Cynthia Passmore Receives National Science Foundation Grants to Advance Science Teacher Preparation

When a teacher poses a challenging question or problem in the classroom, how long should they let students struggle before stepping in with an answer? For Prof. Cynthia Passmore, these decisions are more than a teaching tactic: they reveal a largely unexplored dimension of science education: how teachers and students navigate uncertainty together.

Broadly, Passmore’s research focuses on teacher learning. In an earlier study, her team uncovered the potential importance of moments in the classroom when answers aren’t immediate, and lessons don’t unfold as planned, shedding light on the critical role educators’ comfort with ambiguity plays in student learning. Her work, recently supported by two National Science Foundation grants, explores how teachers respond in these uncertain moments and how curriculum design and professional learning can better equip them to guide students through complex, open-ended scientific reasoning.

The Promise of Model-Based Reasoning

Central to Passmore’s research is model-based reasoning, an approach that asks students to make sense of the world by developing, testing, and refining scientific models. Rather than memorizing facts, students create dynamic models—tools for unpacking the mechanisms of DNA replication, natural selection, or chemical reactions—to explain phenomena and deepen their understanding over time.

To support teachers in implementing this approach, Passmore and her colleagues co-developed Model-Based Educational Resources (MBER), a full year of curriculum to support high school biology or Earth-science integrated biology. Through a partnership with the Colorado-based nonprofit BSCS Science Learning, the team found that students taught using MBER demonstrated higher learning gains than those in more traditional science classrooms. “What we know as educators is that memorizing information isn’t actually likely to lead to robust learning,” Passmore said. “When students construct their own understanding based on evidence and reasoning while trying to explain how something works in the real world, they develop ideas that are more connected, more flexible, and more useful across contexts.”

A Hidden Variable in Instruction

Passmore’s team found that it wasn’t just the theoretical approach behind model-based reasoning that contributed to student success. Teachers’ engagement with and openness to the curriculum also played a key role in student outcomes. “It turned out that teachers who had a higher tolerance for ambiguity at the beginning of the study had students who performed better,” Passmore said.

Tolerance for ambiguity, as Passmore’s team defines it, refers to an educator’s comfort level with uncertain or open-ended learning situations. Within model-based instruction, this disposition can shape how teachers facilitate discussion, respond to student ideas, and choose when to provide the answer to questions they’ve posed to their class.

A high tolerance for ambiguity is important to student success under the MBER curriculum because it may allow teachers to follow their students’ lead during discussions and experiments. In a traditional lesson on photosynthesis, an educator might tightly control the direction of lessons by defining the terms for students to memorize and taking them through a specified instructional sequence to demonstrate how water and carbon dioxide work together to sustain plant life. In contrast, a model-based lesson begins with a question and requires students to draw on prior knowledge, evidence from investigations, and critical thinking to arrive at an answer. “If you ask, ‘Where does this matter come from?’ you’re going to start getting all kinds of answers—in fact, the same kinds of answers early scientists thought of,” said Passmore. “One student might say, ‘It’s coming from the water,’ but then someone else asks, ‘Could it be coming from the air? How would we measure that?’ And then you’re off to the races.”

Why Uncertainty is Challenging for Teachers

While this open-ended approach can deepen learning and reenergize instruction, it also introduces unpredictability that can be challenging for teachers to manage. “It’s more circuitous,” Passmore explained. “Kids can say unpredictable things, and how firmly they hold onto a prior idea can vary greatly. You also have to be sensitive to the different ways your students may approach a problem.”

The MBER curriculum also redefines the teacher’s role in the classroom. Rather than serving solely as the subject matter expert, teachers become collaborators who may encounter questions and ideas they don’t immediately know how to approach with their students. This variability, combined with administrative requirements, standardized testing, large class sizes, limited resources, and other environmental factors, can discourage educators from embracing model-based inquiry, despite the positive outcomes it offers for student learning. “It’s hard to create the conditions in class where students are authentically grappling with difficult concepts,” said Passmore. “School is usually designed to transmit information from teacher to student. The model-based curriculum disrupts that paradigm. You’re asking kids to do a lot of the intellectual work themselves.”

Supporting Teachers Through Data-Driven Professional Learning

The NSF-funded study on tolerance for ambiguity is designed to address this challenge directly. In collaboration with BSCS Science Learning, Passmore and her research team will develop a professional development resource to help educators introduce and manage open-ended tasks in science classrooms. The study will begin by working with teachers to develop supports and strategies to manage ambiguous instructional moments will follow up with them as they take these strategies into the classroom. If findings suggest that teachers are developing greater tolerance for ambiguity, the project will expand and offer professional learning to more teachers.

Passmore emphasizes that this research is not about evaluating or correcting teachers. “Instead of thinking if teachers need more content knowledge, experience, or examples, we’re asking if they have an affective or emotional need that’s not being attended to,” she said. “How can we help them manage those feelings of uncertainty when they arise? What are strategies they can use to offer more opportunities for student reasoning in these environments?”

Rethinking the Teacher-Curriculum Relationship

In addition to her work on teacher ambiguity, Passmore has also gathered a team of scholars to plan an NSF-funded conference that will take up the role of curriculum in supporting teacher learning.  Most science curricula, offer a clear formula for educators to teach course content. However, teachers interact with curricula in a wide range of ways and tend to see it as a tool to implement rather than something they can learn from. More modern science curricula are written to support teachers to learn new approaches to teaching that can persist beyond the lifespan of a specific curriculum package.

Passmore asks, “How can you use curricula as a context to do a bigger kind of teacher learning?” To answer this question, the team will use the conference funding to convene researchers, administrators, and professional development experts to explore the role of curriculum-based professional learning in the science teacher learning landscape. In March 2026, more than 50 science education scholars will gather to chart the current state of the field, identifying where the research community should focus their efforts on science curricula and professional learning and research moving forward.

“We know that people learn better when they’re given opportunities to make sense of science themselves,” Passmore said. “These opportunities are hard to manage for teachers. But if we can create more authentic learning conditions for students, and help adults better manage their comfort with it, this will lead to more robust, longer-lasting, and deeper learning for students and teachers alike.”

Funding for this research is provided by the National Science Foundation through the grants “Collaborative Research: Exploring Teacher Tolerance for Ambiguity: Implications for Science Instruction” (Grant Award # 2501109 ) and “Conference: Shaping the Future of Curriculum-Based Professional Learning in Science Education” (Grant Award #2534508).