Five Principles for Teaching Science for Motivation and
Understanding
1. WYDIWYL: What you do is what you learn. Students don’t just “learn content.” Content
knowledge is always embedded in some kind of practice. The best teachers find ways to get
beyond practices like filling out worksheets and practicing laboratory skills; they engage their
students in the inquiry, application, and narrative practices that will make science knowledge
meaningful and useful.
2. Usefulness and connectedness: The best science teachers find ways to make their students’
developing science knowledge useful for the important practices of application, which
connect observations, patterns, and models and connected in several ways:
a. Students connect individual facts into scientific narratives.
b. Students connect scientific observations, patterns, and models with their everyday
experiences, patterns, and explanations.
c. Students connect different representations of observations, patterns, and models.
3. Arguments from evidence: The best science teachers find ways to engage their students in
developing knowledge through scientific inquiry and collective validation—not all the time
but often enough so that students come to understand the essential role that arguments from
evidence play in developing scientific knowledge. The usefulness and connectedness of
scientific knowledge ultimately rely on its connection to our observations of the material
world, not on arguments from authority of teachers, texts, or leaders.
4. Learning as socialization: The best science teachers find ways to develop learning
communities in their classrooms whose norms and values respect their students’ senses of
identity and build identities as science learners. They recognize that learning involves
socialization into the language, practices, norms, and values of science, and that learning
needs to fulfill students’ needs for community, respect, and knowledge.
5. Expectancy x value: The best science teachers engage students in activities that they can
expect to succeed in with reasonable effort and where they will value success. Expectancy
depends in part on your ability to find generative continuities between students reasoning and
scientific reasoning. Value depends on finding activities that meet students needs and that
they find personally interesting.