Reading List: Recent DRK-12 Project Publications

Professional development that privileges teachers’ voice, equity, and the investigation of high-quality instruction is essential to the mathematics education community. However, more research is needed to understand the process, content, and depth of teachers’ learning in this setting. This paper shares our analytic method designed to capture such learning. We integrate three complementary perspectives: Communities of Practice (theoretical framework), Teaching for Robust Understanding (conceptual framework), and Frame Analysis (analytical framework).

Formative assessment can facilitate teachers’ abilities to elicit and notice the disciplinary substance of students’ thinking and to respond based on this. Following a design-based process, we developed principled practical knowledge to create resources that might guide experienced teachers in examining their formative assessment practice and provide researchers with tools to study formative assessment enactment.

Teachers face challenges when building the concept of substance with students because tensions of meanings emerge from students’ daily life and canonical ideas developed in classrooms. A powerful tool to address learning, pedagogical, and research challenges is the conceptual profile theory. According to this theory, people employ various ways of conceptualizing the world to signify experiences. Conceptual profiles are models of the heterogeneity of modes of thinking and speaking about a given scientific concept which are used in a variety of contexts. To better understand the heterogeneity of thinking/speaking about substance, the present study aimed to answer: (1) What are the zones that constitute the conceptual profile of substance?; and (2) What ways of thinking and speaking about substance do teachers and students exhibit when engaged in a classroom formative assessment activity?

The work presented here focuses on student struggles in undergraduate general chemistry laboratory activities, the source of these struggles, and the actions students take to overcome them. Using an activity theoretical lens and multiple domains (cognitive, epistemological, socioemotional, and psychomotor), we developed a domains-of-struggle framework which encompasses how struggles emerge through contradictions within the laboratory activity system.

Chemical scientists and engineers are interested in controlling chemical processes to attain specific goals, from synthesizing a desired substance to hindering a particular transformation. Nevertheless, students typically have few opportunities to develop the understandings and practices that are required to effectively engage in chemical control. In this study, we investigated similarities and differences among individuals with different levels of expertise in chemistry in the ways they think about how to control and act to control a chemical reaction.

Teaching chemistry as a practice rather than as a mere collection of facts demands that teachers modify their practices, particularly their approach to formative assessment (FA). In this study, we investigated how teachers’ FA practices changed as a result of their participation in a professional development program designed with a Chemical Thinking perspective.

The effective use of formative assessment (FA) has been demonstrated to confer positive impacts on student learning. To understand why and how FA works, it is necessary to characterize teachers’ FA practices, but because both teaching practice and learning depend on the nature of the discipline, there are disciplinary aspects to examining this. This study aimed to develop an analysis of chemistry teachers’ FA practices through the lens of the chemical thinking framework.

Formative assessment is an important component of teaching as it enables teachers to foster student learning by uncovering, interpreting, and advancing student thinking. In this work, we sought to characterize how experienced chemistry teachers notice and interpret student thinking shown in written work, and how they respond to what they learn about it.

The resources that multilingual students bring to school mathematics are often ignored. During a teacher-researcher collaborative project focused on creating more equitable learning environments in high school math classrooms, we noted an initial tendency to focus on the challenges and barriers facing multilingual students. To counter this tendency, we worked with two teachers to engage in a structured teacher-student interview to identify and highlight secondary multilingual students’ home and community resources. We adapted a module from TeachMath to guide the activity and facilitated surveys, debriefs and teacher-research conversations to unpack this experience.

These narratives explore what it might entail to begin school–university partnerships towards the goal of transformative social changes through the voices of two women scholars of color. Using two school–university partnerships as focal cases, we unpack the complexity, tensions, and possibilities that arise through collaborations driven by the objective to promote new and more just forms of science learning within public schools. In this article, we use three key dimensions of participatory design research (namely, critical historicity, power, and relationality) as analytical lenses through which to reflect upon school–university partnerships that we are in the beginning stages of forming.

