Many major reforms underway in American public school districts' elementary science programs are the result of the release of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in 2013. More than a decade later, many districts are continuing to put the vision of those standards into practice. A problem for districts pursuing these changes is the complexity of their environments; that is, the array of governmental, commercial, research, community, and other organizations and interests seeking to influence improvement in elementary science. The purpose of this three-paper dissertation is to support efforts to improve elementary science by conceptualizing the environments of elementary science reform; exploring the intersection between those environments and specific strategies for district-level improvement; and analyzing strategies for reconciling new approaches to improving elementary science with legacy approaches The first paper examines the ways district leaders engage those environments as they work to improve elementary science instruction in ways responsive the NGSS. Drawing on historic accounts of districts engaged in elementary science reform, this paper makes the claim that the organizational field supporting science education reform consists of specific categories of organizations that have maintained currency for decades and that subsets of these organizations appear to be more immediately salient to districts. The primary contribution of this paper is an organizational taxonomy that represents field-level organizations seeking to influence science education in elementary schools and that represents their relative salience for districts. The second paper explores how districts engage in system building to support NGSS aligned instruction in complex environments, the component parts of which are uncoordinated and variably aligned to these new standards. This paper draws on data collected as part of a comparative case study of system-building efforts in 13 districts including interviews, observations, and artifacts. Findings from this paper show that districts coordinate across a wide array of organizations in their environment, regardless of the specifics of their system building approaches. In doing so, organizations that are more proximal and/or more directly related to districts' day-to-day functionality are more salient and may filter the more distal parts of their environment. This paper makes the claim that districts engage with a wide array of organizations, regardless of the approach they take to improving elementary science. The third paper examines how districts are working to put the vision of the NGSS into practice in elementary schools where existing structures, norms, and routines may complicate efforts to respond to these challenges. As in the previous paper, this study draws on interviews, observations, and artifacts collected as part of a comparative case study of system-building efforts in 13 districts. Findings from this paper illustrate that there are at least three distinct approaches—integrating, retooling, and skirting—that districts use to manage relationships between new efforts to improve science instruction and pre-existing structures, norms, and routines. Through three cases, this paper illustrates how these approaches help districts leverage internal strengths to mitigate enduring challenges of instructional improvement. This dissertation provides theoretical and empirical perspectives on the complex environments in which elementary science reforms are enacted and the ways districts manage relationships with those environments. In addition to providing frameworks for future scholarship, these papers highlight the need for science reformers, science educators, and districts leaders to be mindful of the contexts in which that work is enacted.

The work of elementary science teaching is challenging given the wide array of subject matter most teachers are expected to teach and a systematic de-prioritisation of science at these grades. In this literature review (63 papers; 2010-2020), we use a framework of readiness for science teaching. Using this framework allows us to illustrate foundational characteristics and abilities that preservice teachers may start with and develop as they become well-started beginners for elementary teaching in the face of systemic challenges. To this end, we identify what is known from the research literature about the strengths that preservice elementary teachers bring to this difficult work with regard to their characteristics and abilities in addition to the challenges they face, describing a foundation on which preservice teachers can build. We also highlight additional studies that show how teacher education can build on preservice teachers' strengths and support them in areas that are challenging. We identify themes around novices' identities, dispositions, emotions, beliefs, attitudes, self-efficacy, knowledge, engagement in and with science practices, lesson planning, and lesson enactment. Finally, we highlight four implications for science teacher educators, noting focal areas that may compensate for challenges preservice elementary teachers face while building on their strengths.

There is limited time for elementary teacher professional learning in science in order to meet the aspirational goals of current reform efforts. In this study, we investigated what and how teachers learn on-the-job to gain insight into modes of support less often included in teacher education design. Specifically, we studied elementary teachers' participation in a system-level organizational routine: curriculum materials adoption processes (CMAPs). Using a communities of practice framework, we explored teacher learning in a comparative case study of three U.S. school districts' CMAP routines, observing CMAP committee meetings and interviewing participants about their expeirences. We found that what teachers learned varied across each district's CMAP. We argue this variation can be traced to two CMAP features: (1) teachers' use of boundary objects and (2) their boundary spanning roles and structures. Results have implications for the design of educational systems' organizational routines to more intentionally serve a dual role as a professional learning opportunity.

