Gerhard Salinger

This project will determine the viability of an engineering concept-based approach to teacher professional development for secondary school science teachers in life science and in physical science. The project refines the conceptual base for engineering at the secondary level learning to increase the understanding of engineering concepts by the science teachers. The hypothesis is that when teachers and students engage with engineering design activities their understanding of science concepts and inquiry are also enhanced.

In this project, investigators are developing and testing a learning progression for the study of chemistry. Likely pathways are investigated for how grade 8-13 student's implicit assumptions develop on five major threads of chemical design. A focus on chemical design facilitates the coherent integration of scientific and engineering practices, cross-cutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas. This approach should make chemistry more engaging to a greater variety of students.

This project is developing a three-year science program for grades 9, 10, and 11. This program presents the core concepts in physical science, life science, earth-space science, and inquiry as articulated in the National Science Education Standards. The program also engages students in integration across the disciplines in relevant, social contexts to address other standards, and provides high school students and teachers nationwide with a coherent alternative to the traditional sequence of biology, chemistry, and physics.

The purposes of this conference include bringing together 150 participants from all aspects of STEM education to exchange ideas about research, curriculum, and assessment; to help teachers integrate research-based instructional strategies in their teaching; and to build sustainable collaborations between participants. It includes three days of parallel presentations and discussion followed by a two-day summer academy. A focus on research-based strategies that advance the successful participation of underrepresented groups is embedded in all activities.

A principled framework is created for the development of learning progressions in science that can demonstrate how their use can transform the way researchers, educators and curriculum developers conceptualize important scientific constructs. Using the construct of transformation of matter, which requires understanding of both discrete learning goals and also the connections between them, a hypothetical learning progression is constructed for grades 5-12.

This project will design a comprehensive science curriculum for grades 6-8, in which learning performances drive the design of activities and assessments in order to specify how students should be able to use the scientific ideas and skills outlined in standards. The materials contain hands-on experiences, technology tools and reading materials that extend students' first-hand experiences of phenomena and support science literacy.

This is a planning effort to explore future directions and innovations related to educational design in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education in partnership with the International Society for Design and Development in Education. The planning activity will engage a core group of ISDDE principals in the articulation and examination of design processes for the Transforming STEM Learning program at NSF with a goal of developing an agenda for further discussion and research conceptualization.

Project staff are developing modular instructional materials for students. The materials are designed to increase the awareness of and interest in career opportunities in engineering and technology. The modules use authentic, real-world engineering applications and hands-on experiences to build problem-solving skills and contribute to the technological literacy of secondary students. The modules specifically target the ITEA Content Standards for Technological Literacy and related benchmarks.

This project investigates how high school students' understanding about design thinking compares to that of experienced practitioners and whether participation in a multiyear sequence of courses focused on engineering correlates with changes in design thinking. The project builds upon the Standards for Technological Literacy and courses developed at the University of Colorado and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

This project is developing a comprehensive science curriculum for grades 9-11 and related professional development materials. The curriculum prepares students for high stakes testing, accommodates a new understanding about how students learn, updates teacher content and pedagogical knowledge and serves an increasingly diverse student population. The curriculum consists of eight one-semester modules -- two each in biology, chemistry, Earth science, and physics.

This project develops resources to facilitate the involvement of college and university physics departments in the professional development of K-12 teachers of physics and physical science. Research investigates how students and teachers learn content and reasoning skills for applying concepts to real world situations; how teachers can learn content in a way that helps them promote student learning; and how teachers can learn to assess student understanding in a way that promotes student learning.

This project provides a virtual environment in which high school physics students can engage in the cutting edge science of studying exoplanets. Using online telescopes and learning software, students gain a deeper understanding of science inquiry, including reasoning from models, gathering assessing, and interpreting authentic data, and drawing conclusions from multiple line of evidence. The research advances our understanding of ways to increase students' knowledge of data literacy.

