent view of the sciences and engineering,
as well as the ways in which they are pursued and their results can be used” (2011, p. 11).
Achieving the vision of three-dimensional learning in classrooms is not an easy task.
Scientific curiosity shaped by scientific practices and ways of thinking is an important
accomplishment that takes years of experience to cultivate. However, the NRC Framework and

	

36

NGSS make pursuing scientific curiosity a goal for all students, not just those who will go on to
scientific careers. These documents point out that current science education in the United States
falls short of the vision of three-dimensional learning because instruction “emphasizes discrete
facts” and “does not provide students with engaging opportunities to experience how science is
actually done” (NRC, 2011, p. 1).
Decades of research in science classrooms has demonstrated that typical instruction promotes
procedural display rather than developing and using scientific knowledge in authentic ways.
Procedural display refers to “getting the lesson done” (Bloome, Puro, & Theodorou, 1989), and
is similar to what others have referred to as “doing school” (Ford & Wargo, 2012) or the
“classroom game” (Lemke, 1990). The construct of procedural display emphasizes both the
teachers’ and students’ perspective in terms of what is happening in the classroom, and how they
cooperate to perform a lesson. Bloome et al. (1989) describe procedural display as, “the
interactional strategies cooperatively and concertedly used by the teachers and the students” that
serve to get “through the lesson rather than substantive engagement in some academic content”
(p. 282).
Thus, procedural display is enacted through classroom discourse, which includes the talk,
routines, norms of interaction, and activities engaged in by teachers and students. While the term
discourse is sometimes used to refer to strictly written or spoken language, I follow Gee in using
the term more broadly to refer to “a socially accepted association among ways of using language,
of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially
meaningful group” (Gee, 1991). Thus, classroom discourse includes the talk, norms of
interaction, and activities and the meanings that these hold for the teachers and students that
make up a classroom community. Procedural display is deeply entrenched in classrooms

	

37

because it helps to maintain order and manage the performance for grade exchange (Doyle,
1983). Typical classroom discourse, which I call task-driven discourse, aims at procedural
display as students learn about science.
Classroom discourse aimed at procedural display is fundamentally different from threedimensional learning aimed at figuring out phenomena. Figuring out phenomena requires that
questions about the natural world and a shared drive to answer those questions are at the core of
classroom discourse. I call this curiosity-driven discourse because it is motivated by the desire
to explain natural phenomena. Task-driven and curiosity-driven discourse differ in the purposes
that are established for learning activities, the sources of authority that are invoked, and in how
students are positioned in terms of developing and using knowledge.
Curiosity-driven discourse is focused on figuring out phenomena by engaging in scientific
practices and applying disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts. Thus, just as in the
work of scientists, empirical evidence and scientific models serve as the authority for knowledge
claims in a classroom characterized by curiosity-driven discourse. When students take on the
role of figuring out phenomena they are positioned as epistemic agents (Stroupe, 2014)
responsible for constructing knowledge. Classrooms engaged in procedural display may engage
in many of the same activities, but their purposes for doing so are limited to completing the task
at hand, generally with the intention of acquiring some discrete knowledge or skill. In addition,
when classrooms are engaged in procedural display, authoritative knowledge from the teacher or
curriculum materials tends to serve as the source of authority for knowledge claims. Thus,
students are positioned as receivers of authoritative knowledge, rather than as epistemic agents
responsible for constructing knowledge.

	

38

Whether classroom discourse is curiosity-driven or task-driven largely depends on the
purposes that the teacher conveys for activities and the scaffolding they provide learners. Wood,
Bruner, and Ross (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) first used the term scaffolding to describe the
supports that an adult supplies to a child to help solve a problem that the child would be unable
to solve on their own. The term scaffolding is now used to describe a range of material or social
supports used to assist learners (Sawyer, 2014). Vygotsky’s (1978) notion of the zone of
proximal development (ZPD), the distance between what a novice can do on their own and what
they can do with support from others, is central to the concept of scaffolding. While assistance
can take many forms, scaffolding must be aligned to a learner’s ZPD in order to be effective
(Walqui, 2006). Researchers have pointed out that “Scaffolding supports the complex
interactions among cognition, motivation, and affect so students become engaged and remain
involved in learning for learning’s sake” (Turner, Meyer, Cox, Logan, & Thomas, 1998, p. 732).
Thus, this study rests on the assumption that scaffolding provides students with both cognitive
and affective support for science learning.
Curiosity-driven classroom discourse scaffolds scientific curiosity and fosters threedimensional learning. Through curiosity-driven discourse students not only construct new
knowledge, but also deepen their own curiosity and learn to channel it for intellectual pursuits.
Engel asserts that, “talking about what interests or perplexes children gives them a chance to
cultivate and expand their curiosity as an intellectual tool” (2011, p. 638). If students are also
held accountable to disciplinary norms concerning the use of empirical evidence and scientific
models, this type of discourse supports students in three-dimensional learning. Therefore,
curiosity-driven classroom discourse scaffolds all three aspects of scientific curiosity:

	

39

1. Purpose: A shared purpose of figuring out natural phenomena is scaffolded through
clearly articulated questions about phenomena that drive classroom activities.
2. Epistemic Authority: An epistemic commitment to the authority of empirical
evidence is scaffolded by requiring that claims be supported by empirical evidence
and clearly connecting scientific models and empirical evidence.
3. Epistemic Agency: Students’ epistemic agency is fostered as they take on the
responsibility of developing and using knowledge to figure out phenomena and their
personal curiosity is cultivated.
Purpose. Lemke asserts that “All social cooperation is based on participants sharing a
common sense of the structure of the activity: of what’s happening, what the options are for what
comes next, and who is supposed to do what (Lemke, 2001, p. 19). Students come to classrooms
with experiences and conceptions about the purposes for learning activities which influence their
participation in classroom discourse. However, teachers can invite students to participate in new
purposes by explicitly stating those purposes and supporting students in adopting them. Thus,
the teacher’s framing of the purpose of activities in an important form of scaffolding in
classroom discourse (Ford & Wargo, 2012).
Doyle pointed out that the main activity in classrooms is producing answers to teachers’
questions and that, “the answers a teacher accepts and rewards define the real tasks in
classrooms” (1983, p. 182). Similarly, Mehan (1978) described how classroom lessons are
structured through the initiate-respond-evaluate (I-R-E) discourse pattern in which the teacher
poses questions to the students and evaluates their responses. The I-R-E pattern facilitates
orderly interaction between the teacher and students and allows the teacher to maintain control of
the lesson, but it often reduces the knowledge and skills to be learned into discrete easily-

	

40

identifiable pieces such as facts and vocabulary. Thus, the I-R-E pattern tends foster procedural
display. However, multiple scholars point out that the I-R-E pattern can also be used to negotiate
meaning rather than directly transmitting knowledge from the teacher to the students (Ford &
Wargo, 2012; O’Connor & Michaels, 2007). Therefore, the I-R-E pattern could be enacted by
teachers in a way that scaffolds students in making sense of phenomena.
Epistemic Authority. In science classrooms students and teachers can appeal to different
sources of authority for supporting knowledge claims. Teachers sanction particular sources of
epistemic authority through explicit statements, as well as implicitly through their questioning.
When a teacher asks predominantly factual questions of students and evaluates the correctness of
their answers, it elevates the teacher as the epistemic authority in the classroom. Thus, the I-R-E
discourse pattern tends to position the teacher as the epistemic authority in the classroom.
However, the I-R-E pattern could be enacted by teachers in a way that emphasizes the role of
empirical evidence and scientific models in making sense of phenomena. For example, when
teachers ask students to support a claim with observations or data, they implicitly invoke the
authority of empirical evidence. In addition, open-ended questioning and talk strategies that
encourage students to discuss explanations with their peers can be structured in a way that holds
students’ ideas accountable to the epistemic authority of empirical evidence.
Epistemic Agency. Curiosity-driven discourse fosters students’ epistemic agency by
positioning them as questioners, investigators, and creators of knowledge as they explain
phenomena. Whenever a student asks a question, shares their own idea, or uses evidence to
formulate a claim they are exercising epistemic agency. However, in many classrooms taskdriven discourse aimed at procedural display is the norm. In these classrooms, students are

	

41

offered very little epistemic agency. Instead, their main role is to learn authoritative knowledge
and repeat it back to the teacher.
There are many reasons that task-driven discourse aimed at procedural display is so
common in classrooms. Researchers have related the underlying causes to teachers’ practices
related to maintaining order and to students’ and teachers’ strategies for minimizing ambiguity
and risk. This relationship between students’ epistemic agency and teachers’ practices reflects
the idea that “agency refers to acts done intentionally,” but also that “people are contributors to,
rather than the sole determiners of, what happens to them” (Bandura, 1997, p. 3). Thus, the
epistemic agency that students exercise in classrooms is a product of their own free will, but also
shaped by teachers’ practices that position students in particular ways with respect to developing
and using knowledge.
Curiosity-driven and task-driven discourse thus represent two different frames for classroom
discourse. Framing includes the signals exhibited in talk and actions that reveal participants’
sense of the goals and meanings of the activities in which they are engaging (Tannen, 1993).
Multiple scholars have used the term epistemological framing to refer to teachers’ and students’
framing with respect to knowledge and learning during classroom activities (Hutchison &
Hammer, 2010; Russ & Luna, 2013). However, I follow Kitchener (2002) in distinguishing
between the theory of knowledge (epistemology) and knowledge itself (the epistemic).
Therefore, I use the term epistemic framing, rather than epistemological framing, to indicate that
I am not studying teachers’ or students’ theories of knowledge directly, but rather what their
discourse reveals about their epistemic aims.

	

42

OVERVIEW OF STUDY
In this study, I analyze videos from five high school classrooms as they enacted an NGSSaligned curriculum called Carbon: Transformations in Matter and Energy (Carbon TIME) to
describe teachers’ and students’ epistemic framing in classroom discourse. Because the
classrooms were using the same curriculum materials, I could focus my analysis on how Carbon
TIME activities were framed through classroom talk. Several features of classroom discourse
that support three-dimensional learning have been described including: clearly established
purposes for talk, accountability to disciplinary norms and to the classroom community,
responsiveness to students’ ideas, and fostering student agency (Engle & Conant, 2002; Michaels
& O'Connor, 2012; Thompson et al., 2016). This study builds on the body of literature about
productive classroom talk to describe how it can orient students toward figuring out phenomena
and the challenges teachers face in establishing and maintain curiosity-driven discourse. The
study was guided by the following research questions that reflect my theoretical framework:
1. How do teachers indicate the purposes for classroom activities and scaffold students in
taking up those purposes?
2. What sources of epistemic authority serve to support knowledge claims in classroom
discourse?
3. How do students exhibit epistemic agency in classroom discourse and for what purposes?
The Carbon TIME project reflects design-based research’s “commitment to studying activity
in naturalistic settings, with the goal of advancing theory while at the same time directly
impacting practice” (Barab, 2014, p. 151). Each of the five classrooms represents a case study.
A Carbon TIME researcher, or “coach” worked closely with each case study teacher to support
them in implementing the curriculum and to collect data about the implementation. In addition

	

43

to the classroom videos analyzed in this study, the Carbon TIME project collected field notes
from the case study coaches, videos of selected focus students as they engaged in Carbon TIME
activities, teacher and student surveys, interviews with the teacher and focus students, and
student assessment data. This study reports on an analysis of videos collected as the classrooms
enacted first unit of the Carbon TIME curriculum, but other data sources and my participation in
the larger project have undoubtedly influenced my conclusions.
The Carbon TIME curriculum is designed to support three-dimensional learning (disciplinary
core ideas, science and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts) about carbontransforming processes—combustion, digestion, biosynthesis, photosynthesis, and cellular
respiration—at organismal, ecosystem, and global scales. Thus, Carbon TIME units focus on
phenomena that are caused by carbon-transforming processes, such as plant and animal growth
and movement, decay, and combustion. The idea that figuring out phenomena fosters threedimensional learning is supported by many lines of evidence cited in the NRC Framework
(2011), but I do not directly test the relationship between classroom discourse and student
learning outcomes in this study. Instead, my goal is to understand how the differing epistemic
frames of learning about science and figuring out phenomena are established and maintained
through classroom discourse.
Two features of the Carbon TIME curriculum are especially relevant to this study
because of their influence on classroom discourse: the Three Questions and the Process Tools.
The Three Questions serve as the criteria for a complete scientific explanation of a carbontransforming process and include: (1) the Matter Movement Question (Where are molecules
moving?), (2) The Matter Change Question (How are atoms being rearranged into different
molecules?) and (3) the Energy Change Question (What is happening to energy?). The Process

	

44

Tools scaffold student thinking and writing around the Three Questions at four key stages of the
unit: (1) Expressing Ideas: articulating initial ideas and questions about phenomena at the
beginning of a unit, (2) Predictions: articulating reasoning about what students expect to happen
before an investigation, (3) Evidence-Based Arguments: linking claims with evidence after an
investigation, and (4) Explanations: constructing explanations at the end of a unit. Thus, the
Three Questions and how participants engage with the Process Tools are important aspects of the
epistemic framing in classroom discourse.
The videos analyzed in this study were recorded at the beginning of the 2015 – 2016
school year during the months of September and October as teachers implemented the first unit
of the Carbon TIME curriculum, Systems & Scale. In this unit students investigate and explain
the phenomenon of ethanol burning through a series of five lessons that spans two to three weeks
of class time. The Process Tools throughout the unit include the driving question “What happens
when ethanol burns?” and scaffold students toward a complete explanation that addresses each of
the Three Questions. The Systems & Scale unit also includes an investigation of soda water
fizzing to introduce students to the method of tracing matter by measuring the mass of materials
and the use of bromothymol blue (BTB) to test for the presence of CO2. For a more complete
description of the lessons in the Systems & Scale Unit, see the materials online at
http://carbontime.bscs.org
METHODS
I analyzed three videos from each of the five classrooms designated by the pseudonyms
for each case study teacher: Ms. Callahan, Mr. Harris, Ms. Nolan, Mr. Ross, and Ms. Wei. See
Appendix for additional information about the video data from each classroom. Prior to the 2015
– 2016 school year, Ms. Nolan, Mr. Ross, and Ms. Wei had some experience implementing

	

45

selected activities from the Carbon TIME curriculum, while Ms. Callahan and Mr. Harris did
not. The five case study classrooms were from five different public high schools in Michigan
and Washington state (Table 2.1). The choice of case study classrooms was purposeful in that
we wanted to study implementation in classrooms that represented a range of teaching practices
and different types of learners. However, the sampling was not random—the teachers
volunteered to participate in the Carbon TIME project and later agreed to take on the additional
role of a case study classroom.
Table 2.1. Descriptions of the case study classrooms.
Teacher
Grade level
School context
of majority
of students
Ms.
9
Regional math and science center
Callahan
drawing students from high schools in
urban/suburban Michigan
Mr. Harris
9
Public high school in suburban/rural
Michigan
Ms. Nolan
10
Public high school in urban Washington
Mr. Ross
9
Public high school in suburban Michigan
Ms. Wei
9/10
Public high school in urban Washington

Approximate
school enrollment
in 2015-16
300
1500
1100
1600
1600

The classroom videos were analyzed using Studiocode software. In a previous study (Sutdy
One of this dissertation), I used grounded theory methods (Birks & Mills, 2011) to develop an
analytical framework for analyzing epistemic framing in classroom discourse. My coding
framework included three categories of codes that were further refined in this study:
1. Teacher’s Purposes: The ways that teachers frame and scaffold activities.
2. Epistemic Authority: The sources of authority to which participants appeal when making
knowledge claims.
3. Students’ Epistemic Agency: The purposes for activities that students’ questions convey
and the epistemic roles that they take on in the classroom community.

	

46

The codes for these categories were further refined through constant comparative analysis of the
videos from the five high school classrooms included in this study. Thus, the current study
included advanced coding that was aimed at theoretical integration (Birks & Mills, 2011) to
better explain how classroom communities establish and maintain curiosity-driven or task-driven
discourse.
My coding framework is summarized in Table 2.2. The three categories reflect my
theoretical framework for curiosity-driven classroom discourse, while the indicators and codes
reflect my analysis of the data. Thus, the coding framework represents both a theoretical
construct as well as an empirical result of this study.