In this article, we—a team of science teachers and a university researcher—present the processes of adapting existing curricular resources to promote equitable learning experiences for diverse learners. Using a middle school ecology unit as an example, we illustrate what the modification process looks like in two key elements of designing NGSS-aligned science instruction: (a) making phenomena matter with the consideration of student identities and (b) leveraging students’ diverse ideas and questions to drive instruction.

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 villages. The UAF participating programs humbly reached out to local community members to establish a TRACKS Team. However, the UAF participating programs wanted the TRACKS Team to identify what is important to teach their children. The community were the ones to identify the research topic, utilizing an analogy Uvvatuq naluallangniaqtugut (I humbly hope we run into game) for an Iñupiaq research process.

Examining a lesson in a high school biology unit that utilized noisy sensor data, we sought to understand the ways students engaged in active reasoning about the data and the factors that influenced this process. Video analysis centers on one small group of students as they learn to use sensors to collect data on osmosis, focusing particularly on their reactions to variation within and across experimental runs.

The global pandemic and climate change have led to unprecedented environmental, social, and economic challenges with interdisciplinary STEM foundations. Even as STEM learning has never been more important, very few pre-college programs prepare students to address these challenges by emphasizing socio-scientific issue (SSI) problem solving and the engineering design of solutions to address local phenomena. The paper discusses the design and evaluation of a pre-college, SSI curricular unit where students expand their learning by creating solutions to increase biodiversity within local urban neighborhoods.

In this chapter, we argue that the learning sciences and science education have coevolved, a co-evolution that began with the emergence of the learning sciences in the 1990s and that continues today.

In this paper, we share the design and impact of a set of two-hour online mathematics professional development modules adapted from face-to-face video-based materials.

The tasks described in this chapter are intended to build connections between these real-world dangers of viral spread and some relevant topics from the secondary mathematics curriculum. We also explore a link between mathematical reasoning and media literacy—the ability to discern the commercial, ideological, or political motivations of media and the recognition that receivers negotiate the meaning of messages (Aufderheide, 1993)—so that, just as we know to take safety precautions with regard to an airborne coronavirus, we can also help our students learn to take precautions against the spread of misinformation on social media.

We investigate the algebraic discourse of secondary mathematics teachers with respect to the topic of equation solving by analyzing five teachers’ responses to open-ended items on a questionnaire that asks respondents to analyze hypothetical student work related to equation solving and explain related concepts.

This study explores two teachers participating in professional development workshops implementing SocioScientific Issues (SSI) into STEM classrooms. Two research questions were investigated: (a) To what extent did teachers implement SSI into their lesson plans and (b) In what ways did lessons change from the beginning of the workshop?

As distinct communities of practice (COP), science education research (SER) and environmental education research (EER) have both matured a great deal in recent decades, coming to include a greater diversity of theoretical perspectives, worldviews, and researcher and participant voices. In this paper, we present a view of theoretical inclusivity that promises a rich, robust research landscape for both EER and SER through the deliberate inclusion of non-Western theories.

We explored how preservice teachers in a middle school science methods course learned and applied computational thinking (CT) concepts and activities during a month-long
intervention.

Teaching about wave structure and function is a critical element of any physical science curriculum and supported by Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) PS4: Waves and Their Applications in Technologies for Information Transfer. Often, instruction focused on these concepts involves identifying and describing several aspects of wave structure, including amplitude, frequency, and wavelength. To support students’ learning of these ideas, teachers often rely on developing graphic models of a wave with students identifying different aspects of wave structure. To enhance this experience, some teachers employ readily available simulations from trusted websites, such as PhET or Netlogo. Digital resources are valuable tools that teachers can use to support students’ science understanding through manipulating elements of digitally constructed scientific models. These approaches to teaching promote students’ engagement in the practice of designing (drawing a wave) and using scientific models (working with a simulation). To expand upon these resources, we developed a series of instructional activities that deepen students’ conceptual understanding of waves by engaging in computational thinking while developing and using scientific and mathematical models.

