Science Education

Natural history museums with their huge collections and exhibits seem to be particularly well suited to create an understanding and awareness of biodiversity. Mounted specimens are typical learning objects in natural history museums. The visual sense obviously plays a role here, but the haptic exploration of certain elements can also be conducive to learning. By combining an observational study and a mixed‐method study using a questionnaire and a semistructured interview, we analyzed how visitors use, evaluate, and benefit from the haptic exploration of mounted specimens. We also investigated whether a combination of a fur piece and a photo would be a less conservation‐sensitive alternative for mounted specimens. Although both studies indicate that visitors only spent a relatively short time at the exhibit, the possibility of haptic exploration led them to engage with more objects and to spend more time with them. This was independent of whether the mounted specimens or the combination of a photo and a piece of fur was presented. In addition, positive evaluations tended to occur more frequently in the conditions in which touching was permitted, whereas negative evaluations were more frequent in the conditions without haptic experience and the lack of opportunity for interaction was often criticized in these conditions.

Reform‐oriented science classrooms encourage environments in which students engage in a collective enterprise of making sense of their science ideas together. Teachers who strive for these sorts of environments support students in collaboratively constructing and answering their own questions about phenomena and making sense of competing ideas together. However, to engage with one another productively, students must ask questions, share incomplete thoughts, and comment on each other's ideas, all of which can be seen as risky and unfamiliar behavior that may result in feelings of uncertainty or other negative classroom consequences. We conduct an explanatory case study using student and teacher interviews, teacher surveys, and classroom video collected over 2 years to investigate how one teacher used classroom norms to establish and maintain a culture in which students appeared committed to taking risks to improve their collective knowledge‐building. We found that norms were one practical tool the teacher used to encourage students to take risks and that also seemed helpful for negotiating individual and group uncertainty. Norms were also tools the teacher used to ensure that she and her students had similar expectations for classroom engagement. This study practically addresses some key challenges teachers face in enacting reform‐oriented science teaching and offers suggestions for how continued research regarding norms and uncertainty can continue to further science reform efforts.

Prior research demonstrates the integral nature of affective work in STEM/STEAM, including multiple works in this issue. In our contribution to this special issue on Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, we seek to better understand the role of joy, an emotion that moves beyond the temporary shallows of happiness into the depths of complexity that connects fear and joy, constraint and transformation, and human connection. Attending to joy means attending to dignity, wholeness of people, and diversity of experiences. Leaning into joy affirms dignity, which in turn makes possible deeper disciplinary sensemaking. We conceptualize Pedagogies of Joy (POY, rhymes with joy) as design and instructional (in‐the‐moment) decisions an educator uses as they follow pathways leading to joy. We draw on cross‐case analysis of three empirical examples to illustrate four POY: attending to affective‐entanglements, switching roles, cultivating third space, and (co)dreaming to enact. We illustrate how these POY‐shaped design and instructional‐decisions in empirical exemplars to make visible the importance of leaning into moments of joy as seeds of possibility dignity‐affirming learning that can deepen sensemaking about STEM phenomena by foregrounding a full affective range of sensemaking repertoires. We offer POY as tools for educators, researchers, and designers (beyond binary categories of teacher, student, adult, child, youth). We find joy in knowing that these empirical examples are but drops in a wide sea of stories from countless educators who are already committed to seeking joy in solidarity with learners.

In this response to Røkenes and Jornet as part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, we celebrate the contributions they make as they analyze Norwegian teenagers grappling with hope and hopelessness as part of a disciplinary unit on environmental sustainability. We discuss various ways of treating hope and hopelessness as emotional configurations and sensemaking tools. We draw on alternate theorizations of hope, including hope as a discipline, active hope, and critical hope, to argue for politicized understandings of hopelessness as an often‐necessary part of climate education. We argue that if hope is a learning target for science education, critical science educators must teach and practice social movement repertoires that build power, giving young people a taste of meaningful social action and embedding them in politicized relations of solidarity.