	

47

Table 2.2. Summary of the video coding scheme. The codes in green represent curiosity-driven
framing, the codes in red represent task-driven framing and the codes in yellow are task-driven
or curiosity-driven depending on the context.
Category
Description
Indicators
Codes
Teacher’s
How the teacher
Introduction to
Question about phenomena
Purposes
frames the purpose activities
Task-driven
of the activity and
Questioning
Scaffolding sensemaking
scaffolds students
purposes
Sharing ideas
toward those
Reviewing or evaluating
learning goals
Metacommentary
Conceptual
about purposes
Procedural
broader than the
Epistemic
current activity
Epistemic
What serves as the Explicit or implicit Scientific models
Authority
source of authority appeals to authority Empirical evidence
for knowledge
Book or curriculum
claims in classroom
Teacher as authority
discourse
Students’
How students are
Students’ questions Conceptual
Epistemic
positioned in the
Procedural
Agency
classroom in terms Teachers’ response Scaffolding sensemaking
of constructing and to students’
Conceptual
using knowledge
questions
Procedural
Teachers’
Scaffolding sensemaking
responses to
Scaffolding answers or
students’
procedures
difficulties

My coding framework mirrors my theoretical framework to conceptualize the Teacher’s
Purposes as an important form of scaffolding in classroom discourse. I identified three ways
that teachers convey to students their purposes for activities: (1) how they introduce activities,
(2) the types of questions that they ask, and (3) the metacommentary that they provide about
purposes that are broader than the activity at hand. I was only able to identify instances where
the teacher invoked a source of Epistemic Authority. I did not identify any instances where
students invoked an epistemic authority, although this could be related to the fact that the
student talk that I analyzed was from whole-class discussions and interactions primarily with
their teacher (rather than small group work where students interact primarily with their peers).
	

48

Students’ Epistemic Agency is an emergent property that is influenced by how teachers
position students through the Teacher’s Purposes and appeals to Epistemic Authority as well
students’ own actions. Students generally do not explicitly state their own purposes for
activities. Therefore, I inferred students’ purposes in classroom discourse through the questions
that they asked during lessons. I coded student questions as either conceptual or procedural.
Conceptual questions indicate that students are trying to make sense of scientific concepts
(figuring out phenomena frame), while procedural questions indicate that students are focused
on gathering discrete information such as correct vocabulary or procedures to follow (learning
about science frame). For more a more detailed explanation of the coding framework see
Appendix.
RESULTS
My coding and analysis revealed that while each of the five teachers maintained wellmanaged classrooms and faithfully enacted Carbon TIME activities, curiosity-driven discourse
aimed at figuring out phenomena was consistently evident only in Ms. Nolan’s classroom. Taskdriven discourse predominated in the other four classrooms. The discourse in each classroom is
summarized in Table 2.3.
My analysis demonstrated that Teacher’s Purposes had the most substantial impact on
classroom discourse. In all five classrooms, the purposes that the teacher established through
their introduction to activities, questioning, and metacommentary provided the foundation for the
taken-as-shared frame and led to either curiosity-driven or task-driven discourse. The Epistemic
Authority to which teachers appealed served to reinforce the Teacher’s Purposes and sanctioned
particular types of Student Epistemic Agency in their classrooms. Though in Ms. Wei’s
classroom students’ questions sometimes challenged the purposes and roles prescribed by

	

49

Teacher’s Purposes and the Epistemic Authority to which she appealed, generally students
adopted their teacher’s epistemic framing. Thus, in Ms. Nolan’s classroom, curiosity-driven
discourse aimed at figuring out what happens when ethanol burns predominated during the
Systems & Scale Unit, while in the other four classrooms task-driven discourse aimed at learning
about science prevailed.

	

50

Table 2.3. Summary of discourse in the five case study classrooms.
Teacher
Teacher’s Purposes
Epistemic Authority
Ms.
Figuring out phenomena. The teacher stated a
Empirical evidence and
Nolan
driving question about the phenomenon and
scientific models were authority
repeated it multiple times each lesson.
for knowledge claims. Facts and
Procedural instructions focused on reasoning.
rules about atoms were the
Majority of teacher’s questioning instances
authority for building molecular
scaffolded sensemaking about the phenomenon. models.
Conceptual, procedural and epistemic
metacommentary tended to co-occur as the
teacher made connections and situated activities
in a larger context.
Ms.
Rigorous conceptual understanding. The
Teacher’s focus on rigor and
Callahan teacher did not state a driving question about a
assessment positioned her as the
phenomenon. Activities were framed in a taskauthority. Teacher emphasized
driven way. Majority of teacher’s questioning
empirical evidence when
instances focused on reviewing information or
discussing the investigation and
evaluating students’ knowledge. Teacher’s
facts and rules about atoms when
metacommentary focused on learning from
building models.
mistakes and procedural issues.
Ms. Wei

	

Learning about science. The teacher framed
activities in a task-driven way. She stated a
driving question about a phenomenon one time
during the unit when she read it from a Carbon
TIME PowerPoint slide. Questioning scaffolded
sensemaking in about a third of instances, while
the rest focused on reviewing information,
evaluating students’ knowledge, or sharing
ideas. Teacher’s metacommentary focused on
procedural aspects of activities and how she was
evaluating their work.

Teacher’s classroom
management clearly established
her as the authority responsible
for evaluating students’
knowledge. Her fact-based
responses to students’ questions
also reinforced her authority.
She emphasized the role of
empirical evidence as the source
of authority for claims during
discussions of the results of
investigations.

51

Students’ Epistemic Agency
Students asked 33 conceptual
questions to which the teacher
responded with conceptual
answers or scaffolded
sensemaking. Students
responsible for using evidence
and scientific models to explain
phenomena.
Students asked 16 conceptual
questions (15 were in one class
period and mostly during a smallgroup modeling activity) to
which the teacher responded with
conceptual answers or scaffolded
sensemaking. Students
responsible for learning rigorous
content knowledge.
Students asked 21 conceptual
questions, many of which
occurred within a few clusters of
intense questioning by multiple
students. The teacher responded
with a mix of procedural,
conceptual, and fact-based
answers, but rarely scaffolded
sensemaking. Students
responsible for following
directions and learning
information.

Table 2.3 (cont’d)
Teacher
Teacher’s Purposes
Mr. Ross Learning about science. The teacher stated a
driving question about a phenomenon once in
the middle of a modeling activity. Activities
were framed in a task-driven way. Less than
half of teacher’s questioning instances facilitated
sensemaking, with the remainder focused on
sharing ideas or reviewing information.
Teacher’s metacommentary focused on the
process of learning and being OK to make
mistakes.
Mr.
Harris

	

Learning about science. The teacher never
stated a driving question about a phenomenon
and there was very little attention to conceptual
transitions among the many different activities
that occurred within each class period. Activities
were framed in a task-driven way. Episodes of
questioning were very brief and accounted for
less than 10% of class time, although half of
questioning instances focused on sensemaking.
Teacher’s metacommentary focused on it being
OK to make mistakes and purpose of sharing
ideas. He also talked about the role of questions
and evidence in science.

Epistemic Authority
Teacher emphasized the role of
empirical evidence in science
and “thinking like scientists” in
multiple lessons. Teacher’s
classroom management
strategies that tightly controlled
who talked and when established
him as the authority.

Students’ Epistemic Agency
Students asked three conceptual
questions. Teacher responded to
two with conceptual answers and
one with a fact-based answer.
Students responsible for
following directions and learning
information.

Teacher’s classroom
management that focused on
staying organized and quickly
moving between activities
established him as the authority
in the classroom. The teacher
talked about the importance of
evidence in science multiple
times, but in a very generalized
way.

Students asked one conceptual
question to which the teacher
responded by scaffolding
sensemaking. Students
responsible for following
directions and learning
information.

52

	
	
Ms. Nolan established a curiosity-driven frame by explicitly stating the driving question,
“What happens to ethanol when it burns?” multiple times during each videotaped class period.
Similarly, her questioning focused on scaffolding students’ sensemaking about the phenomenon.
In addition, Ms. Nolan frequently emphasized the epistemic authority of empirical evidence and
scientific models for answering the driving question. Thus, the Teacher’s Purposes and
Epistemic Authority in Ms. Nolan’s classroom fostered Students’ Epistemic Agency by
positioning them as responsible for using empirical evidence and scientific models to figure out
phenomena. Students’ questions focused on making sense of the phenomenon and occurred
frequently throughout the unit, indicating that they adopted the curiosity-driven purpose
established by their teacher.
In the other four classrooms, task-driven discourse aimed at learning about science was
more evident. Ms. Callahan, Ms. Wei, Mr. Ross, and Mr. Harris framed activities in a way that
emphasized completing tasks, confirming authoritative knowledge, and following procedures. In
addition, their patterns of questioning tended to emphasize reviewing information and evaluating
students’ knowledge. Despite these similarities in the teachers’ framing, there were several
differences among the classrooms. Ms. Callahan and Ms. Wei were more skillful in eliciting and
responding to students’ ideas than Mr. Ross and Mr. Harris, and their students asked a substantial
number of conceptual questions. Mr. Ross and Mr. Harris lacked strategies for eliciting and
building upon students’ ideas, and their students asked very few conceptual questions. In
addition, the discourse in Ms. Callahan’s was more rigorous than the other three classrooms
characterized by task-driven discourse. Although my coding framework does not completely
account for these differences, a better description of Ms. Callahan’s classroom might be rigordriven discourse, which recognizes that fact that it was not completely task-driven in that the

	

53

	
	
teacher attended to important conceptual connections. Although discourse in Ms. Callahan’s
classroom fell short of positioning students as epistemic agents responsible for figuring out
phenomena, rigor-driven discourse seems more aligned to the vision of three-dimensional
learning than task-driven discourse alone.
Below I illustrate how I applied my coding framework to analyze discourse using
examples from Ms. Nolan’s, Ms. Wei’s, and Ms. Callahan’s classrooms. I describe each
classroom separately to highlight how Teacher’s Purposes, Epistemic Authority, and Students’
Epistemic Agency interacted to produce a taken-as-shared frame for discourse in each classroom.
While each of the teachers ran a successful classroom in terms of maintaining order and
engaging students in the Carbon TIME activities, they differed in the purposes that they
established for those activities. In addition, the epistemic authority to which the teachers
appealed reinforced their purposes and sanctioned particular roles for students in the classroom.
Ms. Nolan’s Classroom: Curiosity-Driven Discourse
Introduction to Activities. Ms. Nolan began each class period by going over the agenda
and goals for the day using a PowerPoint slide that she had prepared. Her introduction included
emphasizing the driving question about the phenomenon and explaining how the activities for
that day related to each other conceptually. For example, at the beginning of the unit Ms. Nolan
began class saying,
Today you will be explaining what you think happens when something burns and
then begin to become comfortable with looking at things at different scales. I
know neither of these things feels especially like biology, the study of life, but we
need to have very solid background skills in understanding what's going on when
something is burning. You are going to find out why this applies to life very
soon, and you've got to become really comfortable zooming in on things and then
looking at the big picture back and forth in order to be successful for the next
several units in here.

	

54

	
	
Thus, Ms. Nolan began the Systems & Scale Unit by indicating that students would be learning
about the phenomenon of burning and situating the unit within the larger goals for the entire
course. During the lesson she clearly established the driving question for the unit, “What
happens to ethanol when it burns?” In addition to beginning each class period with an agenda
and goals for the day, Ms. Nolan clearly marked the beginning of each activity by explicitly
stating the purpose of the activity, and explaining how the activity would help students answer
the driving question for the unit.
For example, as Ms. Nolan transitioned from the discussion in which students expressed
their initial ideas and questions about ethanol burning, into activities focused on developing
foundational knowledge about levels of scale, she indicated the connection between these
activities in multiple ways. She summarized the key ideas and questions that students had shared
about ethanol burning and pointed out that, “It looks like you want to zoom in on that ethanol
and get a better understanding of what is inside that ethanol.” She told students that throughout
the unit, “We are going to work together on this to come up with our answer to this question—
What happens when ethanol burns?” Ms. Nolan then transitioned to the activities focused on
different levels of scale saying, “We are going to get some background information that you need
in order to have a deeper understanding of what’s happening when ethanol burns. The
information we need is understanding scale.” Each of the three videos from Ms. Nolan’s class
included multiple Carbon TIME activities. In each lesson, she introduced the goals of the
activities at the beginning of the period and then explicitly marked the transition between
activities. Every time Ms. Nolan transitioned from one Carbon TIME activity to the next, she
explained the conceptual connections between the activities and emphasized how they would
help students figure out what happens when ethanol burns.

	

55

	
	
Questioning Purposes. The majority of Ms. Nolan’s questioning scaffolded students’
sensemaking about phenomena. For example, after students had individually worked on the
Evidence Based Arguments Tool for ethanol burning, they went over it as a class. During this
discussion, Ms. Nolan asked a series of questions and used students’ responses to model on the
board how to complete the Explanation Tool. The following instance of questioning scaffolded
students’ reasoning about what happened to carbon atoms when ethanol burned:
	
Ms. Nolan: What evidence do we have about carbon, Julie?
Julie: Ethanol lost mass by one gram and the BTB turned green.
Ms. Nolan: For the carbon question we are just going to go with the BTB one.
[she had just explained this distinction in a previous exchange]. What color was
it when it started?
Students: Blue
Ms. Nolan: Yeah, BTB was blue and turned?
Students: Green
Ms. Nolan: Alright, so this tells us a bit about the carbon atoms…. So the
evidence was that the BTB changed, and Sarah, what conclusion can we draw
from that?
Sarah: Carbon moved from ethanol into the air and then into the BTB.
Ms. Nolan: And what molecule was the carbon a part of before and after? [3
second wait time] What is your guess, what molecule had the carbon to begin with
do you think? [4 second wait time] Where do you think the carbon started?
Sarah: Not sure
Ms. Nolan: Ok, how about this, where did the carbon end up?
Sarah: As CO2.
Ms. Nolan: As CO2. OK, let’s put that then…. [reading the words as she writes
on them on the board] the carbon ended up as a part of CO2. I like that Sarah was
like, “I'm not really sure where it started, maybe it was already in the air.” So that
would be an unanswered question. [As she writes it on the board] Where did the
carbon start?
In this series of questions Ms. Nolan asks students to provide evidence as well as reasoning
about the meaning of the evidence. Sarah couldn’t answer Ms. Nolan’s question about where the
carbon atoms started, so the teacher invited her to make a guess (likely because Sarah had
originally said that carbon moved from ethanol into the air). When Sarah indicated that she was
not sure where the carbon started, Ms. Nolan used her uncertainty to scaffold an unanswered

	

56

	
	
question. Thus, Ms. Nolan’s questioning positioned her students as epistemic agents responsible
for using evidence, giving reasoning, and identifying unanswered questions. While she
occasionally asked questions to review information, the majority of Ms. Nolan’s questioning
scaffolded students’ sensemaking about phenomena.
Metacommentary. Ms. Nolan’s metacommentary further emphasized the purpose of
figuring out phenomena. She provided more metacommenary than any of the other teachers and
emphasized a mix of conceptual, procedural and epistemic issues. Ms. Nolan often wove
metacommentary into her transitions between activities. For example, after reviewing the class
data for the ethanol investigation Ms. Nolan said,
Your class average [for the change in mass of ethanol] is negative 0.51 grams.
You guys are saying that on average Ms. Nolan’s classes lost 0.51 grams. So,
here is where we are going today. We just went through the class data, we are
going to analyze it a bit more now and come up with conclusions about what this
data is telling us. We are going look at these to say what does this data tell us
about the Three Questions… If you have forgotten what those Three Questions
are, they are on a poster in the back. Then when we are done figuring out what
we know at the macroscopic scale, we are going to look at the microscopic scale
and model what happened in this lab. On Friday you did some observations, we
burned the ethanol and took measurements. Today we are going to write our
evidence based arguments, so what does this data show us, and then we are going
to model what happened at the atomic molecular scale. By the end of class today
you are going to start to have an idea of what happens when ethanol burns, [and]
by the end of the day tomorrow you should know. You should feel confident at
the macroscopic and atomic molecular level what happens when ethanol burns. If
you don’t by the end of the day tomorrow, you should come in and see me for
help because we have a test on Friday. So, we just looked at our data and did our
cleaning, so I am going to hand out to you now the Evidence Based Arguments
Tool. You have done this before for the soda water lab, so you might want to
use that one as a model. You are going to look at that data and determine what
conclusions can we draw at the macroscopic scale. What can we say about
atoms, what can we saw about carbon atoms, and what can we say about energy
[passing out the handout]?
The example of Ms. Nolan’s metacommentary above includes conceptual, procedural, and
epistemic elements. She explained why they calculated a class average for the change in mass

