ABSTRACT This study examines high school science teachers' perceptions of student engagement in data practices across two instructional contexts: a scaffolded, student‐centered environment using the Science Practices Innovation Notebook (SPIN) and a business‐as‐usual (BAU) teacher‐led investigation. Data practices—creating, collecting, preparing, visualizing, and analyzing data—are foundational to scientific inquiry and central to science education standards, yet little research has examined how teachers interpret student engagement with these practices across different instructional designs. Using qualitative interviews with 12 teachers who implemented comparable investigations in SPIN and BAU conditions, we analyzed teacher perceptions of student engagement and the coherence of data practices during instruction. Findings indicate that teachers in both contexts viewed data creation as foundational; however, SPIN teachers more frequently perceived students as engaging mindfully and independently in subsequent practices. They described greater student self‐regulation during data collection, iterative attention to data quality, and stronger connections between visualization and analysis. In contrast, BAU teachers more often characterized engagement as procedural and noted a greater need for teacher guidance, particularly during visualization and analysis. These findings suggest that instructional designs that make epistemic processes explicit may influence both student engagement and what teachers notice about students' scientific reasoning.
Peters‐Burton et al. (Wed,) studied this question.