The increasing availability of digital tools in science classrooms can provide students with more frequent and easier access to large amounts of data. Large data sets have considerable epistemological potential, as they enable, for instance, the observation of otherwise unobservable phenomena, but it must be assumed that handling them places greater demands on learners. However, it remains unclear how learners use large amounts of data when arguing from data, the challenges they encounter, and how they can be supported effectively. To address these gaps, we derived assumptions from a constructivist epistemological, sociocultural, and cognitive science perspective on how evaluating large amounts of data affects the quality of arguments in educational lab work. To investigate these assumptions, 664 high school students were randomly assigned a diagram containing a small, medium, or large amount of data from one experiment. The students were then asked to work on an argumentation task, which consisted of selecting a scientific claim and providing a written argument to support the selection. In addition to the impact of the different amounts of data, we investigated how the quality of the argument was related to the correctness of the claim the students selected as well as the impact of cognitive load (CL) and data competence on that quality. The results showed that the amount of data, CL, and data competence had no meaningful effects on the quality of arguments, and there was no relation between such quality and the claim the students supported. The study provides insights into how students deal with data in the learning of science. Implications for effectively supporting students when learning from large data sets are discussed.

In this response to Lanouette as part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, this commentary highlights key themes in relation to welcoming affect and emotion into elementary science classrooms to support learners’ data modeling practices. These themes include: (1) the idea that social interactions in classrooms are emotional encounters that can be framed along a continuum, and that no emotions are off‐limits or out‐of‐bounds in these settings (i.e., competition can be just as important to learning science as collaboration); (2) the pedagogical implications of relational work from an arts‐based perspective and thoughtfulness required as the designer/teacher/researcher working toward supporting learners’ dignity in science classrooms; and (3) embedding reflection as a process that is part of the emotional work in making sense of learning experiences. I put the manuscript into conversation with examples from research that positions the arts as a mediating process for supporting sense making around emotion and affect across disciplines. I end with a discussion of emotion as a design imperative for supporting learners’ identities within data modeling practices in elementary science classrooms.

Although there is a push to provide more student agency in science classrooms, teachers and students may become frustrated when inquiry activities and equipment do not work as planned—teachers because of the time crunch to “cover” topics and students because of the perceived lack of value in activities that are “off task.” In classroom implementations of a data‐rich high school physics activity sequence as part of the InquirySpace 2 (IS2) project, numerous episodes of equipment troubleshooting were observed. Teachers questioned whether the time spent had disciplinary value. Students expressed concern regarding what, if anything, they were learning. This qualitative case study of one such episode considers students' activity in terms of their engagement with the “mangle of practice” and misalignments between their conceptual and material worlds, their exercise of epistemic agency in recognizing and repairing those misalignments, and their epistemic affect during and after the activity. Video analysis revealed all three aspects deeply intertwined with evidence of student engagement in multiple science practices. The students expressed their feelings about the episode immediately afterward and the teacher and IS2 observer when interviewed much later, at the end of the project. One reason for the negative perceptions of teacher and students may be that the alignments being explored were related to the instrumentation more than to the target phenomenon. This study argues that in such situations, students may not recognize or value science practices that emerge, and may need explicit support to reframe their activity as valid scientific practice.

In this response to El Halwany and Adam's paper as part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, I restory belonging in STEM by unpacking further the affective politics at work in Higher Education. As illustrated in the paper and expanded on in this commentary, to become somebody in STEM is a complex lifelong process which I suggest can be understood through conceptual lenses such as wayfaring, knots, and complex meshworks. The latter make possible the highlighting of infinite ways of figuring science and becoming a science person as one is on the move, a life‐long embodied process, entangled and marked by intersectionality and emotions. Through engagement with affect, the political, and the kinds of methodological footings called for, the commentary aims to highlight the generative and transformational potential of such work for the weaving of an otherwise of postsecondary STEM.

As part of the special issue, Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, this commentary responds to Alexis Patterson Williams and Manali Sheth's paper, “Cultivating Inner Witnesses Attuned to the Emotional Experiences of Students of Color in Science.” We articulate critical empathy as an emergent set of concrete practices for researchers, teachers, and others to consider, grounded in a deep curiosity about our own and others' emotional experiences and in a steadfast commitment to collective action toward more just and humanizing science education. We offer several suggestions for enacting critical empathy in work on noticing emotions in science education: (1) Reflect on one's own emotions and positionality; (2) Attend to students' and teachers' emotions; (3) Build on emotions as incitements to redress inequities at interpersonal and systemic levels; (4) Illuminate and disrupt dehumanizing emotional rules and politics of affect; and (5) Resist the reduction of emotions and the noticing of emotions to measurable quantities and “best practices,” and instead work to support messy learning in all its complexity. We argue that attuning to the emotions of students of color in humanizing ways requires not only addressing individual teachers' knowledge, skills, and dispositions but also systemic changes to teacher education, science education, and schooling more broadly.