	

57

	
	
of ethanol, how they would use the data from the investigation to make claims about events at
the macroscopic scale, as well as how the modeling activity would help them explain what is
happening at the atomic molecular scale (epistemic metacommentary). She also reminded
students of the Carbon TIME Three Questions and their role in explaining phenomena
(conceptual metacommentary). In addition, Ms. Nolan gave information about the upcoming
test and when students should be ready to completely explain the phenomena (procedural
metacommentary). Ms. Nolan’s sophisticated metacommentary throughout the Systems & Scale
Unit continually reinforced the purpose of figuring out phenomena and wove many disparate
tasks including learning activities, assessments, and key Carbon TIME scaffolds such as the
Three Questions, together within this larger goal.
Teacher’s Purposes. As the examples above illustrate, Ms. Nolan introduced activities
as way to figure out phenomena and emphasized the conceptual connections between activities.
In addition, her questioning focused on scaffolding students’ sensemaking about the
phenomenon, and her frequent and sophisticated metacommentary emphasized the conceptual
and epistemic aspects of the activities while providing important procedural information as
well. Thus, the codes for Ms. Nolan’s introduction to activities, questioning purposes, and
metacommentary all support the conclusion that the Teacher’s Purpose for classroom activities
was figuring out phenomena.
Epistemic Authority. Ms. Nolan often invoked a source of authority outside of herself as
the teacher or the curriculum materials when making knowledge claims. While all the teachers
emphasized the role of empirical evidence in making scientific claims at some point during the
unit, Ms. Nolan was the only teacher that explicitly invoked scientific models as a source of
authority. Ms. Nolan compared the roles of empirical evidence and scientific models while

	

58

	
	
going over the agenda at the beginning of the class period which included the molecular
modeling activity for soda water fizzing. She said,
So, last time we talked about the macroscopic scale things we observed. We
observed that the mass [of the soda water] changed and that the BTB changed
colors. Today we are going to zoom in and see what’s happening at the atomic
molecular scale, something we can’t even use the microscope for, so we are going
to use molecular model kits for that.
Thus, Ms. Nolan made it clear that students had collected empirical evidence at the macroscopic
scale about soda water fizzing through their investigation, but that they could also use molecular
models to figure out what was happening at a scale too small to be seen.
In addition to Ms. Nolan’s frequent references to the role of empirical evidence and
scientific models, the clear purpose of figuring out “what happens when ethanol burns” that she
established, also served to elevate evidence and models as the source of authority for claims.
By framing activities as a way to figure out phenomena by using empirical evidence and
scientific models, Ms. Nolan’s authority as the teacher was clearly distinguished from the
sources of epistemic authority that validate knowledge claims in science. Although she was
clearly an authority figure in that she was responsible for managing the learning environment, in
Ms. Nolan’s classroom her authority as the teacher was separate from the epistemic authority
that validates knowledge claims. Thus, Ms. Nolan’s appeals to empirical evidence and models
aligned with the Teacher’s Purpose of figuring out phenomena, while also situating students as
epistemic agents.
Students’ Questions. Students in Ms. Nolan’s class asked a greater number of
conceptual questions than students in any other classroom. In addition, the students asked
conceptual questions during both whole-class discussions and during individual and smallgroup work across all three lessons that I analyzed. Ms. Nolan often responded by providing

	

59

	
	
the specific information requested by the student, but she regularly also responded with
questions to scaffold their thinking. For example, as students worked in groups on the
Explanation Tool for the soda water investigation, Ms. Nolan circulated and checked in with
each group. After reading one student’s work the following exchange occurred:
Ms. Nolan: This is not a complete explanation because you are not answering…
what molecules were the carbon atoms in before and what molecules were they in
after.
Student: Oh, OK, I get it. So I am supposed to be explaining on a molecular
level?
Ms. Nolan: Yeah, Exactly.
Student: Got it… I have a question though. Is all of the soda water made up of
H2CO3?
Ms. Nolan: No, that is just one of the molecules that is in the water.
Student: OK. When it fizzes is that when it changes?
Ms. Nolan: Yes. You got it! And those bubbles, what do you think is in those
bubbles?
Student: CO2
Ms. Nolan: Yes. You’ve got it!
In this exchange, the student responded to Ms. Nolan’s statement about the weakness of his
explanation by asking a series of conceptual questions to better understand the phenomenon of
soda water fizzing and what scale his explanation should address. Ms. Nolan answered his
questions, but then also directed a question back at him that returned to her assertion that a
complete explanation must account for the carbon atoms at both the beginning and the end of the
reaction. In this way, Ms. Nolan scaffolded the student’s reasoning about the connection
between the CO2 released and the bubbles in the soda water, rather than providing it for him.
This exchange illustrates how Ms. Nolan typically responded to students’ questions, both during
individual and small group work time as well as during whole-class discussions.
Teacher’s Response to Students’ Questions and Difficulties. Just as she responded to the
students’ questions in the example above both by providing information and scaffolding
sensemaking, Ms. Nolan’s response when individuals or small groups seemed to be struggling

	

60

	
	
with an activity included both providing key information and scaffolding sensemaking. Ms.
Nolan was particularly adept at visiting every group of students and quickly assessing their
understanding during small group activities. She often had a specific targeted question that she
asked each group which helped her to quickly assess their understanding and address key
conceptual issues. Her responses to students fostered students’ epistemic agency by supporting
them in figuring out phenomena.
Students’ Epistemic Agency. Students’ epistemic agency is an emergent property of both
the codes in this category of my coding framework which focus on students’ questions and how
the teacher responded to their questions and difficulties, as well as how the Teacher’s Purposes
and Epistemic Authority positioned the students in the classroom. This reflects the notion that
students’ epistemic agency is both a product of their own actions as well as the context
(especially their teacher’s practices) within which they act. In Ms. Nolan’s classroom, the
Teacher’s Purposes emphasized figuring out phenomena and her appeals to empirical evidence
and scientific models as the Epistemic Authority for answering questions about phenomena,
positioned the students as epistemic agents. The large number of conceptual questions that her
students asked demonstrated that they accepted the purpose of figuring out phenomena and took
on the role of figuring out phenomena. Ms. Nolan’s response to students’ questions and
difficulties provided further positive feedback that reinforced students’ epistemic agency. Thus,
in Ms. Nolan’s classroom, a taken-as-shared frame emerged through the actions of both the
teacher and the students that resulted in curiosity-driven discourse aimed at the purpose of
figuring out phenomena.
	

	

61

	
	
Ms. Wei’s Classroom: Task-driven Discourse
Introduction to Activities. Like Ms. Nolan, Ms. Wei put a written agenda up on the
screen and went over it with her students during every class period. However, Ms. Wei’s
discussion of the agenda focused exclusively on the tasks students would do rather than the
purposes for the activities. For example, one class period began with students working on the
Explanation Tool for the soda water investigation. Ten minutes into the class period Ms. Wei
put the agenda on the board and said,
Here is our agenda for today. I have some announcements for you and then we are
going to do a quick summary of the lab from two days ago so that we can recall
what it was that we were looking at the in lab. And then we are going to do a
group explanation for what exactly happened in that soda fizz lab. [Gives
announcements about opportunities to get extra science help and how to make up
the lab if they were absent]. Now, let’s talk about the lab.
Thus, the agenda Ms. Wei shared with her students was solely procedural in that it told students
what they were going to do, but did not mention how the activities were connected to each other
or to the phenomenon they were trying to figure out. Although she referenced the soda water
investigation and said they were going to review what happened, Ms. Wei did not state a driving
question about the phenomenon or explain how the day’s activities would build conceptually on
the investigation they had done previously.
All three videos from Ms. Wei’s classroom began with students working on a warm-up
activity while she did administrative tasks such as checking previous assignments for
completion. While the warm-up was conceptually related to the activities planned for that class
period, the connections were not made explicit to students. For example, the warm-up for the
class period that included expressing ideas about ethanol burning asked students to discuss with
their table groups the similarities and differences that they observed between two vials filled with
clear liquids. Ms. Wei then asked students to share what they noticed about the liquids. Students

	

62

	
	
suggested that the liquids smelled differently and may weigh different amounts or have different
boiling points. Ms. Wei validated students’ ideas and added, “Another property of matter is its
flammability…. one thing that could tell us whether or not these things are different is whether
or not they are flammable.”
Ms. Wei then poured the contents of one vial into a five-gallon plastic bottle and
demonstrated what happened when she lit a match and added it to the bottle. This popular
chemistry demonstration of the combustion of ethanol is known as the “Whoosh Bottle,” but it is
not included in the Carbon TIME materials. Students were very excited to see the flame shoot
out of the bottle. However, when Ms. Wei poured the contents of the second vial into the bottle
and tossed in a burning match, a similar, but smaller, flame shot out. Ms. Wei explained that the
liquid that caused the larger flame was ethanol and the other liquid was water, and that there
must have been some residual ethanol in the bottle that made the water ignite. Ms. Wei then
decided to do the demonstration as written in the Carbon TIME teacher’s guide using Petri
dishes filled with water and ethanol to demonstrate that ethanol burns while water does not.
Ms. Wei’s decision to deviate from the Carbon TIME Teachers’ Guide by starting the
Expressing Ideas activity with students comparing two vials of unknown liquids and to use the
Whoosh Bottle demonstration indicate that student engagement was a high priority for her.
Unfortunately, these additions distracted students from the key question about what happens
when ethanol burns. Ms. Wei invited students to share their ideas about why ethanol burns but
water does not, and then assigned the Expressing Ideas Tool as homework. The only purpose
she ascribed to the Expressing Ideas Tool as she introduced it was that students should “Fill this
out and be ready to share your ideas on Monday.” This pattern of adding engagement strategies
into the Carbon TIME activities was common in Ms. Wei’s classroom. In addition, the other

	

63

	
	
videotaped lessons were similar to the one described here in that she framed activities in a taskdriven way that never referenced a driving question about a phenomenon. In fact, the only time
the question “What happens when ethanol burns?” was ever stated in the videos that I analyzed
was when she read it from one of the Carbon TIME PowerPoint slides during a modeling
activity.
Questioning Purposes. While Ms. Wei’s questioning sometimes scaffolded students’
sensemaking, it was more often aimed at reviewing information and evaluating students’
knowledge. For example, after students modeled the dissociation of carbonic acid into carbon
dioxide and water, the teacher asked a series of questions to review the activity:
Ms. Wei: We first built this molecule over here [pointing to the diagram of a
carbonic acid molecule on the screen] which was what? Everybody say it.
Multiple students: Carbonic acid
Ms. Wei: Thank you, carbonic acid. When I pop open that can of soda, then that
carbonic acid undergoes a chemical change. You guys should have, with your
molecule models, done what to that carbonic acid?
Male Student: Ripped it apart into H2O and CO2.
Ms. Wei: Yes, you should have ripped it apart and created with those same atoms
carbon dioxide and water. So this sort of answers our Movement Question, right?
What about our Carbon Question, what happens to the carbon atoms? What is the
molecule that carbon starts out in?
Male Student: Carbonic acid.
Ms. Wei: Carbonic acid. And what is the molecule that carbon dioxide ends up
in?
Male Student: CO2
Ms. Wei: Carbon dioxide, exactly. CO2.
Ms. Wei went on to explain that individual carbon atoms were not released during the reaction,
but rather carbon dioxide molecules were produced, and that it was the CO2 molecules that had
caused the BTB to change color during the investigation. Although this discussion likely helped
students to solidify their understanding of the chemical reaction, Ms. Wei’s questions required
students only to provide the names of molecules. This illustrates a common pattern in Ms. Wei’s
questioning that positioned students as responsible for filling in the blanks with factual

	

64

	
	
information they head learned. Ms. Wei’s questioning rarely positioned students as the ones
making sense of phenomena. Instead, students were responsible for learning correct answers.
Metacommentary. Ms. Wei’s metacommentary focused on procedural issues and was
often related to assessment and grading. For example, on one day’s agenda she reminded
students about upcoming assignments and quizzes and explained,
I am doing this because I want you to have a couple of opportunities to explain
your understanding. The more information I get from you about what you
understand, the more accurate your grade will be on that learning target. What I
am looking at when I am grading you is your overall picture… like when you take
the quiz and do the explanation, overall does it look like you understand atoms
and molecules based on your answers there. The more information that you give
me, the better, like the higher your grade, generally speaking, will go.
The above example from Ms. Wei’s classroom illustrates a broader pattern of emphasizing
grades and accountability which often sidelined the goal of conceptual understanding. Similarly,
Ms. Wei employed several strategies for holding students accountable for participating in
activities by assigning points for their participation. In addition, Ms. Wei emphasized particular
talk moves in which she wanted students to engage, and had a checklist for them to use to
document their use of the talk moves during small group work. While grading and
accountability are important issues in classrooms, Ms. Wei’s emphasis on how she was assigning
points fostered task-based framing rather than curiosity-driven framing of activities.
Epistemic Authority. Ms. Wei emphasized the authority of empirical evidence for
making claims when students discussed the results of investigations. She also invoked the
authority of empirical evidence at other times in lessons. For example, when a student suggested
that ethanol and water might differ in their boiling and freezing point, Ms. Wei replied, “How
would we be able to test that for these two liquids?” Her question signaled that students would
need to collect physical data in order to validate the claim, thus invoking empirical evidence as

	

65

	
	
the source of authority. However, because Ms. Wei did not frame the purpose of activities in
terms of figuring out phenomena or state a driving question for the unit, her appeals to the
authority of empirical evidence did not seem as salient as it was in Ms. Nolan’s classroom. In
addition, Ms. Wei’s classroom management strategies, emphasis on grading and accountability,
and patterns of questioning, all served to establish her as the main epistemic authority in the
classroom. Students challenged her epistemic authority on several occasions, especially through
their questioning.
Students’ Questions. Students’ questions in Ms. Wei’s classroom often occurred in
clusters as multiple students pressed her about the same topic. For example, as Ms. Wei
presented information on chemical bonds before a modeling activity, three students asked a
series of four questions about bond energy. The students’ questions reflected their frustration
with the vague definition of high energy bonds that she asked them to copy into their notes.
The students pressed her to compare high energy and low energy bonds and to explain why the
Carbon TIME materials labeled certain bonds as high energy. Ms. Wei acknowledged that,
“That is a complicated question,” but still attempted to answer them with simple facts and
definitions. One student in particular was very unsatisfied by her responses. As the class
moved on to work on the modeling activity in groups he approached the teacher to ask, “Why
would we need to label these bonds if all of them have energy in them?” Ms. Wei responded by
reiterating that, “We want to distinguish between high energy bonds and low energy bonds, so
we are only labeling the high energy bonds.”
In another instance in this same period of Ms. Wei’s class, a similar situation occurred in
which multiple students asked a number of questions that seemed to be a response to their
dissatisfaction with her definitions of chemical versus physical change:

	

66

	
	
Ms. Wei: When you guys get to chemistry you are going to find out that there
are some chemical reactions that can reverse each other.
Student 1: Like what?
Ms. Wei: I am not going to say it right now. In this particular case [pointing to
picture of a rotting apple on the screen] one thing that tells us that this is a
chemical change is that this isn’t reversible. You can’t un-decompose an apple.
Student 2: So, you are saying that a chemical change is something that cannot
be reversed?
Ms. Wei: For the purposes of our class, at this moment in time, we are going to
say that the chemical changes that we have seen so far cannot be reversed.
However, we are going to learn later on that there are some chemical changes
that can be reversed. But like this example right here [pointing to picture of the
rotting apple] can’t be reversed. You still look confused [to student 2].
Student 2: It is still an apple. And you are saying that for it to be a chemical
change it has to be something else.
Ms. Wei: Good point. It is still an apple, so in order to understand that this is a
chemical change, can we stay on the macroscopic scale?
Student 3: But there are decomposers
Ms. Wei: And the decomposers are at the microscopic scale right?
Student 3: Yes, so there is something else involved which is separating the
nutrients.
Ms. Wei: Right, and the decomposer is actually separating those nutrients on an
atomic molecular scale. On the macroscopic scale we still consider it an apple,
but on the atomic molecular scale those molecules are in fact different from each
other on the two halves of the apple.
Student 4: What is the apple reacting with?
Student 5: [its reacting to] Age.
Ms. Wei: Can it react to time?
Student 6: Yeah.
Ms. Wei: Time doesn't have any substance to it. It doesn’t have any matter. It
has to be reacting with some kind of matter. The sugar molecules within the
apple are reacting with some other substance to form a new set of molecules.
Student 4: What is the other substance?
Ms. Wei: I think you are right that air is involved.
Student 7: Does that mean that if an apple was in space that it wouldn't
decompose?
For another minute and a half the class continued to discuss the role of air and oxygen in
decomposition. The tone of the conversation seemed to change at this point to genuine interest
rather than challenging Ms. Wei’s definitions. Ms. Wei then told the class about an article that
she read about a scientist who studied landfills and found hot dogs and newspapers from the
1960s that were not decomposing because there was no oxygen present. Ms. Wei then said, “I