This department explores the concept of disciplinary literacy—the conceptual understandings and ways of reading, thinking, and writing involved in critiquing and constructing knowledge in a discipline—and its intersections with aspects of culturally sustaining pedagogy.

We introduce and illustrate three principles for designing secondary mathematics classrooms in which multilingual students can benefit from participating in mathematical discussions. Drawing from the Academic Literacy in Mathematics (ALM) framework (Moschkovich, 2015), we developed these principles through a four-year design research collaboration with ninth grade mathematics teachers working in a linguistically diverse urban secondary school in the southwest USA.

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 framework to create a unit of instruction on linear rates of change for ninth grade mathematics in which multilingual students benefit from discussions.

COVID-19 has thrust educators into a period of uncertainty, complicating conventional ways of teaching and learning. We suspect that the pandemic has magnified the challenges that some high school teachers already experience, particularly when they are the sole chemistry teacher at their school. The pandemic has likely inhibited collegial interactions and access to professional development (PD). Our reflections from redesigning a face-to-face PD program to one that is remotely delivered provide recommendations that advance PD accessibility and interactivity to mitigate isolation and other longstanding challenges teachers may face. In this article, we discuss how the cognitive learning model informed emergent teaching practices that guided the transformation of the PD’s implementation for 20 high school chemistry teachers.

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 Model (RCM), understanding teacher learning, beliefs, and practices is predicated on the interconnections of such knowledge bases. However, lesson planning (defined as the transformation of subject matter knowledge to enacted pedagogical content knowledge) remains underexplored despite its central position in the RCM. We aim to address this gap by developing a conceptual framework known as Pedagogical Chemistry Sensemaking (PedChemSense).

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have been imperative for informing many facets of the chemistry education research field, one of which includes the professional development (PD) of high school teachers. While many researchers and practitioners have responded to the NGSS’ calls for reform by attending to internal factors that influence the PD’s design, resources, and facilitation, there is less attention on extant factors that may negatively affect PD uptake and fidelity. Such factors encompass traditions of teaching chemistry or chemistry-related imprecisions within the NGSS themselves. If left unaddressed, these factors can act as anchors preventing advancements toward students’ particle-level explanations and their chemistry conceptual understanding. In this article, we investigate the uptake and fidelity of our own PD program known as the VisChem Institute.

Achieving data literacy is challenging when schools narrowly focus on statistical reasoning rather than on meaning- and inference-making. Without attention to the social contexts of data, learners can fail to develop a critical stance toward data, to understand the nature and production of data, the questions that it can answer, and the ways that data can be used to inform and misinform. We explore art as an accessible and personally relevant approach to developing middle school students’ data literacy.

We explore the implementation of a co-designed data-dance unit in which middle school students created their own embodied metaphors to represent and communicate about graphs through dance. In analyzing dance artifacts and post-study interviews with the learners and teachers, we demonstrate how the creation of embodied metaphors in dance led to new ways of exploring the data as learners reflected on different perspectives on topics across numerical values, contexts, and implications.

Effective data literacy instruction requires that learners move beyond understanding statistics to being able to humanize data through a contextual understanding of argumentation and reasoning in the real-world. In this paper, we explore the implementation of a co-designed data comic unit about adolescent friendships.

This article describes the experience of using the InquirySpace software in a classroom that practices full inclusion for ninth grade physics.

Interview with Steve Roderick about helping teachers on the InquirySpace project bring more authentic science experiences to their classes.

The process of using Learning Analytics (LA) to improve teaching works from the assumption that data should be readily shared between stakeholders in an educational organization. However, the design of LA tools often does not account for considerations such as data privacy, transparency and trust among stakeholders. Research in human-centered design of LA does attend to these questions, specifically with a focus on including direct input from K-12 educators. In this paper, we present a series of design studies to articulate and refine conjectures about how privacy and transparency might influence better trust-building and data sharing within four school districts in the United States.

