Engineering

Teacher portfolios have long been used to support professional reflection and learning. We developed a new type of e-portfolio tool enabling teachers to efficiently capture, annotate, and share multimedia evidence of student learning and instruction (documents, pictures, video) in mobile devices. This tool supported vertical professional learning communities with teachers in multiple grades, reflecting the spiraling structure of the Next Generation Science Standards, where concepts are covered multiple times in increasing depth and sophistication.

A partnership between the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the Exploratorium, the Spanning Boundaries project researches how science teacher leaders (STLs) can be supported and activated to bring educational improvements into their local contexts. We draw on a range of frameworks from organizational theory and social learning theory to examine how science teacher leaders, as Boundary Spanners who carry knowledge and innovation across professional settings enact their roles, and how their work is sustained and improved.

This project studies and develops science and engineering education technology and pedagogy that supports project‐based learning of science, engineering, and computation concepts and skills underlying the strategically important "green" and "smart" aspects of the infrastructure, which is a national priority.

Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS) is a partnership between the University of Illinois Physics Department and 40 high school physics teachers representing 38 schools across Illinois. The holistic goal of the program is to develop a physics teaching Community of Practice that supports high school physics teachers from diverse school contexts in the design and implementation of high-quality, university-aligned instructional materials, such that their students experience fewer barriers in transitions to post-secondary STEM programs.

This DRK-12 Impact Study project investigates the effectiveness of STEM-Innovation and Design (STEM-ID) curricula in approximately 29 middle schools, targeting 29 engineering teachers and approximately 5,000 students across middle grades in Georgia.

The project explores teachers' capacity to manage student uncertainty as a pedagogical resource that supports student’s productive struggle and the development of conceptual knowledge during project-based learning (PBL) instruction in middle school science classrooms. This project explores how teachers' instructional practices change over time with repeated use of epistemic uncertainty as a pedagogical resource to support students’ engagement in PBL, and what effect those changes have on student perceptions, practice, management of epistemic uncertainty and learning outcomes.

This project is developing the first Internet of Things based pedagogical ecosystem for 9-12 CS and STEM classes. This project has focused on identifying critical elements for effective instructional design for CS and SE education by understanding student and teacher motivation. A key innovation of this effort has been the low-cost, IoT-hardware kits for project-based learning to create a hands-on experience in the classroom.

Computational thinking (CT) is critical in all STEM fields, but it is typically not integrated in STEM courses beyond computer science. To address this gap, our project team is developing a month-long CT-intensive biology unit, where students learn to program a robotic gripper to respond to changes in their electrical muscle activity. This provides a novel, interdisciplinary, and real-world context for students to develop their CT.

Project ExCEED is a three-year project to help upper elementary and middle school teachers create and implement engineering design tasks in their classrooms that are relevant to the cultures and communities of their Native American and rural student populations. The interdisciplinary research team is studying the effectiveness of the professional development program at increasing teachers’ confidence and ability to incorporate culturally relevant engineering design into their classrooms.

This project involves four strands of work: (a) investigating teachers’ engineering instruction, (b) developing a framework of conceptual understanding of engineering education for students with ESN, (c) conducting research to support universally designed engineering instruction and materials, and (d) producing and disseminating the instructional support framework and materials. Insights from project research will be used to further refine professional learning materials to better support teachers' ability to support engineering focused behaviors of students with ESN.