	

67

	
	
got distracted you guys,” and returned to the slides with the information she was presenting. The
above series of student questions indicated that students in Ms. Wei’s class were engaged and
trying to make sense of concepts. However, the students’ tone at the beginning of this exchange,
as well as in the previous example of students’ questions about bond energies, also indicated that
they were frustrated with the facts and definitions that Ms. Wei presented.
Teacher’s Response to Students’ Questions and Difficulties. Ms. Wei typically
responded to students’ questions by providing factual information. However, students often
seem dissatisfied with the information she supplied, and in the two cases described above they
asked additional questions that seemed to challenge her authoritative knowledge. These clusters
of questions in Ms. Wei’s class might have been a bid by students to have their ideas
acknowledged as well as a way to challenge the notion of the teacher as the epistemic authority.
When Ms. Wei interacted with individuals and small groups that seemed to be struggling with a
task, in about half instances she provided information, while in the other half she attempted to
scaffold their sensemaking. This may indicate that Ms. Wei was more comfortable scaffolding
sensemaking with small groups than she was in a whole-class discussion. Teachers may be more
likely to take on the challenge of scaffolding students’ thinking when interacting with individuals
or small groups than they are in whole-class discussions, if they are concerned with maintaining
order and making sure that students get the correct answer.
Students’ Epistemic Agency. Ms. Wei’s practices indicated that she valued conceptual
understanding and student engagement. The warm-up activity that asked students to compare
vials of ethanol and water and the Whoosh Bottle demonstration are examples of activities that
she added to Carbon TIME lessons to make them more engaging for her students. She may have
also believed that adding topics such as chemical versus physical change increased the rigor of

	

68

	
	
the Carbon TIME materials. In addition, Ms. Wei often scaffolded students’ sensemaking in
small groups, and employed a number of strategies for encouraging students to participate during
small group and whole-class discussions. However, the activities and strategies that Ms. Wei
added often detracted from the phenomenon and driving questions of the Carbon TIME unit. In
addition, she introduced activities and questioned students in task-driven ways, and employed a
number of practices that served to situate her as the epistemic authority in the classroom. While
the students at times challenged Ms. Wei’s task-driven purposes and her epistemic authority, for
the most part they adopted the purposes and roles that her framing prescribed for them. Thus,
Ms. Wei’s students’ attempts to establish different purposes and roles was not frequent or robust
enough to counter her framing. Instead, a taken-as-shared frame emerged that resulted in
predominantly task-driven discourse aimed at the purpose of learning about science topics.
Ms. Callahan’s Classroom: Rigor-Driven Discourse
Introduction to Activities. Like Ms. Wei, Ms. Callahan began each class period with a
more procedural introduction. While she often began class by reviewing previous activities, she
did not make the conceptual connections between prior activities and what they would be doing
that day explicit, and a driving question about a phenomenon was never stated. For example,
Ms. Callahan began the class period that included the Evidence-Based Argument Tool for the
ethanol burning investigation with announcements and reminders about upcoming tests and
assignments. Six minutes into the period Mr. Callahan shifted to the content of the lesson
saying,
Last Friday we burned ethanol, but before we burned ethanol we watched this
video. We are going to watch the end of the video. For those of you who weren’t
here on Friday, this will give you an idea of what we did. It’s really important
that you pay attention to it.

	

69

	
	
After saying this, Ms. Callahan also indicated that watching the video would help students who
had performed the investigation remember what they had done. After the video she asked a
series of questions to review what students had observed in the investigation and gave them time
to answer the questions on the investigation handout. Next, she passed out the Evidence Based
Arguments Tool and said,
What I really want to get at is an idea of what your concepts are of what's
happening when ethanol burns. Please put everything away. This is not a quiz, but
this gives me insight into what you understand about ethanol burning. So if there
are any areas that we need to work on, we can certainly clarify before your posttest on Thursday.
Thus, Ms. Callahan framed the Evidence Based Arguments Tool as a way to assess students’
understanding, rather than as a way to continue to construct knowledge as a class about what
happens when ethanol burns. While the Carbon TIME Teacher’s Guide suggests giving students
an opportunity to discuss their work on the Evidence Based Arguments Tool in both small
groups and as a whole class, Ms. Callahan decided to make it an individual assignment to be
used for assessment purposes. The other videos from Ms. Callahan’s class demonstrate a similar
pattern of emphasizing assessing students’ knowledge rather than constructing knowledge as a
group. While she indicated that she wanted to assess what students knew about ethanol burning,
she never stated an explicit driving question in the three class periods that I analyzed.
Questioning Purposes. Ms. Callahan engaged in questioning to scaffold students’
sensemaking about phenomena much less frequently than Ms. Nolan did. Instead, like Ms. Wei,
her questioning tended to focus on reviewing information and assessing students’ knowledge.
For example, in Ms. Callahan’s class after students had completed the soda water modeling
activity they discussed the overall reaction for the dissociation of carbonic acid into carbon
dioxide and water:

	

70

	
	
Ms. Callahan: [Indicating the overall reaction written on the board] This has to
be balanced and we know that atoms last forever. The number of atoms in the
reactants should equal the number of reactants [sic] in our products. Did that
happen on your worksheet?
Multiple students: Yeah
Ms. Callahan: We had three oxygen atoms [pointing to formula for carbonic
acid], did we have three over here [pointing to products]? [waits 4 seconds with
no response] We had two [pointing to CO2] and then [pointing to H2O]?
Multiple students: one
Ms. Callahan: Yeah… so we have three. And we have two hydrogens over here
[pointing to reactants] do we have two hydrogens on this side [pointing to
products]? [waits 5 seconds with no response] Yeah. Excellent. And we have one
carbon [pointing to carbonic acid] and one carbon [pointing to products]. It’s
balanced. This is a very nice equation, it balances quite easily.
Although this discussion was aimed at helping students to develop conceptual understanding of
what it means for a reaction to be balanced, Ms. Callahan did the sensemaking for the students.
Instead of asking questions that scaffolded their sensemaking, she asked a series of questions that
only required students to state the number of each type of atom. She began by telling them that
the reaction had to be balanced because atoms last forever, then asked a series of questions about
the number of atoms on each side. Many of her questions went unanswered by the students, and
Ms. Callahan answered them herself. After comparing the number of atoms on each side of the
equation, Ms. Callahan summarized, “It’s balanced. This is a very nice equation, it balances
quite easily.”
The example of questioning from Ms. Callahan’s classroom above illustrates a common
pattern in her classroom. Like in Ms. Wei’s classroom, Ms. Callahan’s questioning tended to
position the students as responsible for stating correct answers, but not for making connections
or constructing knowledge for themselves. In addition, since Ms. Callahan and Ms. Wei did not
state a driving question about a phenomenon, their questions often seemed more
decontextualized and more like playing a “classroom game,” versus the questioning in Ms.
Nolan’s classroom that was directly linked to the phenomenon they were trying to figure out.

	

71

	
	
Metacommentary, Epistemic Authority, and Teacher’s Purposes. Ms. Callahan’s
metacommentary was very similar to Ms. Wei’s in that in generally focused on procedural issues
including grading and assessment. Ms. Callahan’s metacommentary also focused on the process
of learning itself. She frequently reminded students that it was OK to make mistakes and that
learning from mistakes is important. Ms. Callahan’s appeals to Epistemic Authority were also
very similar to Ms. Wei’s in that she emphasized the role of empirical evidence when discussing
investigations, but her classroom management strategies and her fact-based questioning
positioned herself as the epistemic authority in the classroom. Thus, like Ms. Wei the Teacher’s
Purposes in Ms. Callahan’s classroom were primarily aimed at learning about science topics
rather than figuring out phenomena.
Although my coding of the Teacher’s Purposes depicted a similar pattern in Ms.
Callahan’s and Ms. Wei’s classrooms, I noticed an interesting difference in the rigor of the
discourse between the two classrooms. While Ms. Callahan’s and Ms. Wei’s questioning usually
did not require students to engage in sensemaking, Ms. Callahan’s questions were more rigorous
overall. In addition, while Ms. Callahan’s questioning was generally fact-based, she often
supplied conceptual reasoning to students, while Ms. Wei generally did not. Ms. Callahan’s
questions tended to be more focused on the key ideas developed in the Carbon TIME activities,
while Ms. Wei’s questions were less targeted and often included topics outside of the scope of
the Carbon TIME materials. Finally, Ms. Callahan more rigorously attended to two NGSS
crosscutting concepts in classroom discourse: (1) Energy and Matter: Flows, Cycles, and
Conservation and (2) Scale, Proportion, and Quantity. These crosscutting concepts are a key
focus of Carbon TIME materials, but when Ms. Wei referenced them she tended to state them as
facts, while Ms. Callahan tended to explain how the crosscutting concepts were being applied.

	

72

	
	
Students’ Questions and Teacher’s Responses. I identified 16 conceptual questions in
Ms. Callahan’s class. However, all of them except one occurred within one class period, with
the majority of those questions occurring as students worked in groups on an activity to model
the dissociation of carbonic acid as soda water fizzes. While Ms. Callahan tended to respond to
students’ questions as they worked on the modeling activity by scaffolding their sensemaking,
in the few instances that students asked a conceptual question during a whole class discussion,
Ms. Callahan provided conceptual answers without scaffolding students’ sensemaking. For
example, as Ms. Callahan presented information on the number of bonds that each type of atom
can make, a student asked her to clarify the difference between “forming bonds versus having
bonds” (Ms. Callahan had been using the language of “forming bonds” and “having bonds”
interchangeably). Ms. Callahan responded with a detailed conceptual response to the students’
question.
Ms. Callahan’s rigorous response to the student’s question focused on valence electrons
and the stability of atoms. She explained that, “carbon atoms have four unpaired electrons in its
outer orbital which means it needs to form four bonds to become stable.” She then explained
the number of unpaired electrons that oxygen and hydrogen atoms have and how that relates to
the number of bonds these atoms can form. Finally, Ms. Callahan said, “that was a great
question” and added, “Carbon is going to be sort of the core [of a lot of molecules] because so
many things can form around it. You are going to see that today, and it is going to be pretty
exciting.” Ms. Callahan’s response to the student’s question indicates the priority she placed on
rigorous conceptual understanding. She decided to provide information beyond the scope of the
Carbon TIME curriculum about unpaired electrons and the stability of atoms in order to answer
the student’s question in a conceptually rigorous way.

	

73

	
	
Response to Students’ Difficulties. When Ms. Callahan responded to students’
difficulties during small group work she almost always attempted to scaffold students’
sensemaking. For example, when she responded to one group’s incorrect model of a carbonic
acid molecule she said, “That's interesting. I am not saying it’s wrong or it’s right. But if you
remember, does oxygen like to pair with oxygen or no?” This response demonstrates a pattern
indicating that Ms. Callahan clearly valued students’ figuring things out for themselves.
However, she generally only scaffolded sensemaking during small group work. This was
similar to the pattern in Ms. Wei’s classroom, and may indicate that teachers have a more
difficult time scaffolding sensemaking in whole-class discussions than in small group work.
Students’ Epistemic Agency. Ms. Callahan’s practices that I coded in the Teacher’s
Purposes and Epistemic Authority categories established task-driven purposes for activities, but
also supported disciplinary rigor. Ms. Callahan’s classroom was situated within a science and
math magnet school that students voluntary elected to attend, which likely influenced her desire
to promote rigor and undoubtedly influenced her students’ responses to classroom activities.
Her students did not ask many conceptual questions during whole class discussions, but seemed
content with her rigorous conceptual explanations. When students asked questions during the
modeling activity, Ms. Callahan responded by scaffolding their sensemaking. This difference in
how Ms. Callahan responded to students’ questions during small-group and whole-class
discussions may indicate that she framed the purposes of whole class discussions differently
than she framed small group work. The priority that Ms. Callahan placed on rigor seems to
have influenced how she answered students’ questions during whole-class discussions, as well
as her decision to use the Evidence Based Argument Tool as an assessment rather than a means
for collective sensemaking. Thus, in Ms. Callahan’s classroom a taken-as-shared frame

	

74

	
	
emerged that resulted in predominantly rigor-driven discourse aimed at conceptual
understanding of key scientific ideas.
DISCUSSION
Ms. Nolan’s classroom was the only one of the five that I analyzed that consistently
exhibited curiosity-driven discourse which established a taken-as-shared frame for activities as
figuring out phenomena. This frame was established through the teacher’s frequent explicit
attention to the driving question—What happens when ethanol burns?—which positioned
students as epistemic agents responsible for figuring out phenomena. Ms. Nolan’s use of
questioning to scaffold students’ sensemaking, as well as her emphasis on the authority of
empirical evidence and scientific models for answering scientific questions, supported students
in figuring out phenomena. Students’ own questions indicate that they adopted the role of
figuring out phenomena in Ms. Nolan’s classroom.
Thus, Ms. Nolan led her students in establishing a classroom learning community that
shared key features of curiosity-driven discourse with scientific communities. The features of
curiosity-driven classroom discourse exhibited in Ms. Nolan’s classroom and their significance
for student learning are summarized in Table 2.4.

	

75

	
	
Table 2.4. Summary of curiosity-driven discourse in Ms. Nolan’s classroom.
Aspect of
epistemic
framing
Purpose

Epistemic
Authority

Students’
Epistemic
Agency

How it supported curiosity-driven
classroom discourse

Significance for student
learning

Ms. Nolan led a classroom discourse
community with the shared purpose of
developing a scientific answer to the driving
question “What happens to ethanol when it
burns?” She introduced a specific
phenomenon (ethanol burning) and gave
students the opportunity to observe and
discuss it. The teacher guided the discussion
to develop the driving question and repeated
it multiple times, explaining how each
activity would help students figure out some
aspect of what happens when ethanol burns.
Ms. Nolan’s reinforced the purpose of
figuring out phenomena through carefully
sequenced questions that scaffolded students’
reasoning.
Ms. Nolan scaffolded students in collecting
and analyzing evidence and using scientific
models to answer the driving question about
the phenomenon. She clearly articulated how
empirical evidence and scientific models
support scientific claims. She pressed
students to support claims with evidence and
helped them to relate scientific models to
observations of phenomena.

Clearly establishing figuring out
phenomena as the purpose for
classroom activities engaged
students’ curiosity and gave the
activities context and relevance.
“Anchoring the development of
general science ideas in
investigations of phenomena
helps students build more usable
and generative knowledge” (p.
3).

Students engaged as epistemic agents
responsible for developing and using
knowledge to explain phenomena. They
discussed their ideas in small and large group
discussions. Students asked many conceptual
questions indicating that they accepted the
role of figuring out phenomena. Ms. Nolan
responded to students’ questions and
difficulties by providing key information and
asking carefully sequenced questions to
scaffold their sensemaking.

Clearly establishing empirical
evidence and scientific models
as the epistemic authority for
claims helps students develop an
appreciation for how scientific
knowledge is developed and
used. “The goal of building
knowledge in science is to
develop general ideas, based on
evidence, that can explain and
predict phenomena” (p. 1).
Students engaged in scientific
practices to develop and use
knowledge in authentic ways.
They were positioned as
epistemic agents and their ideas
and questions were honored and
used in classroom discourse.