Despite the ease of accessing a wide range of measures, little attention is given to validity arguments when considering whether to use the measure for a new purpose or in a different context. Making a validity argument has historically focused on the intended interpretation and use. There has been a press to consider both the intended and actual interpretations and how users make sense of the data when constructing validity arguments, but the practice is not widespread.This paper contributes to existing research on validity by highlighting the value of attending to the actual interpretation and use of a measure aimed at supporting instructional improvement in mathematics.

With the spread of learning analytics (LA) dashboards in K-12 schools, educators are increasingly expected to make sense of data to inform instruction. However, numerous features of school settings, such as specialized vantage points of educators, may lead to different ways of looking at data. This observation motivates the need to carefully observe and account for the ways data sensemaking occurs, and how it may differ across K-12 professional roles. Our mixed-methods study reports on interviews and think-aloud sessions with middle-school mathematics teachers and instructional coaches from four districts in the United States.

Globally relevant, action-oriented learning, like Project-Based Inquiry (PBI) Global, is a powerful tool to increase classroom engagement and help students understand the world in which they live. Today, Person Early College for Innovation and Leadership (PECIL) is engaged in their fourth year of collaboration with the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation’s PBI Global team.

In a project designed to help create the next generation of problem-solvers, North Carolina State University researchers challenged a group of 11^th graders to investigate and find solutions to a global problem: that billions of people lack access to clean water and sanitation services.

This week is Global Goals week — an annual week of action, awareness, and accountability for the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which are aimed at addressing global challenges like poverty and hunger. In North Carolina, two schools have integrated purpose-driven, interdisciplinary, and collaborative inquiry into their classrooms to empower students and teachers as local and global change agents during a particularly uncertain school year.

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 collective case study approach, we focused on six diverse students from two of the 18 teams who participated in a PBI Global examining global water and sanitation over a two-month period.

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 Nancy Butler Songer and her collaborators have developed a suite of interdisciplinary instructional and field-based data collection resources offering elementary and secondary students the chance to create solutions for local, urban environmental issues.

This article addresses the need and potential for students to develop problem-solving skills as part of STEM learning.

It is vital to develop an understanding of students' self-regulatory processes in the domains of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) for the quality delivery of STEM education. However, most studies have followed a variable-centered approach, leaving open the question of how specific SRL (Self-regulated Learning) behaviors group within individual learners. Furthermore, little is known about how students' SRL profiles unfold over time in STEM education, specifically in the context of engineering design. In this study, we examined the change of students’ SRL profiles over time as 108 middle school students designed green buildings in a simulation-based computer-aided design (CAD) environment

From a network perspective, self-regulated learning (SRL) can be conceptualized as networks of mutually interacting self-regulatory learning behaviors. Nevertheless, the research on how SRL behaviors dynamically interact over time in a network architecture is still in its infancy, especially in the context of STEM (sciences, technology, engineering, and math) learning. In the present paper, we used a multilevel vector autoregression (VAR) model to examine the temporal dynamics of SRL behaviors as 101 students designed green buildings in Energy3D, a simulation-based computer-aided design (CAD) environment.

Computer-aided design (CAD) programs are essential to engineering as they allow for better designs through low-cost iterations. While CAD programs are typically taught to undergraduate students as a job skill, such software can also help students learn engineering concepts. A current limitation of CAD programs (even those that are specifically designed for educational purposes) is that they are not capable of providing automated real-time help to students. To encourage CAD programs to build in assistance to students, we used data generated from students using a free, open-source CAD software called Aladdin to demonstrate how student data combined with machine learning techniques can predict how well a particular student will perform in a design task.

The work presented here describes in detail the development of an integrated STEM observation instrument - the STEM Observation Protocol (STEM-OP) - that can be used for both research and practice. Over a period of approximately 18-months, a team of STEM educators and educational researchers developed a 10-item integrated STEM observation instrument for use in K-12 science and engineering classrooms. The process of developing the STEM-OP began with establishing a conceptual framework, drawing on the integrated STEM research literature, national standards documents, and frameworks for both K-12 engineering education and integrated STEM education.

