DRK-12 Research and Products

Tool | STEM education-related publications that may be of interest to DR K-12 grantees.
Publication | A common approach to scaling up a professional development program is for the researchers who designed the program to prepare teacher leaders to facilitate it at their schools. When researchers eventually leave, however, teacher leaders may…
Publication | This study investigated how newcomer emergent bilinguals made meaning in two 9th-grade biology classrooms. Methods relevant to naturalistic inquiry were used to collect and analyze data. Findings indicate that newcomers bridged aspects of…
Publication | Researchers have typically identified and characterized teachers’ knowledge bases (e.g., pedagogical content knowledge and subject matter knowledge) in an effort to improve enacted instructional strategies. As shown by the Refined Consensus…
Tool | Planning to submit an NSF proposal this year? This toolkit is a compilation of helpful resources.
Publication | In this study, we present a conceptual tool for guiding teachers’ principled pedagogical actions toward equitable instruction, referred to as the Transforming Science Learning (TSL) framework. The TSL framework was developed to address the…
Publication | Although prior research has highlighted the significance of representations for mathematical learning, there is still a lack of research on how students use multimodal external representations (MERs) to solve mathematical tasks in digital game-…
Publication | This position paper advocates supporting computer science (CS) teacher professional learning by supplementing existing curriculum-specific teacher professional development (PD) with standards-aligned PD that focuses on teachers' conceptual…
Publication | This article addresses the need and potential for students to develop problem-solving skills as part of STEM learning.
Publication | The University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Development Team is working with the Northwest Arctic Borough School District to develop STEM lessons utilizing Iñupiaq knowledge systems and university research for middle school-age students in three…
Presentation | Slides from a pre-conference workshop at the 2021 National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL.
Publication | This study examines how sampled Chinese and U.S. third and fourth grade students (NChina=167,NUS=97) understand the commutative, associative, and distributive properties.
Publication | In this mixed method study, we analyse the effectiveness of two pedagogical approaches – one model-based and another non-model-based – for developing secondary students’ understanding of the phenomenon of increase in Earth’s average surface…
Publication | Humankind faces unprecedented environmental, social, and economic challenges. There is a critical need for STEM education to foster both science learning and the application of learning to problem solving. At the University of Utah, Professor…
Presentation | This poster describes the work of the Bridging Science Teaching and Learning in Title 1 Schools project. Historically, the public education community has struggled with providing all children withequitable access to quality science education;…
Publication | This study explored how two professional development approaches to reforming math instruction with different mechanisms for fostering change might have valuable synergies when used in tandem to support take-up, i.e., teachers’ acceptance,…
Publication | Emerging multilingual students can develop the dimensions of Academic Literacy in Mathematics (ALM) in classroom discussions. But, there is a need for empirically-validated principles for fostering such discussions. This research used ALM as a…
Publication | This paper contributes to current discussions about supporting prospective teachers (PSTs) in developing skills of noticing students’ mathematical thinking. The results document that without providing any intentional support for PSTs’ noticing…
Publication | This study examined and compared teachers’ perceived affordances of 360 video as a representation of practice and their professional noticing of students’ mathematics in 360 videos. Results from this study suggest that referencing teacher…
Product for Educators | Data Nuggets are free classroom activities, co-designed by scientists and teachers, designed to bring contemporary research and authentic data into the classroom. Students are guided through the entire process of science, including…
Publication | The present study focuses on examining transitions in elementary pre-service teachers (PSTs)’ understanding of, and skills in, leading argumentation-focused discussions in mathematics during participation in a sequence of three different…
Publication | This is a technical report detailing the methods and findings for each of the research studies in the LLAMA project. 
Publication | In this work, we extend variational auto encoders (VAE) to estimate item parameters and correlated latent abilities, and directly compare the ML2P-VAE method to more traditional parameter estimation methods, such as Monte Carlo expectation-…
Publication | Recent implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) has intensified the focus on teaching and learning of the Earth’s climate and GCC in formal learning environments. Concurrently, the empirical research associated with climate…
Publication | This study explored how engaging in critical inquiry through Project-Based Inquiry (PBI) Global fostered social action with high school students. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from critical inquiry and social action and employing a…