Ms. Callahan’s, Ms. Wei’s, Mr. Ross’, and Mr. Harris’ classrooms all exhibited more
task-driven discourse that established a taken-as-shared frame for activities as learning about

	

76

	
	
science. The teachers established this frame by introducing activities in a procedural way that
did not link them to a driving question about phenomena. In addition, the teachers’ questioning
practices and instructional decisions tended to position themselves or the curriculum materials
as the epistemic authority in the classroom and positioned the students in a more passive role
responsible for learning authoritative knowledge. While these teachers attempted to implement
the Carbon TIME curriculum with fidelity and their students were highly engaged, the
classrooms were unable to shift the taken-as-shared frame from the more traditional stance of
learning about science to the framing of figuring out phenomena.
Understanding Task-driven Discourse
My analysis suggest that task-driven discourse was the norm in most classrooms not
because the teachers or students were deficient in some way, but because establishing and
maintaining curiosity-driven discourse is different and challenging. The teachers were all
knowledgeable, experienced, and dedicated professionals. They voluntarily participated in the
Carbon TIME project because they believed that the curriculum could enhance their practice
and help them support students in three-dimensional learning. Their students were attentive and
hardworking, and they did everything their teachers asked of them. However, even with NGSSaligned curriculum materials, classrooms struggled to shift the frame for discourse from the
more traditional frame of learning about science to the frame of figuring out phenomena.
Curiosity-driven discourse requires that a particular phenomenon is clearly established
as an object of collective curiosity and that scientific questions about it are clearly articulated.
This study highlights the important role that teachers play in this process. Although the
activities in the Carbon TIME Systems and Scale Unit were explicitly designed to scaffold
students in figuring out what happens when ethanol burns, in most classrooms the driving

	

77

	
	
question was rarely or never explicitly stated. For example, the question “What happens when
ethanol burns?” was written at the top of each of the Carbon TIME Process Tools that students
used throughout the Systems & Scale Unit. However, as teachers introduced the Process Tools
they tended to focus on procedural aspects of completing them, rather than on their role in
helping students to figure out the phenomenon. Ms. Nolan’s frequent reference to the driving
question and her metacommentary that explicitly connected each activity to that question, seem
to be key reasons that curiosity-driven discourse was established in her classroom.
While the science education research community has recognized the importance of
centering instruction on explaining natural phenomena, teachers have often not experienced this
type of learning in their own educational backgrounds. In addition, many science teachers have
little experience engaging in authentic scientific research. Yet, studies have found that teachers’
experiences doing science significantly influence how they teach science (Stroupe, 2017;
Varelas, House, & Wenzel, 2005). Without engaging in authentic scientific inquiry themselves,
teachers’ understanding of what constitutes an observable phenomenon, how to formulate
scientific questions about it, and how these can drive instruction are quite limited. In our work
with teachers through Carbon TIME professional development activities, we have found that
teachers often struggle to identify the phenomenon that a unit is designed to explain and to
recognize how each activity connects to that overall purpose. In particular, teachers have
difficulty differentiating between processes such as combustion, photosynthesis, and cellular
respiration, and the phenomena that these processes help to explain.
My analysis also revealed that teachers’ practices often shifted attention away from the
purpose of figuring out phenomena toward other goals. While these practices undermined
curiosity-driven discourse, they were aimed at other valuable purposes including student

	

78

	
	
engagement, rigor, and assessment. However, not only did these practices detract from the
purpose of figuring out phenomena, they diminished students’ epistemic agency and situated the
teacher as the epistemic authority in the classroom. Thus, it is important to understand how
teachers’ practices can undermine curiosity-driven discourse and how Ms. Nolan’s classroom
was able to align these priorities to achieve it.
Prioritizing Engagement. When teachers deviated from the Carbon TIME lesson plans
their reasons for doing so often seemed to be an attempt to engage their students. For example,
Ms. Wei and Mr. Ross both decided to use the Whoosh Bottle demonstration, likely because they
believed that the large flame would be more interesting for students than burning ethanol in a
small Petri dish as proposed by the Carbon TIME materials. However, in both cases the Whoosh
Bottle demonstration served to distract from the phenomenon that the unit was designed to
address and may help explain why the driving question, “What happens to ethanol when it
burns?” was never clearly established in their classrooms.
In addition, both Ms. Wei and Mr. Ross frequently used strategies for calling on students
randomly during lessons to keep them engaged. However, by tightly controlling when students
talked and what they shared, these strategies inhibited students from sharing ideas freely and
encouraged procedural display rather than sensemaking. Ms. Wei also incorporated several
strategies aimed at supporting students in using particular talk moves during their small group
work. While supporting productive talk is certainly important, talking seemed to become a
purpose in and of itself in Mr. Ross’ and Ms. Wei’s classroom, rather than serving to scaffold
students’ sensemaking about phenomena. These examples illustrate how even “best practices”
for fostering student engagement can undermine the purpose of figuring out phenomena.

	

79

	
	
It is important to note that it was not the engagement strategies themselves, but rather
how they were employed that undermined curiosity-driven discourse in Mr. Ross and Ms. Wei’s
classrooms. For example, Ms. Nolan also occasionally called on students randomly, but she did
so during brainstorming sessions when the goal was to get as many ideas on the table as possible.
She explained to students that she would randomly draw names to add their ideas to the list, and
that afterward students could volunteer to add any ideas that were not captured. In addition, Ms.
Nolan always clearly linked the purpose of classroom discussions to the phenomena that students
were trying to explain. Thus, in Ms. Nolan’s classroom strategies to encourage participation did
not undermine the purpose of figuring out phenomena.
Prioritizing Rigor. Disciplinary rigor also seemed to be a competing priority that
undermined the purpose of figuring out phenomena. For example, while the discourse in Ms.
Callahan’s classroom attended rigorously to disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts,
the teacher often did the sensemaking for students. Conversations shared by her case study
coach indicate that Ms. Callahan valued disciplinary rigor, especially given her context at a
science and math magnet school. In addition, these conversations indicated that she believed her
students were capable of sensemaking, even though she often unintentionally provided
information that circumvented it. For example, while the students waited for the results of the
burning ethanol investigation, Ms. Callahan showed a video that explained why a candle loses
mass when it burns and why the chemical reaction releases water and carbon dioxide. Her
decision to show the video, while likely intended to promote conceptual understanding and help
students see the similarities between burning ethanol and burning a candle, presented all the
“answers” that the investigation was designed to help students figure out. Similarly, Ms.

	

80

	
	
Callahan’s fact-based questioning and her detailed conceptual answers to students’ questions,
elevated disciplinary rigor above sensemaking.
While disciplinary rigor is a worthy goal, prioritizing it above figuring out phenomena
diminishes students’ epistemic agency. Instead of using evidence and models to explain
phenomena, students are presented with authoritative knowledge that explains phenomena. Even
when a teacher hopes to engage students in sensemaking, they may inadvertently circumvent it
by presenting the “correct” answer too early or by providing the reasoning that links evidence to
scientific explanations rather than asking students to articulate the reasoning. Teachers often
perceive tension between discourse that is responsive to students’ ideas and rigorous disciplinary
work that prioritizes correct answers. In order for curiosity-driven discourse to occur, teachers
must become comfortable letting students share incorrect ideas and partial explanations, and
develop strategies for scaffolding students’ sensemaking rather than providing the reasoning for
them.
Ms. Nolan was able to simultaneously foster disciplinary rigor and students’ epistemic
agency by focusing on supporting students’ sensemaking. While the discourse in her classroom
attended rigorously to key disciplinary ideas and crosscutting concepts, this was accomplished
by asking strategic questions and being responsive to students’ ideas, rather than by presenting
authoritative knowledge. For example, when students asked conceptual questions, Ms. Nolan
most often responded by providing key information and posing a question back to the students.
Rather than proving the complete answer, she supplied or reminded them of key information, but
left it up to the students to make important connections. This fostered students’ epistemic
agency by signaling that the teacher believed students were capable of the intellectual work and
leaving the students with the feeling that they had solved the problem on their own.

	

81

	
	
Assessment Practices. My analysis suggests that teachers’ assessment practices may
have been especially difficult for them to reconcile with the seemingly contradictory goal of
scaffolding students in figuring out phenomena. Many of the teachers substituted accountability
or evaluation for sensemaking as they enacted Carbon TIME activities. For example, most of the
teachers used questioning during whole-class discussions primarily to review and evaluate
students’ knowledge. Even fairly early on in the unit, the teachers asked close-ended questions
and responded primarily with indications of how correct students’ answers were. This emphasis
on rehearsing correct answers limited students’ epistemic agency to engage in sensemaking and
positioned the teacher as the epistemic authority.
In addition, teachers often chose to use the Carbon TIME Process Tools primarily to
collect assessment data, rather than to guide small-group and whole-class sensemaking
discussions. The Carbon TIME Teachers’ Guide describes a process of giving students time to
work on the Process Tool individually, share in small groups, and finally discuss as a whole
class. This is particularly important for the Evidence Based Arguments Tool which helps
students connect data from an investigation to claims and to formulate unanswered questions
about the phenomena that will be addressed in future activities. However, many teachers
shortened or eliminated these discussions and instead used the Evidence Based Argument Tool
to collect individual assessment data. There are many practical reasons a teacher might
substitute assessment for sensemaking including: time constraints and the pressure to move on to
the next lesson, a need to provide grades to students and parents, and a preference for collecting
formative assessment data in the form of individual written responses. In addition, our work
with teachers has demonstrated that they often underestimate how much time and support
students need in reasoning about phenomena. Thus, teachers may have believed that the data

	

82

	
	
collected in the investigation was self-evident and that students did not need support in
formulating claims or unanswered questions.
While most of the teachers focused on the role of assessment in providing them with
information to evaluate students’ knowledge, Ms. Nolan emphasized the importance of students
understanding their own ideas and recognizing how their ideas changed over time. She did this
by frequently returning to the initial ideas and questions that students raised about the
phenomenon, as well as by referring students back to their previous Process Tools as they moved
through the unit. In addition, while many of the other teachers emphasized how they were
assigning points during class activities, talk about grading was virtually absent in Ms. Nolan’s
classroom. Ms. Nolan emphasized what expected students to learn, rather than how she would
grade them. For example, when discussing an upcoming test, Ms. Nolan said, “You should feel
confident at the macroscopic and atomic molecular level what happens when ethanol burns. If
you don’t by the end of the day tomorrow, you should come in and see me for help because we
have a test on Friday.” In this way, Ms. Nolan integrated the purpose of figuring out phenomena
with assessment rather than treating them separately.
Implications for Future Research
The results of this study lead to a very important question: Why was Ms. Nolan’s classroom able
to establish curiosity-driven discourse using the Carbon TIME curriculum while the other
classrooms were not? Other data collected through the Carbon TIME project may be able to help
address this question in future studies. The interviews with teachers have suggested that they
differed significantly in their understanding of the vision of three-dimensional science learning
and in their priorities and skills for guiding classroom discourse. For example, the interviews
indicate that Ms. Nolan had a strong grasp of the goal of three-dimensional learning before

	

83

	
	
implementing the Carbon TIME curriculum. She recognized the importance of building on
students’ initial ideas questions about phenomena, and had many strategies for engaging students
in rigorous and responsive classroom discourse. Thus, Ms. Nolan’s teaching practice was
already “preadapted” to the Carbon TIME curriculum, which allowed her to focus on scaffolding
students in figuring out phenomena through classroom discourse. Interviews with the other
teachers indicated that they had varying levels of understanding of the goals of three-dimensional
learning. Future studies may begin to help us understand how to better design professional
learning experiences to support teachers in making the changes necessary to shift the frame for
classroom discourse from learning about science to figuring out phenomena.
This study also raises important questions about how students experience the discourse in their
classrooms and how it influences their engagement, learning, and attitudes toward science.
Other data collected through the Carbon TIME project may help to begin to address these
questions. For example, videos of focus students as they participated in small group work can
help us to better understand how individual students understood the purposes of activities and the
epistemic agency they exercised while interacting with their peers. Assessment data and student
surveys were also administered that can help us begin to understand how classroom discourse
influences student outcomes. Future research that clearly links classroom discourse with student
outcomes is vital for understanding the mechanisms that support three-dimensional learning in
classrooms.
Limitations
The findings of this study represent the discourse in five high school classrooms based on
three class periods that were videotaped during the first unit of the Carbon TIME curriculum.
Because the camera and microphone were centered on the teachers, I have more evidence about

	

84

	
	
how they framed and scaffolded classroom activities than I do from the students. In addition,
although all five classrooms were enacting the Carbon TIME curriculum, there are many other
features of these classrooms and their school and community contexts that likely differed. While
the findings here do not represent the discourse in every high school classroom, they offer
important contributions for understanding how curiosity-driven discourse supports students in
adopting the role of figuring out phenomena and highlight how common teaching practices may
divert students away from this goal.
Contributions of the Study
The practices of scientists are driven by curiosity about natural phenomena and a
commitment to the epistemic authority of empirical evidence. Thus, the NRC Framework and
NGSS emphasize the importance of instruction that engages students in figuring out phenomena
to help students understand how scientific knowledge is developed and used. This study shows
how it is possible to establish and sustain curiosity-driven classroom discourse that supports
students in figuring out phenomena. At the same time, it helps explain why task-driven
discourse is common in most science classrooms and the challenges for teachers and students in
shifting the frame from learning about science to figuring out phenomena.
The findings in this study reiterate the importance of establishing driving questions about
phenomena and supporting students’ epistemic agency to address those questions. Thus, my
analysis echoes many lines of research about productive discourse in science classrooms (e.g.
Engle, 2011; Ford & Wargo, 2012; O’Connor & Michaels, 2007; Thompson et al., 2016). This
study also contributes rich descriptions of how classroom activities are framed in ways that are
more and less productive. Perhaps most importantly, my theoretical framework points to
curiosity about phenomena as the driver of productive discourse in science classrooms. While

	

85

	
	
other studies have identified similar features of productive discourse, they have not articulated
the role of curiosity about natural phenomena in driving productive framing or examined how
activities can be framed in a way that engages students’ curiosity and scaffolds them in figuring
out phenomena to satisfy that curiosity.
In this light, the curiosity-driven discourse in Ms. Nolan’s classroom is understood to be
a significant accomplishment. Thus, the descriptions of the discourse in her classroom add to
our understanding of both theory and practice around three-dimensional learning. In particular,
this study describes specific strategies that position students as epistemic agents in figuring out
phenomena (summarized in Table 2.4). Analysis of the discourse in the other classrooms is also
important because it suggests key challenges that classrooms face in establishing and
maintaining curiosity-driven discourse. Positioning students as epistemic agents responsible for
figuring out phenomena is a new paradigm for classroom learning. Every time a teacher fails to
connect an activity with a driving question or a student recites a fact without understanding it,
the quality of classroom discourse is degraded with respect to scientific curiosity about
phenomena and students’ view of their own agency in developing and using scientific
knowledge.
Thus, curiosity-driven discourse is fragile and requires teachers to align their practices to
a new goal—supporting students in figuring out phenomena. A wealth of literature exists that
speaks to the challenges that teachers face in managing competing goals for lessons and why
procedural display is so common in schools (e.g. Bloome et al., 1989; Kennedy, 2005; Lemke,
1990). This study adds to that literature by highlighting three challenges that teachers face in
establishing and maintaining curiosity-driven discourse: (1) lack of experience in using questions
about phenomena to drive instruction (2) prioritizing other goals such as engagement or rigor,

	

86

	
	
and (3) assessment practices that elevate correct answers over sensemaking and situate the
teacher or curriculum materials as the epistemic authority.
Shifting classroom discourse from learning about science toward figuring out phenomena
is no easy task. This study suggests that almost any instructional practice could potentially get in
the way of curiosity-driven discourse if the classroom community does not adopt a view of
learning which recognizes it as a “combination of both knowledge and practice” (p. 254) and
which honors students’ role in constructing knowledge through their own experiences.
Therefore, fostering three-dimensional learning requires not only carefully crafted curriculum
materials, but also a teacher who is skillful in engaging and scaffolding students’ curiosity about
natural phenomena, as well as students who are ready to take on the intellectual challenge of
satisfying their curiosity.