Integrated STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education is becoming increasingly common in K–12 classrooms. However, various definitions of STEM education exist that make it challenging for teachers to know what to implement and how to do so in their classrooms. In this article, we describe a series of activities used in a week-long professional development workshop designed to elicit K–12 teachers’ conceptions of STEM and the roles that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics play in STEM education.

This study used an exploratory case study design to investigate conceptions of 19 K-12 science teachers after participating in an integrated STEM-focused professional development and implementing integrated STEM lessons into their classrooms.

Today’s students are exposed to news about wildfires on an all-too-regular basis. An increasingly larger portion of those students live in areas where wildfire risks are high or where smoke has reduced the air quality. The GeoHazard project has designed, developed, and tested an online wildfire curriculum module for middle and high school students that addresses the factors that influence wildfires, as well as the risks and impacts that wildfires bring to people and their communities.

Climate change, and the rise of the natural hazards that climate change brings, has been at the top of news feeds every week over the past year. Extreme events such as floods, droughts, and wildfires are expected to increase in the future. What does that mean for those of us living in the path of one of these hazards? Our GeoHazard project is exploring this question with middle and high school teachers and students across the country.

In this manuscript, we propose that educators’ perspectives may serve as an independent source of evidence that can be integrated with traditional evidence sources (e.g., cognitive interviews with students, psychometric data). This manuscript describes two studies that used surveys to draw on educator knowledge of students to identify upper and lower bounds of a learning progression (MMaRS study) and to understand the order of intermediary phases of learning (ESTAR study).

This article introduces a new online curriculum module called “What will Earth look like in 500 million years?” Using two web-based tools, middle and high school students develop understandings of (1) how collective movements associated with a system of plates create the current distribution of landforms found on Earth’s surface, and (2) how earthquakes and volcanoes provide important clues for interactions at plate boundaries.

The goal of our National Science Foundation-funded Geological Models for Exploration of Dynamic Earth (GEODE) project is to help students use plate tectonics as an explanation for the landforms and geological phenomena observed on Earth’s surface.

This article describes a free online plate tectonics curriculum module (PT module), which offers a unique approach with two innovative tools that allow students to make connections between real-world data and plate tectonics models.

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 practice-based activities, collectively referred to as the Online Practice Suite (OPS).

In this study, our team developed and is studying the use of an Online Practice Suite (OPS) composed of a coordinated and scaffolded collection of three practice-based online simulations designed to support the development of preservice teachers' (PSTs’) abilities, skills, beliefs, and understanding around one ambitious teaching practice within mathematics and science: facilitating discussions that engage students in argumentation.

We describe an online citizen science platform for human brain and behavior research that uses a participatory science learning approach to engage learners in the full spectrum of scientific inquiry.

School-based science inquiry tends to focus on already answered questions. We describe how we used the COVID-19 pandemic in a high school citizen science unit for students to witness and engage in real-time science. High school students developed proposals to study questions about their experiences related to the pandemic.

We explored the COVID-19 pandemic as a context for learning about the role of science in a global health crisis. In spring 2020, at the beginning of the first pandemic-related lockdown, we worked with a high school teacher to design and implement a unit on human brain and behavior science. The unit guided her 17 students in creating studies that explored personally relevant questions about the pandemic to contribute to a citizen science platform.

Drawing from published literature, as well as the experiences of a co-design team of motivation and science education researchers and middle school science teachers, we address the landscape of decision points for designing and implementing professional learning focused on supporting middle school students’ motivation in science.

This experience report describes lessons learned from a remote after-school camp with 24 elementary school students who participated in a series of individual and paired learning activities over three weeks. The report contributes to the understanding of remote CS learning practices, particularly for elementary school students, and we hope it will provoke methodological advancement in this important area.

In this study, we investigated how an experienced fourth-grade teacher responded to her students’ thinking as part of her teacher noticing practice in a formative assessment context. Our primary purpose in doing this work was to decompose the responding component of teacher noticing and use our findings to present an emerging framework characterizing the multidimensional nature of this practice.