This collaborative, exploratory, learning strand project focuses on improving reflective decision-making among elementary school students during the planning and re-design activities of the engineering design process. Five teacher researchers in three elementary schools provide the classroom laboratories for the study. Specified units from Engineering is Elementary, a well-studied curriculum, provide the engineering content.

This conference uses Student Evaluation Standards, published by the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, to engage a broad array of educational organizations in improving student achievement in STEM education through better evaluation practices that assess for learning. Participants learn more about the Student Evaluation Standards and use them together with a benchmarking process - distributed to them in the form of a toolkit - to enhance student evaluation processes.

This project will develop and test a cyberlearning professional-development model that builds on the successful Curriculum Customization Service model implemented in Denver with EarthComm. The cyberlearning system is tested with the Project Based Inquiry Science (PBIS) curriculum - a proven comprehensive middle school science curriculum. The cyberlearning system is evaluated for scalability, affordability, flexibility, and effectiveness for changing teacher practice and student learning.

In this project, a video and audio network links elementary school teachers with researchers and educators at Purdue to form a community of practice dedicated to implementing engineering education at the elementary grades. The research plan includes identifying the attributes of face-to-face and cyber-enabled teacher professional development and community building that can transform teachers into master users and designers of engineering education for elementary learners.

This project is developing 24 activities that span three years of a Physics high school science curriculum. The activities cover four themes: motion and energy, charge, structure, and light. This study aims to determine the extent to which exposure to these activities in one year influences performance on activities in a subsequent year and the extent to which students can recall concepts from prior years and apply them to new activities in a different discipline.

Project staff are developing a two-year integrated science course for grades 9–10. The Science and Global Issues course includes a complete year of new material, along with a major revision to the Science and Sustainability high school course. This two-year sequence will complete the SEPUP sequence for grades 6–10. When these courses are published, they will provide the equivalent of a year-long biology course and a semester each of chemistry and physics.

This project is writing and researching a book supporting grade 5-8 students in scientific explanations and arguments. The book provides written and video examples from a variety of contexts in terms of content and diversity of students. The book and accompanying facilitator materials also provide different teacher instructional strategies for supporting students. The research focuses on how the book and accompanying professional development impact teachers' beliefs, pedagogical content knowledge and classroom practice.

This project provides a model of how existing, tested digital enhancements can increase student learning. Increasing the quality of science education requires careful coupling of effective, research-based curricula with innovative digital features that deepen and enhance science learning and teaching. This RAPID is to ensure that the content and pedagogical expertise is present during the development of the digital version of Foundation science.

This project is designing, developing, and testing a model that delivers effective teacher PD to in-service and preservice teachers to enable the successful implementation of engineering curricula. Research is performed to evaluate the impacts of the curricular materials and the teacher PD framework on classroom instructional practices and student learning, interests, and attitudes and to evaluate which curriculum components are most effective in promoting student learning and interest as a function of gender and ethnicity.

The goal of the study is to craft a research agenda that will examine the value of an integrated STEM education to students (K-12) in terms of learning achievement, motivation, and career aspirations. The final report summarizes the findings from the data gathering and analysis and the committee's conclusions and recommendations for a research agenda. This report is disseminated through presentations, publication of print and online articles and editorials and briefings to relevant stakeholders.

CAST, the University of Michigan, and EDC are collaborating to create heuristics for universally designed middle and high school science materials; to build an open-source UDL Inquiry Science System (ISS) that enables science curricula to be transformed into digitally supported versions that incorporate UDL features, to use the ISS to produce four UDL exemplars from tested instructional materials, and to evaluate the benefits of these exemplars for grades-5–12 students with and without learning disabilities.

This project is exploring how curricula and assessment using dynamic, interactive scientific visualizations of complex phenomena can ensure that all students learn significant science content. Dynamic visualizations provide an alternative pathway for students to understand science concepts, which can be exploited to increase the accessibility of a range of important science concepts. Computer technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to design curricula and assessments using visual technologies and to explore them in research, teaching, and learning.