Previous studies have revealed that preservice science teachers (PSTs) require more robust and stimulating opportunities to engage with and reflect on formative assessment (FA) during teacher education. From a sociocultural‐asset perspective, 16 PSTs participated in a co‐design process with researchers, engaging in an iterative reasoning and development process of an FA‐embedded chemistry laboratory learning environment through the conjecture mapping approach over the course of a semester. This case study presents how a randomly selected small group of PSTs (N = 4) implemented the co‐designed FA practices for one of the most challenging chemistry topics, chemical equilibrium, in a laboratory setting in the subsequent semester. Several data collection tools, such as audio records and artifacts from the PSTs' FA enactment in their laboratory investigation, were used in this study. All triangulated data was analyzed using the method of interaction analysis to generate and interpret meanings. Findings revealed that the PSTs could implement FA by interweaving five key FA strategies to enhance their learning in the chemistry laboratory. Specifically, the findings showed that not only the content and quality of feedback but also the way feedback is used and interacted with in FA play a critical role in improving the PSTs' learning and performance. This study has implications for designing and testing FA‐embedded learning environments that must be created with, not for, PSTs from sociocultural‐asset perspectives to improve the quality of FA.

In this article I explore the case of the Mariana dam disaster in 2015 in Brazil seeking to contribute to reflections about the role of chemistry and chemistry education in environmental injustices. Drawing on stories about this disaster shared in the Dead River Podcast (2024), on wider literature and on other cases of environmental injustices associated with mining complexes around the world, I explore the historical and contemporary connections between chemistry‐related knowledge, practices and industries with mineral resource exploitation. In particular, I examine how this example of a mining complex in the Global South, like many others across the world, can bring to light chemistry's complex socio‐political and socio‐historical entanglements with extractivist, neocolonial and socially unjust practices that structure the triple planetary crisis we currently face. From this theoretical‐exploratory work, I then elaborate on a decolonial perspective for chemistry education to support critical engagement with such entanglements. Here I seek to offer some insights into what a nuanced and critical decolonial perspective can bring to those interested in the role of chemistry education in the context of environmental injustices.

This study analyzes the effect of different instructions on threshold concepts within material covering natural selection on students' use of concepts about evolution. Moreover, it examines students' use of concepts as interconnected networks when reasoning about natural selection and analyzes how these concepts relate to each other regarding their connections and centrality within the network. We recruited a sample of N = 128 German 10th‐grade students to address these aspects and conducted an experimental intervention study with three groups. We assessed the effect of instruction on the threshold concepts of randomness and probability by teaching them either in contexts of biology, the original discipline of mathematics, or not at all, along with input on natural selection. We analyzed the number of students' key concepts, misconceptions, and threshold concepts by applying an inferential statistical and concept network approach. The results reveal that teaching threshold concepts in biological or mathematical contexts leads to significantly higher use of key concepts than in the control group. Furthermore, only teaching them in a biological context resulted in a significantly higher use of threshold concepts than in the control group. The network analyses reveal descriptive differences in the structures, significant correlations of concepts, and most central and influential concepts (i.e., key concepts: selection factors or limited resources, change in the population; misconceptions: teleology/need, anthropomorphic conception; threshold concept: probability). We discuss the valuable potential of explicitly teaching threshold concepts and utilizing network theory to enhance a nuanced understanding of how students organize and apply evolutionary concepts.

In this response to Dylan Paré's “Queer reorientations in virtual reality: Designing for solidarity in science and technology learning environments,” and as part of the special issue “Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education,” I invite educators to consider “the virtual” that always exists alongside actual reality. Drawing from recent research by Dylan Paré entitled “Reorienting Toward LGBTQ+ Belonging in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics by Feeling and Thinking With a Queer and Nonbinary Person in Virtual Reality,” I argue that things like solidarity, ethics, and justice are not possible without the existence of ‘the virtual’; which is part of the everyday existence of things, making the technology we call “virtual reality” but a tiny example of “the virtual.” Virtuality determines the lines of possibility that a being might take toward ethical becomings and different forms of actualization in the world. Using sociomaterialist philosophy this article encourages educators to explore the virtual for just futures and multispecies flourishing. Using the technology of virtual reality in the way Paré does is one way to open the wide potential of the virtual dimension. While virtual reality research for justice and inclusion might seem like a niche area of computer science, the learning sciences, or technology education, such research helps reintroduce educators and students to the vast aspects of reality that have not yet actualized but are nonetheless real and ever‐present.

