The scientific practices students are expected to learn from inquiry units in science classes are the same ones that students need to develop to evaluate scientific claims outside the classroom. Many students, however, struggle to coordinate these skills to create a scientific argument (Osborne et al., 2004). Some challenges for middle school students are: including providing reasoning to demonstrate why the evidence supports a claim and/or why the evidence refutes an opposing claim. Previous research with middle school students has found that students place less emphasis on engaging in scientific practices, as compared to understanding specific scientific phenomena (Rupp et al., 2020). One potential support for students is to help teachers support students’ reflection on and development of these scientific practices (Herrenkohl et al., 2011) to improve epistemic competence (Chinn et al., 2014). Our team approaches epistemic cognition as the development of a regulatory task model which includes understanding the goal state (purpose) of each subtask, understanding how to accomplish each subtask (subgoals, tools, and strategies), and valuing the goals of the primary task and the subgoals of each subtask (Britt et al., 2018). A discipline-appropriate task model instantiates epistemic aims and value, epistemic ideals or criteria, and epistemic processes to achieve those aims.

             We have developed two tools designed to help teachers guide students through a multi-session inquiry unit that required engagement in and reflection on epistemic practices within the discipline of science. The first tool, Investigation Steps Chart, is a class-level regulatory structure to help students develop epistemic practice of figuring out how the unit and lesson investigation questions will be explored through scientific inquiry, what was found, and what still needs to be done to answer each of the questions. This is intended to help students develop a task model to organize multiple days of inquiry to support writing of a unit culminating with a scientific argument. The Investigation Steps Chart uses key NGSS storyline routines (i.e., exploration, navigation, investigation, problematization, “putting the pieces together”) to guide inquiry (Reiser, 2017). The second tool, The Evidence Sorter, supports student synthesizing notes taken across the multi-day inquiry to help students construct argumentation by: (a) organizing all evidence collected during the unit, (b) determining which claim is best supported, (c) engaging in reasoning to connect evidence to the chosen claim. These tools were improved upon over the course of two academic years in the context of middle-school science classes in the Chicago Public Schools. Iterations were informed systematically by: teacher feedback provided during workshops, analysis of student written work, classroom observations (pre-pandemic only), and analysis of teacher and student surveys. The key changes to the Investigation Steps Chart included reordering the questions so that students did not consider materials not available, improved emphasis on the student’s role in scientific practices as they consider how the material that is provided will be used, encouraging separately the connections with the overall goal (unit question) and subgoals (investigation question), and including a prompt for making deliberative connections to the key concepts as a scaffold or a lens for creating reasoning statements. The key change in the Evidence Sorter was a revision to decrease cognitive load. Through the use of tools that bring students into the discussion about the process of scientific inquiry, students should develop appropriate epistemic cognition and practices that can be used when they encounter scientific claims.