There is an urgent need for vetted Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)–aligned, classroom-based formative assessment tasks for the early grades that incorporate language and literacy development of young students into the design.
To successfully understand and address complex and important questions in the field of environmental science, many kinds of communities’ knowledge about their local environment need to be engaged. This one-year partnership development project involves a collaboration to design an approach that would yield opportunities for K-12 students to learn about environmental science in ways that honor both traditional STEM knowledge and Native ways of knowing among the Pomo community in California.
Online STEM credit courses have become attractive to school leaders as a way to support students who fail STEM courses in face-to-face school year settings. However, there is little research about the processes involved in how schools make decisions regarding student credit recovery. This study is engaged in data collection in high schools in a diverse county including credit recovery classroom observations, interviews, and administrative data to measure and evaluate policies around credit recovery.
This project will develop a professional development (PD) program to support teachers in implementing a physical computing anchored transdisciplinary curriculum. The program includes summer institutes and year-long activities where teachers will be first immersed in the same transdisciplinary learning experiences their students will undergo and then co-design/revise the curriculum for the local context. We will follow teachers over time to understand what trajectories teachers follow as they strive to shift toward more transdisciplinary teaching practices.
This project will develop a professional development (PD) program to support teachers in implementing a physical computing anchored transdisciplinary curriculum. The program includes summer institutes and year-long activities where teachers will be first immersed in the same transdisciplinary learning experiences their students will undergo and then co-design/revise the curriculum for the local context. We will follow teachers over time to understand what trajectories teachers follow as they strive to shift toward more transdisciplinary teaching practices.
This project will develop a professional development (PD) program to support teachers in implementing a physical computing anchored transdisciplinary curriculum. The program includes summer institutes and year-long activities where teachers will be first immersed in the same transdisciplinary learning experiences their students will undergo and then co-design/revise the curriculum for the local context. We will follow teachers over time to understand what trajectories teachers follow as they strive to shift toward more transdisciplinary teaching practices.
This three-year project aims to increase multilingual students’ engagement in scientific and engineering practices (SEPs) through a model of professional learning for high school teachers focused on embedding the Instructional Conversation (IC) pedagogy within standards-aligned SEPs. Under this model, science teachers will collaborate with English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers to co-develop linguistically-sustaining instructional materials that provide students with intentionally scaffolded opportunities to use scientific dialogue as they engage in the SEPs.
This project explores the influence of elementary teachers' curricular context knowledge, developed over multiple curricular enactments, to adapt curriculum materials in ways that are culturally respsonsive to their students. The project utilizes Explore the Salish Sea, a place-based curriculum that braids together Western and Indigenous science. Students learn about their local ecosystem and and partner with community members to engage in stewardship. Our research follows teachers through four different cycles of curriculum enactment to develop robust case studies.
Project CuRRENT addresses the need for incorporating multiple ways of knowing and learning into STEM pedagogy and curriculum through the design and delivery of a two-year professional development (PD) model that engaged elementary teachers in integrated, place-based, and regionally relevant learning focused on the theme of local watersheds. We explore how PD that embeds epistemological pluralism and is connected to local communities and ecology impacts teachers’ self-efficacy with designing and delivering place-based, NGSS-aligned STEM curriculum.
SIMIRS is a Level 2 Early Stage Design and Development project led by an interdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners at NC State University, in partnership with 26 rural school systems across North Carolina.
