Science and Children—Fall 2023
(Volume 60, Issue 7)
By Alison Haas, Scott E. Grapin, Lorena Llosa, and Okhee Lee
While the vision for science education through A Framework for K–12 Science Education (NRC 2012) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) continues to take hold in classrooms across the nation, computational modeling is becoming increasingly essential in school and society. Computational models, or “representations of phenomena that can be simulated by a computer” (Weintrop et al. 2015, p. 137), are reshaping the way science is practiced in increasingly diverse classrooms, as all students, including multilingual learners (MLs), can use computational models to develop and test explanations of phenomena. However, teachers lack high-quality science curricula that integrate computational modeling in purposeful ways and with explicit attention to student diversity.