Purpose: Most empirical work using a distributed perspective to frame research on leadership practice uses the school as the unit of analysis, focusing on how leadership is stretched over people and aspects of the situation within schools. This study investigates leadership practice for elementary science, using a multilevel distributed framework, to understand the interrelationships among educational leaders operating at various levels-from classrooms, to schools, to educational systems, and, beyond, to the educational sector. Research Methods/Approach: Using an embedded, comparative case study design, we analyzed leadership practice for elementary science reform in 13 school districts in the U.S. as leaders worked to bridge from the Next Generation Science Standards learning ideals to classroom instruction. Data collection included interviews, observations, and documents. Findings: Leading elementary science reform involved three core components of leadership practice: (1) garnering attention for science in a situation that prioritized the instruction of English Language Arts and mathematics; (2) cultivating and channeling essential relationships not only within the system but also in the broader education sector to access the resources needed to (re)build an educational infrastructure for elementary science instruction; and (3) supporting the use of educational infrastructure in everyday practice in schools. Implications: This study makes the case for using a multilevel distributed leadership perspective to frame studies of leadership practice to understand how efforts at different levels interact in shaping the practice of leadership.

Reforming instruction is challenging. In this comparative case study of 12 school districts, we investigated the dilemmas that emerged for system leaders as they engaged in system building for elementary science and the approaches leaders took in managing them. We found that system leaders' efforts to manage their environments contributed to the preferential treatment of literacy and mathematics relative to science. Leaders managed this dilemma using three strategies: (a) integration of science with other subjects, (b) specialization of teachers, and (c) adopting curriculum materials. This study contributes to literature on dilemma management by showing that dilemmas in education system building are school-subject sensitive, emerge in relation to system building for other subjects, and are embedded in school and education systems' structural/organizational arrangements.

Despite a tremendous increase in the use of video for conducting research in classrooms as well as preparing and evaluating teachers, there remain notable challenges to using classroom videos at scale, including time and financial costs. Recent advances in artificial intelligence could make the process of analyzing, scoring, and cataloguing videos more efficient. These advances include natural language processing, automated speech recognition, and deep neural networks. To train artificial intelligence to accurately classify activities in classroom videos, humans must first annotate a set of videos in a consistent way. This paper describes our investigation of the degree of inter-annotator reliability regarding identification of and duration of activities among annotators with and without experience analyzing classroom videos. Validity of human annotations is crucial for research involving temporal analysis within classroom video research. The study reported here represents an important step towards applying methods developed in other fields to validate temporal analytics within learning analytics research for classifying time- and event-based activities in classroom videos.

This comparative case study explores how 18 state education agencies (SEAs) support school districts in advancing standards-based elementary science reform. We identify how SEAs understand their work in advancing elementary science reform and describe how SEAs sought to engage districts in bridging from standards to classroom practice. Based on our analysis, we argue that the school subject is a critical explanatory variable in understanding SEA efforts to support standards implementation and SEAs lean on a resource-based approach for instructional policy implementation. This study contributes to the growing research base on the role of state policy in supporting standards implementation.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a reform effort for states, by states, advances ambitious ideals for elementary science teaching, but the fate of these ideals will depend in part on the engagement of state science coordinators (SSCs). This article explores the responses of SSCs to NGSS in a purposeful sample of 18 US states. Based on analysis of 19 interviews with 22 SSCs, we develop two arguments. First, SSCs' ideas about improving elementary science education converged around three themes: the introduction of three-dimensional science teaching and learning, the integration of engineering with science teaching, and the integration of science with ELA and mathematics. Second, SSCs' sense-making about reforming elementary science education was situated in and shaped by (a) their knowledge of how elementary science instruction has been and continues to be de-prioritized, as well as their experiences (b) facilitating work groups in developing science standards using the Framework for K-12 Science Education, and (c) participating in professional networks.

Historically, teachers had been delegated the primary responsibility for the organization and management of classroom instruction in US public schools. While this delegation afforded teachers professional autonomy in their work, it has also resulted in disparities in students’ educational experiences and outcomes within and between classrooms, schools, and systems. In the effort to improve instruction and reduce disparities for students on a large scale, one reform effort in the US has focused on building instructionally focused education systems (IFESs) where central office and school leaders collaborate with teachers to organize and manage instruction. These efforts are playing out in a variety of contexts in the US, including in public school districts, non-profits, and other educational networks, and it is shifting how teachers carry out the day-to-day work of instruction. In this comparative case study, we investigate two IFESs in which efforts to improve instruction pushed against historic norms of teacher autonomy. We found that these new systems are not at odds with teacher autonomy, but rather these systems reflect a transition to more interdependent notions of teacher autonomy.