Using social learning theory with the central concept of a community of practice, we situate this work within a secondary mathematics methods course to unpack preservice secondary mathematics teachers (PSMTs) development through the use of video case studies. We analyzed six sessions of the course in which PSMTs engaged in discussions about video segments of mathematics teaching rooted in the Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) framework for high-quality instruction.

Incorporating video case study of mathematics teaching into professional development (PD) can provide opportunities for teachers to develop new ways of seeing teaching and learning and inform efforts to enact new instructional practices. However, more research is needed to understand how such PD can foster sustained teacher learning about high-quality instruction and materials. In this paper, we share the evolution of our analytic method that aims to reveal how secondary mathematics teachers learn while collectively analyzing video of mathematics teaching.

In this article, authors described the six-phase data investigation process for analyzing large-scale quantitative and categorical data.

As the discipline of statistics education broadens to data science education, there is a need to examine how practices in data science can inform work in K-12. We synthesize literature about statistics investigation processes, data science as a field and practices of data scientists. Further, we provide results from an ethnographic and interview study of the work of data scientists.

There is strong empirical evidence in support of learning from comparisons in mathematics education research. The Animated Contrasting Cases in Geometry project seeks to extend this research and transform the learning of geometry for middle school students by designing a supplementary digital animated curriculum. This paper focuses on the Transformations unit, which is one of four units.

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 movement and student tables or groups is associated with a higher focus on student actions and that 360 video affords opportunities for teachers to notice students’ mathematical thinking.

Productive use of student mathematical thinking is a critical yet incompletely understood dimension of effective teaching practice. We have previously conceptualized the teaching practice of building on student mathematical thinking and the four elements that comprise it. In this paper we begin to unpack this complex practice by looking closely at its first element, establish. Based on an analysis of secondary mathematics teachers’ enactments of building, we describe two critical aspects of establish—establish precision and establish an object—and the actions teachers take in association with these aspects.

This preliminary study explored how many representations of standard videos, animations/comics, and 360 videos are being used in mathematics methods courses to teach future teachers. Drawing on knowledge from prior studies on standard videos, this study aimed to address the gaps in literature to encompass other representations that are being utilized and obtained.

The purpose of this study was to adapt and validate an instrument for assessing immersive 360 video use in an undergraduate preservice teacher university training program.

Professional noticing is an essential skill for teachers that is enacted by teachers via their embodied senses (sight, sound, etc.). To better understand the nature of teacher noticing, 44 preservice teachers (PSTs) viewed a 360 video of an elementary mathematics lesson while wearing virtual reality headsets. PSTs writings of what they noticed and recordings of where they turned their head while wearing the headsets during the recorded scenario were examined. Findings suggest that how PSTs positioned students and the teacher in their field of view interacted with whether and how such events were described in writing.

Scholarship on extended reality (XR) in teacher education is emerging at an increasing rate. As additional forms of XR become more common in the profession, there is a need for teacher educators to consider how the various forms of XR-based representations of practice are conceptualized. This editorial focuses on how the field may begin to consider defining XR within the boundaries of perceptual capacity—a concept that align with definitions in various other professional fields and with theory and practice in teacher education.

The ReLaTe-SA project investigates the research question: what language do teachers use to describe and explain routines in algebra classes? The goal of this article is to inform readers about some ways we have learned to describe the discourse that teachers use when solving linear equations.

Through a composite counter-story from the perspective of fifth-grade Raza learners, the authors show how race and language play a role in the mathematics classroom.

The rapid and unexpected nature of the move to online instruction has meant that the content presented to students has been primarily static and linear. Thus, there is a need for creative pedagogical approaches that re-create some level of the laboratory experience. One economical and accessible approach to building an interactive lab experience is making web-based interactive slides. In the virtual spaces created by this approach, students can explore different modalities of content in a nonlinear and asynchronous manner.

