Science

This paper describes HASbot, an automated text scoring and real‐time feedback system designed to support student revision of scientific arguments. Students submit open‐ended text responses to explain how their data support claims and how the limitations of their data affect the uncertainty of their explanations. HASbot automatically scores these text responses and returns the scores with feedback to students. Data were collected from 343 middle‐ and high‐school students taught by nine teachers across seven states in the United States.

School engagement researchers have historically focused on academic engagement or academic-related activities. Although academic engagement is vital to adolescents’ educational success, school is a complex developmental context in which adolescents also engage in social interactions while exploring their interests and developing competencies. In this article, school engagement is re-conceptualized as a multi-contextual construct that includes both academic and social contexts of school.

The search for habitable planets offers excellent opportunities to advance students’ understanding of core ideas in physics, including gravity and the laws of motion, the interaction of light and matter, and especially the nature of scientific inquiry. Thanks to the development of online telescopes, students can detect more than a dozen of the known exoplanets from the classroom, using data they gather, assess, and interpret for themselves. We present a suite of activities in which students apply basic physics concepts to their investigations of exoplanets.

Presser, A. L. Dominguez, X., Goldstein, M., Vidiksis, R., and Kamdar, D. (2019). Ramp It Up! Science & Children.