	

87

	
	

APPENDIX

	

88

	
	
Video Data
I analyzed three videos of each classroom recorded by the case study coach over a period
of 2 – 3 weeks as they engaged in the Systems & Scale Unit. Carbon TIME lessons are
segmented into activities that require 20 – 50 minutes of class time. Table 2.5 shows the
activities that were recorded in each classroom and the total time of the three videotaped lessons.
While not all the same activities were recorded in every classroom, a range of types of lessons
were captured which allows me to compare how teachers and students framed the purposes of
activities throughout the unit.
Table 2.5. Summary of video data from each case study classroom.
Ms.
Mr.
Ms.
Callahan
Harris
Nolan
Total video time (min)

140

Ms.
Wei

206

224

176

206

Activity 1.2 Expressing ideas
about ethanol burning

X

X

X

X

Lesson 2 Scale

X

X

Activity 3.3 Soda water fizzing
evidence-based arguments

X

Activity 3.4 Modeling soda water
fizzing

X

X
X

Activity 3.5 Explaining soda
water fizzing
Activity 4.1 Predictions about
ethanol investigation

X

X
X

X

X

Activity 4.2 Investigating ethanol
burning

X

X

Activity 4.3 Ethanol burning
evidence-based arguments

X

X

X

given as
homework

X

X

X

X

X

Activity 4.4 Modeling ethanol
burning

	

Mr.
Ross

89

discussion
of results

	
	
Coding
My coding framework attends to the three features of curiosity-driven discourse that
mirror scientific curiosity: (1) the purpose of figuring out phenomena, (2) epistemic authority of
empirical evidence and scientific models, and (3) students’ epistemic agency. At the same time,
I also wanted to be able to describe different purposes, sources of epistemic authority, and roles
for students across classrooms. Thus, I developed codes in each category that capture the range
of curiosity-driven and task-driven discourse that I observed in the videos. Below I describe in
more detail how I identified instances in the videos and classified them with codes.
Teachers’ Purposes. The codes in the Teacher’s Purposes category describe the
teacher’s epistemic framing of activities and how they scaffold students in adopting the purposes
that they promoted. I identified three main ways that teachers indicate their purposes and
scaffold students in taking them up during lessons: introduction to activities, questioning
purposes, and metacommentary about broader purposes. I found that when teachers introduced
activities they either indicated that the purpose was to help answer a question about a
phenomenon or they introduced the activity in a task-driven way. Task-driven introductions
could include conceptual or procedural rationales for the activity, but did not directly reference a
question about the phenomenon that the Carbon TIME activity was designed to address.
Sometimes the teacher did not provide any rationale for the activity other than “this is what we
are going to do next,” which I also coded as a task-driven introduction.
One of the most prominent discourse structures across all lessons was teacher questioning
in which the teacher asked a question directed at the whole class and students either called out
answers, raised their hand to answer, or the teacher used some method of randomly calling on
students. Teacher questioning also occurred when teachers worked with small groups of students

	

90

	
	
who were engaged in a task. Each instance of questioning was marked in Studiocode and
assigned one of three codes: scaffolding sensemaking, sharing ideas, or reviewing or evaluating.
1. I coded an instance of teacher questioning as facilitating sensemaking if the questions
focused on making meaning from empirical evidence or scientific models or on
making conceptual connections between ideas. These instances generally included a
series of questions that the teacher used to scaffold students’ thinking about a key
concept and sometimes included asking students to explain their reasoning.
2. Sharing ideas questioning episodes were marked by the teacher asking students to
share what they thought about a phenomenon or what they observed in an
investigation, but did not press students to explain their reasoning or try to develop a
class consensus about the ideas. The sharing ideas instances of questioning occurred
most often in conjunction with the Expressing Ideas activity and Process Tool, but
also occurred at other points of the unit.
3. Reviewing or evaluating questioning episodes followed an I-R-E pattern in which the
teacher asked a question, one or more students responded with an answer, and the
teacher indicated whether their answer was correct or not. These instances often
focused on reviewing information from previous activities.
Teachers also occasionally explicitly indicated purposes that were beyond the immediate
activity at hand. I marked these instances as teacher metacommentary and coded them as
conceptual, procedural, or epistemic. Conceptual metacommentary focused on making
conceptual connections among activities. For example, when Ms. Nolan introduced the Carbon
TIME Three Questions she said, “You are going to want to get really used to these questions…
These are really important in all of our labs that we do this semester.” Procedural

	

91

	
	
metacommentary focused on establishing classroom norms for activities such as class warm-ups
or whole-class discussions. Epistemic metacommentary focused on the nature of science or
issues related to knowledge and learning more generally. For example, Mr. Harris talked about
the role of questions in science. He used statements such as “questions lead us” to explain that
scientific investigations are guided by questions. Mr. Ross used epistemic metacommenatry to
focus on the process of learning. Statements such as “we learn by making mistakes" and
"learning is connecting ideas together" attended to the nature of learning and served to establish
purposes related to developing skills as learners.
Epistemic Authority. I marked each time I noticed an implicit or explicit reference to a
source of authority that supported a knowledge claim in classroom discourse. I was only able to
identify instances where the teacher invoked a source of epistemic authority. I did not identify
any instances where students invoked an epistemic authority, although this could be related to
the fact that the student talk that I analyzed was from whole-class discussions and interactions
primarily with their teacher (rather than small group work where students interact primarily
with their peers).
I marked utterances that explicitly or implicitly appealed to a source of authority to
validate knowledge claims and then categorized the sources of authority that were invoked. I
identified instances in which teachers appealed to the authority of the textbook or curriculum,
their own authority as the teacher, and to the authority of empirical evidence and scientific
models. When teachers emphasized the role of empirical evidence or scientific models it served
to support curiosity-driven discourse aimed at figuring out phenomena. However, when teachers
emphasized the authority of the textbook or curriculum or their own authoritative knowledge, it
supported task-base discourse oriented discourse aimed toward learning about science.

	

92

	
	
Teachers’ appeals to sources of authority also promoted particular roles for students in
the classroom. When teachers appealed to empirical evidence and scientific models, it helped to
position students as epistemic agents responsible for using evidence and models to construct
knowledge. However, when teachers appealed to the textbook, curriculum, or their own
authority, it positioned students as passive receivers of knowledge. Thus, the epistemic authority
that was established in classroom discourse appears to be an important link between teachers’
epistemic framing and the epistemic agency that they offer to students.
Students’ Epistemic Agency. The student epistemic agency codes attend to the roles
that students assume in relation to developing and using knowledge in classroom discourse.
Students’ epistemic agency is an emergent property that is influenced by how teachers position
students through the Teacher’s Purposes and appeals to Epistemic Authority as well students’
own actions. This reflects the idea that “agency refers to acts done intentionally,” but also that
“people are contributors to, rather than the sole determiners of, what happens to them”
(Bandura, 1997, p. 3). Thus, although the Teacher’s Purposes and Epistemic Authority
categories focused on teachers’ actions, they also speak to students’ epistemic agency more
broadly in that the actions by teachers suggest particular roles for students to take on in the
classroom. Therefore, in some ways the distinction between students’ and teachers’ actions is
somewhat arbitrary, but for analytical reasons it is much clearer to code student actions and
teacher actions separately in the videos.
It is also important to note that my data includes more evidence of the teachers’ talk and
actions than of the students’ talk and actions because the teachers wore the microphone. While
the teachers’ microphones recorded student talk that occurred during whole class discussions, I
was not able to analyze all of the student talk that occurred when students worked in pairs or

	

93

	
	
small groups. When the teacher moved near a small group or interacted with them, the
microphone recorded their conversations, and thus this talk is included this in my analysis. I
used the combination of teacher and student talk that was included on the videos to characterize
students’ purposes for activities. However, my conclusions about students’ epistemic agency in
classroom discourse are informed by all three coding categories.
Students generally do not explicitly state their own purposes for activities. Therefore, I
inferred students’ purposes in classroom discourse through the questions that they asked during
lessons. I coded student questions as either conceptual or procedural. Conceptual questions
indicate that students are trying to make sense of scientific concepts, while procedural questions
indicate that students are focused on gathering discrete information such as correct vocabulary or
procedures to follow. To distinguish conceptual questions from procedural ones I used the
context in which the question was asked, the words the student used, and the teacher’s response
to understand the meaning that the question conveyed within the classroom community. I also
coded teachers’ responses to students’ difficulties. This code was used when teachers interacted
with small groups of students that seemed to be experiencing difficulty with the task. In these
instances, the teachers responded with some type of verbal scaffolding. I distinguished between
scaffolding that focused on sensemaking, which was accomplished by asking students a series of
questions to aid them in making an important conceptual connection, versus scaffolding answers
or procedures, which focused on helping students by providing them factual information or
procedural guidance.

	

94

	
	

REFERENCES

	

95

	
	
REFERENCES
American Association for the Advancement of Science, A. (1989). Science for all Americans: A
Project 2061 report on literacy goals in science, mathematics, and technology. Retrieved
from Washington, D.C.: http://www.project2061.org/publications/sfaa/online/sfaatoc.htm
Ball, P. (2013). Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: W.H. Freeman and
Company.
Barab, S. (2014). Design-based research: A methodological toolkit for engineering change. In R.
K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2nd ed., pp. 151170). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Birks, M., & Mills, J. (2011). Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide. Thousand Oaks, California:
Sage Publications.
Bloome, D., Puro, P., & Theodorou, E. (1989). Procedural display and classroom lessons.
Curriculum Inquiry, 19(3), 265-291.
Doyle, W. (1983). Academic Work. Review of Educational Research, 53(2), 159-199.
Engel, S. (2011). Children's need to know: Curiosity in Schools. Harvard Educational Review,
81(4), 625-645.
Engle, R. A. (2011). The Productive Disciplinary Engagement Framework: Origins, Key
Concepts, and Developments. In D. Y. Dai (Ed.), Design Research on Learning and
Thinking in Educational Settings: Enhancing Intellectual Growth and Functioning. New
York: Routledge.
Engle, R. A., & Conant, F. R. (2002). Guiding Principles for Fostering Productive Disciplinary
Engagement: Explaining an Emergent Argument in a Community of Learners Classroom.
Cognition and Instruction, 20(4), 399-483.
Feynman, R. P. (1999). The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (J. Robbins Ed.). Cambridge, MA:
Helix Books.
Ford, M. J., & Wargo, B. M. (2012). Dialogic framing of scientific content for conceptual and
epistemic understanding. Science Education, 96(3), 369-391.
Gee, J. P. (1991). Rewriting LIteracy: Culture and the Discourse of the Other. London: Bergin &
Garvey.

	

96

	
	
Hutchison, P., & Hammer, D. (2010). Attending to student epistemological framing in a science
classroom. Science Education, 94, 506-524.
Inan, I. (2012). The Philosophy of Curiosity. New York: Routledge.
Keller, E. F. (2003). A feeling for the organism: The life and work of Barbara McClintock. New
York, NY: Holt.
Kennedy, M. M. (2005). Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Kitchener, R. F. (2002). Folk epistemology: An introduction. New Ideas in Psychology, 20(2-3),
89-105.
Lemke, J. L. (1990). Taking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Norwood, NJ: Ablex
Publishing.
Lemke, J. L. (2001). Articulating Communities: Sociocultural Perspectives on Science
Education. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 38(3), 296-316.
Loewenstein, G. (1994). The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation.
Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75-98.
Mehan, H. (1978). Structuring school structure. Harvard Educational Review, 48(1), 32-64.
Michaels, S., & O'Connor, C. (2012). Talk Science Primer. Retrieved from Cambridge, MA:
http://inquiryproject.terc.edu/shared/pd/TalkScience_Primer.pdf
National Research Council (NRC). (2011). A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices,
Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Retrieved from
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13165/a-framework-for-k-12-science-education-practicescrosscutting-concepts
NGSS Lead States. (2013). Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. Retrieved
from https://www.nextgenscience.org
O’Connor, C., & Michaels, S. (2007). When Is Dialogue ‘Dialogic’? Human Development,
50(5), 275-285.
Pennock, R. T. (2011). Can't Philosophers Tell the Difference Between Science and Religion?:
Demarcation Revisited. Synthese, 178, 177-206.
Russ, R. S., & Luna, M. J. (2013). Inferring teacher epistemological framing from local patterns
in teacher noticing. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 50(3), 284-314.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic
motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.

	

97

	
	
Sacks, O. (2002). Uncle tungsten: Memories of a chemical boyhood. New York: Vintage.
Sawyer, R. K. (2014). The New Science of Learning. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge
Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2nd ed., pp. 1-18). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Schmitt, F. F., & Lahroodi, R. (2008). The Epistemic Value of Curiosity. Educational Theory,
58(2), 125-148.
Shubin, N. (2009). Your inner fish: A journey into the 3.5-billion-year history of the human body.
New York: Vintage.
Stroupe, D. (2014). Examining classroom science practice communities: How teachers and
students negotiate epistemic agency and learn science-as-practice. Science Education,
98(3), 487-516.
Stroupe, D. (2017). Ambitious teachers' design and use of classrooms as a place of science.
Science Education, 101(3), 458-485.
Tannen, D. (1993). What's in a frame? Surface evidence for underlying expectations. In D.
Tannen (Ed.), Framing in Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.
Thompson, J., Hagenah, S., Kang, H., Stroupe, D., Windschitl, M., & Colley, C. (2016). Rigor
and responsiveness in classroom activity. Teachers College Record, 118(5), 1-58.
Turner, J. C., Meyer, D. K., Cox, K. E., Logan, C., & Thomas, C. T. (1998). Creating contexts
for involvement in mathematics. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90(4), 730-745.
Varelas, M., House, R., & Wenzel, S. (2005). Beginning teachers immersed into science;
Scientist and science teacher identities. Science Education, 89(3), 492-516.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Interaction between learning and development Mind and Society (pp. 7991). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Walqui, A. (2006). Scaffolding instruction for English language learners: A conceptual
Framework. The International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(2),
159-180.
Watson, J. D. (2001). The double helix: A personal account of the discovery of the structure of
DNA. New York, NY: Touchstone.
Wood, D., Bruner, J. S., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of
Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 89-100.
Zuss, M. (2012). The Practice of Theoretical Curiosity (Vol. 20). New York: Springer.

	

98

	
	
STUDY THREE
Students’ Perceptions of Classroom Discourse
INTRODUCTION
The discourse in most high school science classrooms traditionally has focused on
learning about science topics. However, the vision for three-dimensional learning put forth in
the National Research Council’s (NRC) Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2011)
contends that more productive science learning is aimed at figuring out phenomena. Threedimensional learning requires experiences that engage students in developing and using all three
dimensions of science—practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas—to explain
observable natural phenomena. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead
States, 2013) integrates the three dimensions into performance expectations and asserts that,
“learning to explain phenomena and solve problems is the central reason students engage in the
three dimensions” (NGSS Website, 2016). Therefore, the NGSS represent not just a new way to
package content and process goals for science education, but a new paradigm for science
learning that positions students as epistemic agents who engage in science practices, apply
crosscutting concepts, and develop and use disciplinary core ideas to explain phenomena in
science classrooms.
Science instruction aimed at figuring out phenomena requires that questions about the
natural world and a shared drive to answer those questions are at the core of classroom discourse.
I call this curiosity-driven discourse because it is motivated by the desire to explain natural
phenomena. Curiosity-driven discourse fosters three-dimensional learning because it engages
students in science practices to construct knowledge and emphasizes the transfer of knowledge
and skills to new situations. In contrast, more traditional classroom discourse, which I call task-

	

99

	
	
driven discourse, is aimed at learning about science topics. Task-driven discourse tends to foster
procedural display (Bloome, Puro, & Theodorou, 1989) because it emphasizes acquiring discrete
facts and skills. Therefore, curiosity-driven and task-driven discourse differ primarily in the
purposes that are established for learning activities: curiosity-driven discourse aims at figuring
out phenomena, while task-driven discourse aims at learning about science. The purposes
established in classroom discourse are important because they not only determine the goals for
students learning, but they influence students’ engagement and motivation to achieve those
goals.
In my analysis (Study Two of this dissertation) of five high school classrooms implementing
the NGSS-aligned Carbon TIME curriculum, I found that only one achieved curiosity-driven
discourse. This conclusion was based on the talk and actions of the teachers and students
captured in the videotaped lessons that I analyzed. While students’ actions in the videos revealed
particular purposes for activities and roles that they took on, the videos do did not reveal what
students actually thought or felt about classroom discourse. This raises questions such as: What
did students perceive their teacher’s goals to be? Did students feel like their ideas were valued in
their classroom? Did classroom discourse nurture students’ own curiosity about the world?
Students’ perceptions of these aspects of classroom discourse are important because they
influence students’ emotional responses to activities, affect their motivation to Given the
importance of students’ perceptions, I developed a student survey to address the research
question: How do students perceive the discourse in their science classrooms? Answering this
question is relevant not only for comparing students’ perceptions to my own assessment from the
video analysis, but also for determining whether a student survey could potentially identify the

	