Reform‐oriented instruction is advocated in secondary science, encouraging students to engage with the experimental and epistemic practices of science. It is challenging for teachers though, especially for out‐of‐field teachers. This study focuses on biology and chemistry teachers who are called to teach middle‐school physics. These teachers face not only a knowledge gap, but also an epistemic gap arising from the distinct epistemic practices that are applied in the different school‐subjects to construct scientific knowledge. We put forward a professional development (PD) approach for out‐of‐field teachers that capitalizes on the strengths and resources they bring from their original field of expertise, and describe design guidelines for a PD program designed to enable them to carry out inquiry experiences in physics with their students. Given our PD approach, we argue that successful classroom implementation should be framed differently for out‐of‐field teachers. Rather than expecting them to strictly implement the PD activities and thus completely change their familiar practice, successful implementation would entail modifications that integrate new practices with familiar ones. Using the boundary‐crossing framework, we analyze three illustrative case studies in which teachers report on classroom implementation. We show how teachers remained rooted in their former practice ‐ biology and chemistry instruction ‐ and at the same time were inspired to adopt physics‐oriented practices, for example integrating mechanistic reasoning and deductive approaches. Illustrating the different boundary crossing mechanisms the teachers applied and the boundary objects that mediated this process sheds light on new productive avenues for the PD of out‐of‐field science teachers.

Learning science in the context of local phenomena and problems can be powerful for young people. Yet, designing place‐based instructional materials is resource intensive, limiting broad access. This study investigates how instructional materials designed for widespread use can support teacher localization through phenomenon adaptation, whereby teachers add or swap phenomena relevant to students' interests, identities, and community. Using design‐based research, we developed two upper elementary storyline units and professional learning to support teachers' pedagogical design capacity for phenomenon adaptation. We studied 12 teachers' adaptations during their first implementation of the units by analyzing teachers' interviews, reflections, and professional learning discussions. Findings from both units showed that all teachers added phenomena, with common adaptations including adding student‐generated phenomena. In the unit anchored around one phenomenon, teachers extended exploration of existing phenomena, citing student interest and cross‐curricular connections as rationale. In the unit motivated by multiple phenomena, teachers added new phenomena to support knowledge building and connect to students' lived experiences. Embedded curricular resources offered low‐floor entry points for teachers new to the unit. Supplementary resources showed potential as high‐ceiling options for more experienced teachers. Phenomenon adaptation requires teachers to coordinate their knowledge of curriculum, students, and community resources to incorporate meaningful phenomena while maintaining coherence. Challenges included time constraints, high quality of existing materials, limited knowledge of local phenomena, and limited confidence. Implications for curriculum and professional learning are discussed, highlighting the potential to turn curricula designed for widespread use into locally‐relevant learning experiences.

Historically, higher education institutions have created and maintained barriers that prevent people of color, particularly Black women and girls, from pursuing careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Researchers suggest fostering positive attitudes towards STEM subjects among Black girls to address these systemic barriers. Dually marginalized Black women and girls face unique challenges along the STEM education and career pipeline. Their status as members of two underrepresented groups in STEM, Black and female, leads to unique challenges that differ from those of Black men and boys and White women and girls. Unfortunately, explanations for the underrepresentation of Black women and girls in STEM fields have primarily focused on White women and girls. To address this gap in the extant literature, the present study employed multiple regression analysis of the High School Longitudinal Survey of 2009 (HSLS:09) to examine the influence of Black girls' perceptions of their math and science teachers' attitudes toward them on the development of their scientific and mathematical identities. The findings reveal that more positive perceptions of mathematics and science teachers are associated with more positive science and mathematics identities. This study has broad implications for educational settings, as the data can assist practitioners and professionals in reimagining and implementing programs and practices to foster and nurture positive self-perceptions of Black girls' scientific and mathematical identities.

