Supporting students' epistemic agency is a key goal of science education. However, the process of realizing this goal in classrooms is complex and layered, and we have a limited understanding of how teachers draw from their practice to position students as epistemic agents, making it difficult to provide concrete actionable guidance for teachers. To address this question, we conducted a case study of one middle school teacher and her classroom to explore how she decided to make space in her instructional practice for students to take intellectual responsibility in the classroom. To capture the teacher's in-the-moment decision-making, we used point-of-view video capture followed by stimulated recall interviews. We examined classroom discourse in three select episodes where the teacher adapted her instruction in response to student contributions. By defining epistemic agency as a person's capacity to position themselves in a conversation as responsible for action, we analyzed patterns of teacher moves that positioned students as responsible for epistemic activities. We found that by linguistically indexing students as responsible consistently across the episodes, student intellectual participation increased in both quantity and depth. Importantly, these indexing actions emerged dynamically from the teacher's goals for deepening student sensemaking. These findings provide insight into a teacher's pedagogical decisions and their outcomes contribute to our understanding of how teachers can support epistemic agency.

Calls to immerse students in the sensemaking practices of science recommend that students propose ideas and work together to construct explanations as well as drive the evaluation and decision-making around classroom knowledge-building. In other words, they should be participating with epistemic agency. Part of the teaching work of supporting student sensemaking, therefore, is to intentionally open up space for student contributions and negotiations during sensemaking. The type of space that is opened up for students' sensemaking is highly dependent on teachers' choices and interpretations of student contributions. Accordingly, this paper leverages a teacher noticing framework to begin to characterize the teacher noticing and decision-making involved in supporting students' epistemic agency while teaching. Using a novel point-of-view video collection methodology, we asked two teachers to identify moments while teaching in which they were making a decision about how to open up or close down space for students' epistemic agency. We found that both teachers attended similarly to the disciplinary substance of students' ideas; the epistemic nature of students' ideas; students' epistemic stance or orientation during participation; and students' overall degree of engagement. Teachers' responses to students varied across pedagogical phenomena, and they also varied in their effectiveness. These variations were related to each teacher's conception of epistemic agency. We propose that attention to the epistemic nature of students' responses and to students' epistemic stance or orientation may be especially important foci of teacher attention for supporting students' epistemic agency.

We suggest that tinkering is implicit in movement and changes to movement while exploring embodied models, as students must interpret and react in real time to the system outcomes.Using movement analysis, we explore the ways that physical movement fosters and reflects computational tinkering across episodes in two embodied science models.We argue that patterns and shifts in movement may be a window into the computational growth that takes place as learners participate in the modeling environment.

While there is increased interest in using movement and embodiment to support learning due to the rise in theories of embodied cognition and learning, additional work needs to be done to explore how we can make sense of students collectively developing their understanding within a mixed-reality environment. In this paper, we explore embodied communication’s individual and collective functions as a way of seeing students’ learning through embodiment. We analyze data from a mixed-reality (MR) environment: Science through Technology Enhanced Play (STEP) (Danish et al., International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning 15:49–87, 2020 ), using descriptive statistics and interaction analysis to explore the role of gesture and movement in student classroom activities and their pre-and post-interviews. The results reveal that students appear to develop gestures for representing challenging concepts within the classroom and then use these gestures to help clarify their understanding within the interview context. We further explore how students collectively develop these gestures in the classroom, with a focus on their communicative acts, then provide a list of individual and collective functions that are supported by student gestures and embodiment within the STEP MR environment, and discuss the functions of each act. Finally, we illustrate the value of attending to these gestures for educators and designers interested in supporting embodied learning.

Existing approaches to instructional design each have a core focal unit of analysis; some focus on developing a specific tool, some focus on a sequence of tasks, and more recently, some approaches have focused more broadly on activities. However, we find that these don’t go far enough as real-world implementations require that learners move through a shifting sequence of activities with teachers attending to these shifts. We therefore propose and illustrate an approach to design grounded in focusing on how the design of activities, including tools, necessarily need to shift over time to support learning.

Constructing causal mechanistic explanations of observable phenomena is a key science practice that is often challenging for students as most mechanisms involve interactions of unobservable entities and activities. In this study, we examined how gesturing with a computer simulation that depicts the molecular mechanism of thermal conduction supported middle-school students in constructing causal mechanistic explanations. We designed a gesture-augmented computer simulation in which students were cued to use hand gestures to control the simulation. These cued gestures represent core causal interactions of conduction and they prompt students to physically engage with the simulation in conceptually meaningful ways. In this study, we examined how 21 students used the simulation and explained thermal conduction in a semi-structured interview, followed by a mixed-methods analysis. Quantitative analysis shows that students moved toward articulating the canonical causal mechanistic explanation of thermal conduction using the simulation. Three representative cases were identified to explore how students' explanations were facilitated by cued gestures. The analysis shows two main ways the cued gestures supported all students in the study: (a) by helping them attribute causal agency to molecules rather than an entity called Heat, and (b) by reifying the core mechanism of molecular collisions in conduction. Furthermore, the case studies show how each student's unique ways of sensemaking impacted their gesture use. Implications for instruction with gestures and design of augmented environments are discussed.

Constructing explanatory models, in which students learn to visualize the mechanisms of unobservable entities (e.g., molecules) to explain the working of observable phenomena (e.g., air pressure), is a key practice of science. Yet, students struggle to develop and utilize such models to articulate causal-mechanistic explanations. In this paper, we argue that representational gesturing with the hands (i.e., gesturing that models semantic content) can support the development of explanatory models. Through case studies examining middle school students gesturing during sensemaking, we show that representational gestures can support students in at least four ways: (a) they make underlying mechanisms visible, (b) they facilitate translation of a spatial model to a verbal explanation, (c) they enable model articulation while relying less on scientific terminology, and (d) they present opportunities for students to embody causal agents. In these ways, representational gesturing can be considered an epistemic tool supporting students during sensemaking and communication. We argue that instruction should attend to students' gestures and, as appropriate, encourage students to gesture as a means of aiding the construction and articulation of causal-mechanistic explanations. While our study explores one form of embodied representation, we encourage the field to explore embodied expressions as epistemic tools for learning.