100

	
	
degree of curiosity-driven discourse in the absence of more time-intensive classroom
observations.
The survey measured multiple affective constructs related to the key features of curiositydriven discourse. It was administered to the students in each of the five case study classrooms
when they had finished implementing the Carbon TIME curriculum. I had two main goals in
developing, administering, and analyzing the survey: (1) compare students’ perceptions of
classroom discourse across the case study classrooms to my findings from the video analysis,
and (2) determine whether the results from the student survey could stand in for more intensive
analyses of classroom discourse.
Curiosity-Driven Discourse and Theories of Motivation
While the NGSS describe cognitive performances to be accomplished by individuals, the
three-dimensional learning experiences required to achieve the performance expectations include
social and affective components that engage students’ collective curiosity and motivate them to
explain natural phenomena. Achieving the performance expectations requires socializing
students into communities of practice motivated by curiosity about the natural world. Therefore,
curiosity plays an important role in motivating productive science learning. Susan Engel has
extensively studied the role of curiosity in elementary classrooms and calls curiosity “the
mechanism that underlies the best learning” (Engel, 2011, p. 626).
Curiosity has both cognitive and affective dimensions that influence learning. It is not
simply a generic desire for any knowledge, but curiosity always has a particular object of focus
(Inan, 2012; Schmitt & Lahroodi, 2008). Thus, curiosity focuses the learner on developing
particular types of knowledge. In addition, curiosity is associated with enjoyment and learning
for its own sake (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Enjoyment derived from particular learning activities has

	

101

	
	
been shown to increase motivation and improve learning (Shumow & Schmidt, 2014). In
addition, to its cognitive and affective dimensions, curiosity has a social dimension. Engel
points out that, “children’s curiosity unfolds within a social context… their curiosity is
influenced by those around them” (2011, p. 629).
The notion that curiosity-driven discourse supports productive learning is supported by
key psychological theories of motivation including achievement goal theory (Senko, Hulleman,
& Harackiewicz, 2011) and self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000). These theories
highlight how individuals’ goals, perceived autonomy, and social relationships influence their
motivation and achievement. The key aspects of motivation highlighted by these theories
directly relate to my conceptualization of curiosity-driven discourse and its role in fostering
productive learning. Curiosity-driven classroom discourse positions students as epistemic agents
responsible for using empirical evidence and scientific models to answer questions about natural
phenomena. The role of the teacher in curiosity-driven discourse is to orient students toward
productive questions about phenomena and to scaffold their sensemaking. Thus, curiosity-driven
discourse is aimed at a particular epistemic goal—figuring out phenomena, it fosters students’
autonomy by positioning them as epistemic agents, and it involves social relationships that
support their sensemaking including scaffolding from the teacher and discourse with peers.
Achievement goal theory explains student motivation in terms of the students’ reasons for
engaging and persisting in classroom activities (Meece, Anderman, & Anderman, 2006). Many
scholars have described two main types of achievement goals, which are often summarized as
“mastery” and “performance” orientations (Shumow & Schmidt, 2014). The mastery approach
is characterized by a desire to understand and develop competence in a particular area, while the
performance approach is characterized by a desire to outperform other students. The

	

102

	
	
performance orientation can also manifest as performance avoidance in which students avoid
tasks if they believe they will fail. Many lines of research have demonstrated that the mastery
orientation fosters greater persistence and deeper learning than the performance orientation
(Meece et al., 2006). While students who have strong performance goals may do well in school,
if they do not also hold mastery goals, then they often avoid challenging tasks or courses and are
less intrinsically motivated to deeply engage with the material.
It is important to note that mastery and performance goals are not mutually exclusive. In
addition, research has found that student goal structures differ in different situations and are
influenced by their educational contexts and teachers’ practices. However, because curiositydriven classroom discourse promotes learning for its own sake, I expect students in these
classrooms to adopt more mastery-oriented goal structures. On the other hand, I would expect
classrooms that engage in task-driven discourse to support more performance-oriented goal
structures.
A mastery orientation has shown to be positively related to academic self-efficacy
(Meece et al., 2006). Perceived self-efficacy refers to a person’s belief in their “capability to
organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments” (Bandura,
1997, p. 3). A student’s level of self-efficacy affects their motivation, effort, and persistence in
science classrooms. Shumow and Schmidt (2012) found that students’ self-efficacy in their
science classes varies throughout the school year and tends to be related to teachers’ practices.
Their study showed that students’ self-efficacy tended to increase in classrooms in which
teachers used more questioning and emphasized critical thinking over recall of facts. Thus, I
expect classrooms that adopt curiosity-driven discourse to foster increased academic efficacy
versus classrooms that emphasize recall of facts. However, multiple surveys throughout the

	

103

	
	
school year would be necessary to measure the degree to which the classroom discourse actually
affects students’ ability beliefs over time.
Research shows that students are intrinsically motivated to engage in appropriately
challenging activities (Shumow & Schmidt, 2014). Many lines of research on classroom
discourse also support the notion that academically productive talk that fosters conceptual
reasoning and presses students to explain their ideas is critical for science learning (Michaels &
O'Connor, 2012). Curiosity-driven classroom discourse challenges students by positioning them
as epistemic agents capable of developing and answering scientific questions about phenomena.
The teacher scaffolds students to meet this challenge by pressing them to analyze evidence and
explain their reasoning. The degree to which teachers foster rigorous thinking and encourage
learning beyond procedural display is referred to as academic press (Murphy, Weil, Hallinger, &
Mitman, 1982). Academic press implies that students are challenged, but it also fosters selfefficacy because, “When a teacher challenges his or her students, students receive an implicit
positive message about their abilities and the teacher’s confidence in them” (Shumow &
Schmidt, 2014).
Self-determination theory (SDT) explains motivation in terms of three psychological
needs: competence, relatedness, and autonomy (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Competence is another
word for self-efficacy as described above. Relatedness refers to a person’s perception of their
social relationships, with higher relatedness connected to increased intrinsic motivation. In the
classroom, these relationships include both a student’s relationships with peers as well as with
their teacher. Autonomy refers to a person’s sense of independence or freedom within a
particular context. Students’ sense of autonomy in the classroom is especially influenced by

	

104

	
	
their teacher’s practices. Research has shown that teaching practices that support students’
perceived autonomy promote intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000).
Curiosity-driven classroom discourse supports the three aspects of intrinsic motivation
emphasized by self-determination theory. It promotes a feeling of competence by positioning
students as epistemic agents responsible for explaining phenomena and supporting them in
achieving that goal through intentional scaffolding. It supports relatedness through dialogic
discourse that encourages students to share their ideas and reasoning and through working
together toward a common goal of explaining phenomena. Finally, curiosity-driven discourse
supports students’ sense of autonomy by engaging their own curiosity and supporting them in
developing questions and using empirical evidence and scientific models to answer those
questions.
Measuring Students’ Perceptions of Curiosity-Driven Discourse
Figure 3.1 depicts the constructs considered in this study which were measured by the
survey. At the center of the image is curiosity-driven classroom discourse, surrounded by the
key features. Academic press, mastery goal orientation, self-efficacy, and autonomy were
constructs identified in the psychology literature that positively influence students’ motivation to
learn and are directly related to my conceptualization of curiosity-driven discourse. Although
not previously described in the literature on motivation, curiosity about the natural world and
attention to students’ ideas are also important components of my conceptualization of curiositydriven classroom discourse because they position students as epistemic agents responsible for
figuring out phenomena. Thus, I developed a student survey that included a scale for each of
these six constructs.

	

105

	
	
Figure 3.1. Key components of curiosity-driven discourse measured by the student survey.
Curiosity	
about	
natural	
world

Mastery	
goal	
orientation
Academic	
press

Attention	
to	
students’	
ideas

Curiosity-driven	classroom	
discourse

Selfefficacy

Autonomy

The survey items ask students to indicate their degree of agreement to statements about
their teacher’s or classroom’s goals and purposes for activities. Thus, the survey measures
students’ perceptions of classroom discourse, rather than their individual degree of any of these
constructs. In the video analysis of the case study classrooms (study 2 of this dissertation), I
described my coding scheme for analyzing classroom discourse. The constructs included in the
survey directly relate to these key features of classroom discourse. The Teacher’s Purposes
identified in the video analysis are measured by the constructs of academic press, mastery goal
orientation, curiosity about the natural world, and attention to students’ ideas. These constructs
relate to the purposes that teachers establish for activities, whether teachers press students toward
conceptual understanding, and the role of curiosity about phenomena and students’ own ideas in

	

106

	
	
classroom discourse. In the video analysis, Students’ Epistemic Agency was conceptualized as
the actions that students take to indicate their framing of the purposes of lessons as well as how
they are positioned in relation to developing and using knowledge. The constructs of selfefficacy and autonomy on the survey are closely aligned to these aspects of Students’ Epistemic
Agency because they measure students’ perceptions of their competence for achieving the goals
in their classroom and the degree to which their teacher positions them as epistemic agents.
In the video analysis (study 2 of this dissertation), I compared the discourse in five high
school classrooms implementing the Carbon TIME curriculum (see Table 2.1 for an overview of
the five classrooms). I found that only Ms. Nolan’s classroom achieved curiosity-driven
discourse, while the other four exhibited more task-driven discourse. The survey described in
this study was designed to compare students’ perceptions of the discourse in these classrooms to
my own analysis. Additionally, agreement between my analysis of classroom discourse and
students’ responses on the survey would suggest that the survey might be used as a less timeintensive method of measuring the degree of curiosity-driven discourse in science classrooms.
SURVEY INSTRUMENT
The survey included six scales that each measure a specific aspect of curiosity-driven
classroom discourse. The constructs measured are depicted in Figure 3.1 and the survey scales
that measure them are described in Table 3.1. In the literature on achievement goal theory and
self-determination theory, I identified four published scales that measure constructs that are
central to my conceptualization of curiosity-driven discourse (the scales marked PALS and SDT
in Table 3.1). Because I could not locate published scales to measure students’ perception of the
role of curiosity about the natural world or whether their ideas were encouraged and valued in
classroom discourse, I developed scales to measure these aspects of curiosity-driven discourse.

	

107

	
	
I conducted a pilot study in the fall of 2015 in which I administered the survey to a group
of students that was not participating in the Carbon TIME project. The pilot survey included
additional scales that were removed from the final survey because they were determined to be
redundant or unnecessary for measuring the degree of curiosity-driven discourse. The pilot study
demonstrated that both the published scales and the ones that I developed for measuring the role
of curiosity and students’ ideas in classroom discourse all had acceptable reliability using the
standard measure of Cronbach’s ! > 0.7.
The final survey measuring curiosity-driven discourse consisted of 35 items that asked
students to indicate their degree of agreement on a 5-point Likert scale (See Appendix for the list
of items). The survey was administered to 315 students across the five Carbon TIME high
school case study classrooms during the 2015 – 2016 school year. The reliability of each of the
scales ranged from ! = 0.781 to ! = 0.925 (Table 3.1). The reliability scores of ! > 0.7
indicate acceptable reliability for each scale included on the survey.

	

108

	
	
Table 3.1. Scales measuring key aspects of curiosity-driven discourse included in the survey.
Survey Scale

Measures the students’ perception of…

PALS Classroom Mastery
Goal Structure

The purpose for classroom activities is
developing competence and conceptual
understanding
Students’ perception of their competence
for classroom activities (self-efficacy)
The teacher challenges students and
presses for understanding
The student feels understood and
supported by the teacher (autonomy)

PALS Academic Efficacy
PALS Academic Press
SDT Learning Climate
Questionnaire (Autonomy
Support)
Curiosity about the natural
world in classroom
discourse
Role of students’ ideas in
the classroom

Classroom discourse encourages
appreciation of nature or curiosity about
the world
Students have opportunities to share their
ideas in the classroom and feel that their
ideas are valued

Reliability of the
scale
in this study
(Cronbach’s $)
0.895

0.921
0.912
0.925

0.781
0.779

The Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales (PALS) were developed to measure students’
perceptions of the learning environment in their classroom (Midgley et al., 2000). The PALS
included in this survey measure students’ perceptions of (1) classroom mastery goal orientation
(2) self-efficacy and (3) the degree of academic press that they felt from their teacher. I also
included the PALS Classroom Performance-Approach Goal Structure scale to test whether
classrooms differed in their emphasis on performance goals such as getting correct answers and
scoring high on tests. I found no statistical difference (p = 0.264) across the five classrooms in
students’ responses on the PALS Classroom Performance-Approach. The performance approach
scale was the only scale included that was not hypothesized to correlate with curiosity-driven
discourse, and thus it was removed from the survey total score. Thus, the total survey score is a
measure of students’ perception of the overall degree of curiosity-driven discourse in a
classroom.
	

109

	
	
The Learning Climate Questionnaire (Deci & Ryan, undated) was developed by SDT
researchers to measure the degree to which students feel that their teacher supports their
autonomy in the classroom. Thus, it was included to measure students’ epistemic agency in the
classroom. The two scales that I developed for the role of curiosity about the natural world and
students’ own ideas in classroom discourse measure constructs that were not previously
identified in the motivation literature. However, these constructs are essential components of the
NRC Framework’s vision of three-dimensional learning that emphasizes the importance of
students’ sensemaking about phenomena. These scales were tested in the pilot study, and the
reliability in this study of ! = 0.781 for the Curiosity scale and ! = 0.7779 for the Ideas scale
(Table 3.1) further confirms that the scales I developed are reliably measuring a single construct.
The Curiosity scale is made up of six items that focus on whether the class has increased
students’ curiosity about the natural world or their appreciation of nature, whether the class is
boring or fun, and whether the topics in the class relate to their life outside of school. These
items are meant to measure students’ perceptions of the classroom discourse rather than students’
own inherent curiosity about science. However, responses are likely influenced by students’
personal interest in science. I also developed four items measuring students’ perceptions of the
role of their own ideas in classroom discourse. While the PALS Academic Press scale measures
the degree to which teachers press students to explain their answers, and the SDT Learning
Climate Questionnaire measures the degree to which a student feels understood and supported by
their teacher, neither scale specifically asked about whether students feel that they can share their
ideas in class and that their ideas are valued. For example, it is possible that academic press and
autonomy support could occur through written feedback and a teacher’s interactions with
individuals. However, I am also interested in whether students feel that sharing their ideas with

	

110

	
	
their peers is encouraged in the classroom. Thus, the Curiosity and Ideas scales that I developed
capture important aspects of curiosity-driven discourse that have not been studied through
student surveys previously.
RESULTS
The survey was administered to 315 students across the five case study classrooms. Most
students took the survey online in the spring of 2016 in conjunction with their completion of
Carbon TIME post-tests at the conclusion of the units. Mr. Harris’ students took a paper version
of the survey, while the students in the other four classrooms completed on online version of the
survey. Analysis of the mean scores in each classroom revealed the same pattern across all six
scales: the mean for Ms. Callahan’s classroom was highest, followed by Mr. Harris’, Ms. Wei’s,
and Ms. Nolan’s, with the lowest scores on each scale in Mr. Ross’ classroom (See Appendix for
the results of each scale). Thus, the mean scores on the individual scales are highly correlated to
each other in all five classrooms. This suggests that students’ perceptions of these features of
curiosity-driven classroom discourse are not discrete variables.
The survey total score represents students’ perceptions of the degree to which their
classroom engaged in curiosity-driven discourse. Some students did not complete all parts of the
online survey which resulted in missing data for certain scales. Because sum scores could not be
computed for these students, the final sample size for the total survey score was 271 students.
Ms. Callahan asked her students to complete the survey outside of class time which resulted in
few students participating. The sample size for each classroom and the mean sum score for the
survey are reported in Table 3.2.