This paper theorizes transformative agency and its potential to promote justice-oriented science teacher education. We argue that science education often acts as a disimagination machine, constraining possibilities for envisioning and enacting transformative change. To contest this reality, we draw on critical perspectives in science education, specifically Paulo Freire's and Simone Weil's philosophies to theorize transformative agency as encompassing three dimensions: a) reading the world to identify injustices, b) imagining untested feasibilities, and c) writing the world anew. In doing so, we act upon the belief that inherited practices of science education that negate collective joy must be challenged. We expand current conceptualizations of transformative agency by proposing critical imagination as one of its core components, enabling the envisioning of possibilities for change. We propose three pedagogical approaches for cultivating critical imagination: a) facilitating practices that move beyond the self to recognize multiple human and nonhuman others; b) adopting a planet-centred orientation to education transcending human-centered approaches; and c) troubling dominant spatial and temporal scales of thinking. We argue for the need to develop liberatory pedagogies that bring critical scientific questions to justice issues while nurturing critical imagination. This entails conceiving agency as more than responsive classroom practices but rather as achieving justice-oriented commitments, agendas and visions that center the world and its necessities.

This longitudinal phenomenological case study examines a science outreach program called iBEARS from undergraduate mentors' perceptions of their expectation for success, value in the experience, and knowledge gained. Undergraduates ( n = 24) mentored K‐12 classrooms through biology research projects, participated in pre‐ and post‐questionnaires, and follow‐up interviews 4 years later ( n = 4). We found that prementoring themes focused on expectancy for successful and enjoyable outreach experiences and gaining skills for future careers. Postmentoring, undergraduates emphasized enjoying the experience and reinforced research capabilities. Follow‐up interviews revisited mentoring skills' utility for current/future careers. Additionally, they expressed mentoring and providing value to society as part of their identities. Perceptions of their own learning as a result of teaching others also became a valued aspect of the experience. Strong perspectives of value and personal importance may have overshadowed cost. Future research could utilize cost–benefit analysis to explore these constructs in combination.

To cultivate the capability of making informed decisions on socioscientific issues, ideally, we hope students would engage in discerning and evaluating justifications for and against different positions while constructing well‐structured, persuasive arguments. When argumentations do not develop ideally, it is important to understand the constraints presented. This study explores a case where socioscientific argumentation (SSA) in a fifth‐grade classroom showed unbalanced structural and content quality. The students’ oral arguments and post‐discussion written arguments both demonstrated quality structure in terms of justification use, multiple perspective‐taking, and rebuttals, and low accuracy level of knowledge‐based justifications. Tracing the development of the SSA, we identified a few teaching and learning features that shaped this discourse pattern, including an overemphasis on structure, side‐taking setting, context knowledge provided in brief points, and the students’ lack of content and context knowledge. Implications for practice and future research were discussed in reflection.

The teacher shortage is a very real problem in America's schools. While research has sought to describe the shortage, the science teacher labor market is oftentimes bundled with other curricula. This study aims to better understand science teachers who leave their teaching position, the reasons for their actions, and where science teachers go once they leave their position. Science teacher turnover destination was determined and disaggregated into teachers who move horizontally to another school or district and those who leave the teacher profession. For those that leave the teaching profession, workforce destination was further analyzed as well as salary changes. Findings suggest that teachers with an alternative certification are more likely to leave their teaching position, as well as teachers in rural schools. Those that are leavers have a significant wage boost and likely enter the health or higher education work force. Policy implications are discussed.

Attention to emotion could offer insight into supporting the science‐informed civic participation of young people. We drew on sociocultural views of emotion, civic participation, and science literacies to examine digital civic media about climate change produced by youth during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, investigating intersections of emotional, civic, and scientific practices of making meaning. Using mixed‐methods, we analyzed 82 media pieces created by youth across the US. With an analytic framework informed by prior research and adapted to meet our data, we found two common patterns that emerged in over half of the data set: (1) fear and/or despair around the impacts of climate change and (2) anger over inaction around mitigating climate change. Additionally, we found that the fear/despair pattern was associated with youth engagement in civic empathy and the anger pattern was associated with youth practices of critique. We also identified less common and less distinct patterns, including positive emotion around actions, guilt around causes, and generalized worry across youth civic authors. We use these findings to suggest that emotion is entangled in youth civic participation around climate change, and that such participation can be afforded and constrained by emotion. We offer implications for teaching and use our findings to call attention to the need for science education that attends to the emotional nature of youth social practices within and beyond science‐related civic issues.

Elementary science education, particularly in the 4th and 5th grades, is essential for setting the foundation for lifelong science learning, fostering critical thinking, and preparing students for success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. This stage is especially critical for students with disabilities, as achievement gaps between them and their peers emerge during elementary school. Despite this importance, little is known about how science is taught in elementary classrooms during these critical years, particularly for students with disabilities. To address this gap, we surveyed teachers from a nationally representative sample of U.S. schools to examine elementary science education, including instructional practices, allocation of time, and the inclusion and support of students with disabilities. Our findings reveal that limited instructional time is allocated to science, with significant variability across classrooms. The amount of time dedicated to science instruction was significantly influenced by external factors, such as whether science was a tested subject. Students with disabilities often face additional barriers, including being pulled out of science instruction for special education services, resulting in missed opportunities to engage in science. These findings highlight the need to address opportunity gaps in science instruction to ensure all students have meaningful access to quality science education.

Theorizing and exploring teacher learning contexts is critical to understanding reform‐based instructional changes. Research on professional learning, organizational contexts, and science reform has grown over the years, particularly since the unveiling of the Framework for K‐12 Science Education in the United States. In this article, the authors present the case of Mr. Gray—a veteran middle school science teacher—to explore factors that influence the implementation of professional learning tools and resources. Using the theoretical constructs of habitus, structure, and agency, the study offers insight into the acquisition of reform‐aligned teaching practices and illuminates why it is challenging to change science pedagogy. While professional learning was a supportive structure, especially for availing new schemas and supporting agency, this paper highlights the importance of considering agency‐related constraints beyond professional learning. Students' ways of participation, assessments, and a teacher's existing habitus were found to be influential structures that constrained Mr. Gray's agency toward reform. The authors argue that structures have differential power in influencing change and that structures may work together in unpredictable ways, across different teaching contexts, to limit or facilitate change of teaching habitus. The interplay of habitus, structure, and agency explored in this study has implications for professional learning design and teacher education programs.

Affect has long been of interest in early childhood education, where social and emotional dynamics are seen as critical dimensions of learning, intricately linked to embodied activity. As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, this paper conceptualizes affect through children's bodily comfort. Data were collected in two Kindergarten classrooms participating in an integrated computer science‐STEM curriculum that involved small groups of children engaging in floor‐based activities. Focusing on body positioning, we use interaction analysis to explore how a focal child found a comfortable fit in her learning environment, highlighting the role of clothing in establishing a mundane sense of comfort. We found that fitting in the space and fitting in with others involved creating comfortable spaces, or comfort zones, in the classroom. For focal participant Theresa, a comfort zone involved physically positioning her body and negotiating norms of social comportment that govern how different bodies come to feel like some‐body. We discuss ways in which some children perform extra physical and emotional labor to establish comfort zones in the classroom, and how this contributes to their felt sense of belonging and dignity, whereby all children are valued participants and feel that they fit. We conclude with pedagogical implications of creating spaces for embodied belonging, where children feel a goodness of fit in STEM.

In the era of the Framework for K‐12 Science Education and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), research on preparing preservice science teachers (PSTs) for NGSS‐aligned teaching practices is important. In this study, we explored PSTs' sense‐making around planning for Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) during their discussions of teaching in a secondary science teaching methods course. Grounded in sociocultural and situated views of learning, we examine how approximation and decomposition of AST practices support PSTs in making sense of lesson planning in developing meaningful learning and teaching environments. We conducted this case study in a secondary science teaching methods course within a teacher education program at a large mid‐Atlantic university. The participants included six PSTs and their instructor. We used video recordings of the course and the lesson plans PSTs developed as data sources. Using both inductive and deductive coding, we applied discourse analysis based on interactional sociolinguistics theory and the framework of professional vision to analyze the data. Findings indicate PSTs engaged in sense‐making around two key areas of AST planning: defining phenomena and constructing explanations. PSTs made sense of the characteristics of the chosen phenomenon, including its explicitness and its alignment with the storyline of the unit, as well as what counted as an explanation, focusing on two aspects of scientific explanations: gapless explanations and levels of explanations. Based on these findings, we provided implications for teacher educators designing methods courses that focus on ambitious science instruction.