	

111

	
	
Table 3.2. Results of the student survey in the case study classrooms.
Teacher Sample
Size

Mean
Total

Standard
Deviation

Median
Total

Skewness

Callahan 12

153.92

10.09

154.00

-0.826

Harris
Wei
Nolan
Ross

139.86
131.57
129.13
118.86

19.31
20.29
27.56
30.30

142.00
131.00
137.00
115.50

-0.839
-0.037
-1.201
-0.375

42
54
85
78

Adjusted Significance
(differs from the
following other
classrooms)
Ross (p < 0.001)
Wei (p = 0.008)
Nolan ( p = 0.008)
Ross (p < 0.001)
Callahan ( p = 0.008)
Callahan (p = 0.008)
Callahan (p < 0.001)
Harris (p < 0.001)

The total survey scores in each classroom were not normally distributed and classrooms
had different numbers of respondents. Therefore, the nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis H test was
used to compare the medians across the classrooms instead of a one-way ANOVA (Lomax & L.,
2012; Midgley et al., 2000). Distributions of the total survey scores were similar for all groups
as assessed by visual inspection of the boxplots. The Kruskal-Wallis H test demonstrated that
there were significant differences in the total survey scores among the classrooms, χ2(4) =
31.608, p < 0.001. Pairwise comparisons were performed using Dunn's procedure with a
Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons (Lomax & Hahs-Vaughn, 2012). Adjusted pvalues are presented in Table 3.2. This post hoc analysis revealed statistically significant
differences in median total survey scores between Ms. Callahan’s students and Mr. Ross’ (p <
0.001), Ms. Wei’s students (p = 0.008), and Ms. Nolan’s students (p = 0.008) as well as between
Mr. Harris’ and Mr. Ross’ students (p < 0.001), but not between any other classroom
combinations.
DISCUSSION
My previous analysis of classroom discourse (study 2 of this dissertation) revealed that
only Ms. Nolan’s classroom engaged in curiosity-driven discourse that positioned students as
	

112

	
	
epistemic agents responsible for figuring out phenomena. The other four classrooms were
characterized by more task-driven discourse that positioned students as learning authoritative
science knowledge. Ms. Nolan established a driving question about a phenomenon that she
linked to each activity, she supported students’ epistemic agency by scaffolding them in figuring
out phenomena and pressing them to explain their answers. Ms. Nolan’s students demonstrated
their scientific curiosity by asking a large number of conceptual questions throughout the unit
that I analyzed. Their questions and other participation also suggested that they felt comfortable
sharing their ideas in the classroom. Thus, my findings from the video analysis lead to the
prediction that Ms. Nolan’s students would have the highest average total survey scores.
Although my previous analysis found that the other four classrooms engaged in more
task-driven discourse, I also noticed that the discourse in Ms. Callahan’s classroom was more
rigorous than the discourse in Ms. Wei’s, Mr. Ross’, and Mr. Harris’ classroom. Due to the
emphasis on conceptual understanding in Ms. Callahan’s classroom, I would expect her students
to rate the discourse in their classroom higher on this survey than the students in Ms. Wei’s, Mr.
Ross’ and Mr. Harris’ classrooms. Although the discourse in Ms. Callahan’s classroom fell short
of positioning students as epistemic agents responsible for figuring out phenomena, there was a
strong emphasis on conceptual understanding that I would expect to positively impact students’
perceptions of classroom goals related to mastery, academic press, and self-efficacy. Both Mr.
Harris and Mr. Ross struggled to illicit students’ ideas and to respond to students’ ideas in class
discussions. In addition, they rarely pressed students to explain their answers and did little to
foster students’ epistemic agency. Therefore, my findings from the video analysis lead to the
prediction that Mr. Ross’ and Mr. Harris’ students would have the lowest average total survey
scores.

	

113

	
	
My predictions about students’ responses across the classrooms were not supported by
the survey data. The most surprising results were from Ms. Nolan’s classroom, in which the
students tended to rate the degree-of curiosity driven discourse lower than I expected, and Mr.
Harris’ classroom, in which the students tended to rate the degree of curiosity-driven discourse
higher than I expected. The total survey scores in Ms. Nolan’s classroom had a high degree of
variability and were negatively skewed (Table 3.2), indicating that the results in her classroom
were influenced by a number of outliers who rated the discourse much lower than the rest of the
students. This group of students may not have taken the survey seriously, or they may have
disliked the teacher or the class and responded negatively to all of the questions. The outliers
may partially explain the lower than expected results in Ms. Nolan’s classroom.
Mr. Harris’ students rated the degree of curiosity-driven discourse much higher than
expected. Although outside the scope of this study, preliminary analysis of other data sources
collected through the larger Carbon TIME project suggests some reasons why this may have
occurred. I served as the case study coach in Mr. Harris’ classroom, and my interviews with the
focus students indicated they felt his classroom was much more engaging than most of the other
classes at their school. They reported more opportunities to share their ideas, increased hands-on
activities, and a higher degree of curiosity about the natural world than they experienced in other
science classes. Thus, Mr. Harris’ higher-than-expected survey scores are likely attributable to
the fact that students’ perception of classroom discourse is a function of their experiences in
other classrooms. Therefore, although as a researcher comparing discourse across the five
classrooms I perceived the degree of curiosity-driven classroom discourse to be very low in Mr.
Harris’ classroom, when his students compared the classroom discourse to their experiences in
even more task-driven classrooms at their school, it actually seemed more curiosity-driven.

	

114

	
	
The fact that students’ perceptions of the discourse in a particular classroom is a function
of their experiences in other classrooms may also explain why Ms. Nolan’s survey scores were
lower than expected. If students at her school experienced other classes that were even more
curiosity-driven than hers, it would have caused them to rate her classroom somewhat lower in
comparison. Ms. Nolan has shared with Carbon TIME staff that most of her students had a
teacher the previous year that was particularly skilled at orchestrating classroom discourse. This
supports the conclusion that her students may have rated the discourse in her classroom
somewhat lower simply because it seemed more normal to them rather than out of the ordinary.
If students’ perception of classroom discourse is a function of their experiences in other
classrooms, a different research design would be necessary to compare the survey responses
across the case study classrooms. One option would be to ask the students to complete the
survey about all of their classes, and then use the results from other classes to statistically control
for their responses about their science class. Another option would be to give the survey
multiple times across the year to look at how students’ responses change over time. However,
even with the limitations of the design of this study, future analysis of other data collected
through the Carbon TIME project may shed light on why the students responded the way that
they did. For example, other research groups within the Carbon TIME project are currently
analyzing work samples, interviews, and video recordings of students’ small group work for a
selected group of focus students from these case study classrooms. Analysis of these studentfacing data sources, in conjunction with the information gleaned from interviews with the
teachers, may help explain the results presented here.

	

115

	
	
CONCLUSION
The survey instrument I developed for this study reflects the theoretical framework that
guided my analysis of classroom videos in study 2 of this dissertation. Thus, I expected that
classrooms exhibiting a higher degree of curiosity-driven classroom discourse would score
higher on the survey than classrooms that exhibited more task-driven discourse. However, the
results of the survey did not support this hypothesis. While Mr. Harris’ classroom exhibited very
task-driven discourse in the video analysis, his students rated each of the components of
curiosity-driven discourse included on the six scales of this survey quite high. In contrast,
although Ms. Nolan’s classroom exhibited the highest degree of curiosity-driven discourse in the
video analysis, her students did not rate the degree of curiosity-driven discourse very high on the
survey. These findings indicate that students’ perceptions of classroom discourse do not match
my own.
Of course, there are many possible reasons that students’ perception of classroom
discourse do not match my perception. A likely reason is that students’ responses to the survey
items were heavily influenced by their experiences in other classrooms. Other data collected
from the Carbon TIME case study classrooms suggests that students’ views of the discourse in
their science classroom is shaped by their experiences other classrooms and what they have come
to expect as normal. If this is true, then the study design of administering a single student survey
is not sufficient to draw conclusions about the degree of curiosity-driven discourse in a particular
classroom.
Whatever the reason for the mismatch between students’ perceptions of classroom
discourse and the results of my video analysis, the survey results call into question any research
design that infers the quality of classroom discourse from student surveys alone. Researchers

	

116

	
	
and evaluators often use student surveys in study designs that do not include classroom
observations. However, the results of this study raise serious concerns about the legitimacy of
the claims that they make. If students perceive classroom discourse differently from researchers
and evaluators, it would be a mistake to draw conclusions about the quality of classroom
discourse from student surveys in the absence of classroom observations.
While the results of this study did not match my predictions based on my video analysis
of classroom discourse, students’ responses suggest that engagement and motivation were fairly
high in all of the Carbon TIME classrooms. The average score in each classroom for each
survey item was greater than three, which corresponded to “somewhat true” on the Likert scale.
Students’ tendency to rate the items related to curiosity-driven discourse as “somewhat true” or
“very true” in their classrooms indicates that overall they perceived classroom discourse
positively. Thus, it may be that the Carbon TIME curriculum itself had a positive influence on
classroom discourse. More research is needed to understand the effects of particular features of
classroom discourse on students’ perceptions of classroom discourse in Carbon TIME
classrooms.

	

117

	
	

APPENDIX

	

118

	
	
The survey items below were randomly organized on the final instrument (not grouped by scale).
Students were given the following directions for completing the survey:

Directions:
Carbon TIME researchers are interested in understanding students’ perceptions of
their current science class. Your answers are completely confidential and will not
impact your grade in any way. Your teacher will not see your individual answers,
but only a summary of the class totals for each question.
Please circle the number that represents your agreement or disagreement with the
statements.
• Circle only one number for each question. The more you agree with the
statement, the higher the number you should choose.
• Answer these questions specifically for your current science class (the one
in which you participated in Carbon TIME activities).
Rating scale
1
Not at all true

2

3
Somewhat true

4

5
Very true

Survey Scales:
PALS Classroom Mastery Goal Structure
In our class, trying hard is very important.
In our class, how much you improve is really important.
In our class, really understanding the material is the main goal.
In our class, it’s important to understand the work, not just memorize.
In our class, learning new ideas and concepts is very important.
In our class, it’s OK to make mistakes as long as you are learning.
PALS Academic Efficacy
I'm certain I can master the skills taught in class this year.
I'm certain I can figure out how to do the most difficult class work.
I can do almost all the work in class if I don't give up.
Even if the work is hard, I can learn it.
I can do even the hardest work in this class if I try.
PALS Academic Press
When I’ve figured out how to do a problem, my teacher gives me more challenging problems to
think about.
My teacher presses me to do thoughtful work.
My teacher asks me to explain how I get my answers.

	

119

	
	
When I’m working on something, my teacher tells me to keep thinking until I really understand.
My teacher doesn’t let me do just easy work, but makes me think.
My teacher makes sure that the work I do really makes me think.
My teacher accepts nothing less than my full effort.
SDT Learning Climate Questionnaire (autonomy support)
I feel that my teacher provides me choices and options.
I feel understood by my teacher.
My teacher has confidence in my ability to do well in the course.
My teacher encourages me to ask questions.
My teacher listens to how I would like to do things.
My teacher tries to understand how I see things before suggesting a new way to do things.
Curiosity about the natural world in classroom discourse
What we learn in this class is connected to the real world or my everyday life.
The topics in this class do not relate to my life outside of school. (reverse coded)
This class makes learning science fun.
I am usually bored in this class. (reverse coded)
This class has made me more curious about the world.
This class has increased my appreciation of nature.
Role of students’ ideas in the classroom
I feel like my ideas are valued in this classroom.
I have opportunities to share my ideas in this class.
I feel comfortable sharing my ideas in a whole class discussion in this class.
I’d rather not tell anyone when I don’t understand something in this class. (Reverse coded)
My teacher tries to help students figure things out on their own rather than telling them answers.

	

	

	

120

	
	
Table 3.3 Student Survey Results on Each Scale by Classroom.
SDT Learning

Teacher NREL ID
Ross

N

Valid

Efficacy

Press

(Autonomy)

1

1

3

3

Mean

21.2262

16.9524

23.7927

20.7805

Median

22.0000

18.0000

23.0000

20.5000

Std. Deviation

5.79853

5.79968

6.89200

6.50550

33.623

33.636

47.500

42.322

61

63

61

59

4

2

4

6

Mean

23.1148

19.8413

25.7869

22.8475

Median

23.0000

20.0000

26.0000

23.0000

Std. Deviation

4.37835

4.10824

5.74490

4.97169

19.170

16.878

33.004

24.718

88

94

90

90

6

0

4

4

Mean

22.3409

19.1915

25.8444

22.5444

Median

24.0000

20.0000

27.0000

24.0000

Std. Deviation

5.67488

4.91274

6.41612

5.93061

32.204

24.135

41.167

35.172

16

17

13

13

1

0

4

4

Mean

26.9375

21.2353

31.3846

26.1538

Median

27.5000

22.0000

31.0000

26.0000

Std. Deviation

2.86284

4.11597

2.46774

2.30384

8.196

16.941

6.090

5.308

50

54

50

52

4

0

4

2

Mean

25.4000

20.0556

28.4400

24.4423

Median

26.0000

21.0000

29.5000

26.0000

Std. Deviation

3.33809

3.74879

4.43161

4.09884

11.143

14.053

19.639

16.801

N

Valid

N

Valid
Missing

Variance
N

Valid
Missing

Variance
N

Valid
Missing

Variance

	

Mastery

82

Variance

Harris

Climate

82

Missing

Callahan

PALS Academic

84

Variance

Nolan

PALS Academic

84

Missing

Wei

PALS Classroom

121

	
	
Table 3.3 (cont’d)
Role of Students’ Ideas in
Teacher NREL ID
Ross

Curiosity in Classroom Discourse
N

Valid

83

83

2

2

Mean

18.3735

16.7229

Median

18.0000

17.0000

Std. Deviation

5.62597

4.40430

31.651

19.398

61

60

4

5

Mean

20.1967

18.9667

Median

20.0000

19.0000

Std. Deviation

4.51966

3.27790

20.427

10.745

90

90

4

4

Mean

20.1000

19.1111

Median

21.0000

20.0000

Std. Deviation

4.86688

4.19857

23.687

17.628

16

12

1

5

Mean

24.2500

22.2500

Median

24.5000

22.0000

Std. Deviation

3.64234

1.71226

13.267

2.932

52

52

2

2

Mean

21.3269

19.6154

Median

22.0000

20.0000

Std. Deviation

4.35089

3.59277

18.930

12.908

Missing

Variance
Wei

N

Valid
Missing

Variance
Nolan

N

Valid
Missing

Variance
Callahan

N

Valid
Missing

Variance
Harris

N

Valid
Missing

Variance

	

Classroom Discourse

122

	
	
Figure 3.2. Student Perceptions of Mastery Goal Structure.

Figure 3.3. Student Perceptions of Academic Efficacy.

	

123

	
	
Figure 3.4. Student Perceptions of Academic Press.

Figure 3.5. Student Perceptions of Autonomy.

	

124

	
	
Figure 3.6. Student Perceptions of Curiosity in Classroom Discourse.

Figure 3.7. Student Perceptions of the Role of Their Ideas in Classroom Discourse.

	

125

	
	

REFERENCES

	

126

	
	
REFERENCES
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: W.H. Freeman and
Company.
Bloome, D., Puro, P., & Theodorou, E. (1989). Procedural display and classroom lessons.
Curriculum Inquiry, 19(3), 265-291.
Engel, S. (2011). Children's need to know: Curiosity in Schools. Harvard Educational Review,
81(4), 625-645.
Inan, I. (2012). The Philosophy of Curiosity. New York: Routledge.
Lomax, R. G., & L., H.-V. D. (2012). An Introduction to Statistical Concepts (3rd ed.). New
York: Routledge.
Meece, J. L., Anderman, E. M., & Anderman, L. H. (2006). Classroom goal structure, student
motivation, and academic achievement. Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 487-503.
Michaels, S., & O'Connor, C. (2012). Talk Science Primer. Retrieved from Cambridge, MA:
http://inquiryproject.terc.edu/shared/pd/TalkScience_Primer.pdf
Midgley, C., Maehr, M. L., Hruda, L. Z., Anderman, E., Anderman, L., Freeman, K. E., . . .
Urdan, T. (2000). Manual for the Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales. The University
of Michigan. Retrieved from http://www.umich.edu/~pals/manuals.html
Murphy, J. F., Weil, M., Hallinger, P., & Mitman, A. (1982). Academic press: Translating high
expectations into school policies and classroom practices. Educational Leadership, 40(3),
22-26.
National Research Council (NRC). (2011). A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices,
Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Retrieved from
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13165/a-framework-for-k-12-science-education-practicescrosscutting-concepts
NGSS Lead States. (2013). Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. Retrieved
from https://www.nextgenscience.org
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic
motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.
Schmidt, J. A., & Shumow, L. (2012). Change in self-efficacy in high school science classrooms.
In S. Brittner (Ed.), Psychology of self-efficacy. Hauppauge, N.Y.: Nova Publishers.

	

127

	
	
Schmitt, F. F., & Lahroodi, R. (2008). The Epistemic Value of Curiosity. Educational Theory,
58(2), 125-148.
Senko, C., Hulleman, C. S., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (2011). Achievement goal theory at the
crossroads: Old controversies, current challenges, and new directions. Educational
Psychologist, 46(1), 26-47.
Shumow, L., & Schmidt, J. A. (2014). Enhancing Adolescents' Motivation for Science:
Research-Based Strategies for Teaching Male and Female Students. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Corwin Press.

	

128