This report describes initial findings from a study of middle school science curriculum materials that were designed to promote learning as called for by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

High-quality science education is essential for students to become scientifically literate. Model-Evidence Link (MEL) diagrams and build-a-MEL (baMEL) diagrams are instructional scaffolds that create an opportunity for students to build scientific understanding through the evaluation of the connections between evidence and alternative explanations of a scientific phenomenon. The MELs and baMELs allow for a natural incorporation of three-dimensional learning that has been recommended by the Next Generation Science Standards to enhance students’ comprehension. Through this science teaching methodology, students are able to see that by diagramming and then writing about one’s thoughts about the connections between evidence and explanations, one can deepen their understanding of scientific concepts.

The origin of the Universe is something that people have pondered for thousands of years. As evidence has mounted, the Big Bang theory has become the consensus scientific model. Much of this same evidence refutes opposing theories such as the earlier Steady State model. The NGSS for high school includes the nature of and evidence for the Big Bang, providing a rich opportunity to explore—with the help of a scaffold—the connections between evidence and competing models about the origins of the Universe.

The construct of active learning permeates undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), but despite its prevalence, the construct means different things to different people, groups, and STEM domains. To better understand active learning, we constructed this review through an innovative interdisciplinary collaboration involving research teams from psychology and discipline-based education research (DBER). Our collaboration examined active learning from two different perspectives (i.e., psychology and DBER) and surveyed the current landscape of undergraduate STEM instructional practices related to the modes of active learning and traditional lecture.

The purpose of this study was to investigate fourth-grade students’ sensemaking of a word problem. Sensemaking occurs when students connect their understanding of situations with existing knowledge. We investigated students’ sensemaking through inductive task analysis of their strategies and solutions to a problem that involved determining the difference between two quantities and number of groups within the task.

This article focused on expansive, meaningful, and equitable modeling practice.

The process of modeling a complex phenomenon often requires working across representational systems of differing scales, modalities, and purposes. When put into contact, entities across multiple representational systems can become related or “interlock.” This paper describes how students drew from multiple representational systems to construct “interlocking models” and how reasoning with interlocking models supported meaningful practice and conceptual innovation.

This article describes resources that are freely available to help teachers navigate the peer review and publication processes and guide their students through the successful completion of submission and publication of their research papers.

Scientists spend a substantial amount of their time engaging with the primary literature: reading, constructing, reviewing and revising it. Yet, the role of primary literature is generally absent from the development of scientific inquiry skills in the pre-college science classroom, thus undermining a true understanding of what it means to do science. In this study, we examined middle and high school student perceptions of scientific inquiry and the role of disciplinary literacy practices after engaging in scientific review and publication of their research papers.

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, adoption, and incorporation of ideas into practice.

The Responsive Math Teaching project has been developing and refining a model for the development of mathematics instructional leadership in a network of 13 urban under-resourced elementary schools. This report summarizes the core elements of this model for developing sustainable math instructional leadership for systemic change at the district level.

The researchers conducted a qualitative analysis of the perceptions of school personnel and pre-service teachers about an Algebra I tutoring program for students with learning disabilities. The researchers surveyed and interviewed the participants about the effectiveness of the program for the mathematics learning of the students with LD at the school and as a learning experience for the pre-service teachers.

In this article, we use data from interviews, class observations, and an analysis of instructional videos to describe an elementary mathematics specialists' efforts to incorporate flipped instruction for mathematics in her fifth grade class. We use this case to highlight how a knowledgeable teacher might use flipped instruction to enhance her teaching, and also describe potential challenges.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has consistently emphasized the importance of curricular coherence in mathematics education. However, the predominance of the Internet has led to a lack of consistency in the use and quality of curricular materials. We drew on teachers’ self-report of their use of curriculum materials and conducted a Latent Class Analysis to examine patterns in 56 elementary teachers’ selection, use, and perceptions of materials for teaching mathematics, including the role that teacher expertise may play in these patterns.

This blog post looks at the role of simulations in teacher learning.

This study explores how 79 elementary preservice teachers perceive the relevance and importance of assessment task scenarios designed to elicit information about content knowledge for teaching (CKT) about matter and its interactions—a foundational topic for teaching physical science.

This study explored an innovative coaching model termed video-based online video coaching.  As part of an NSF-funded project, we studied nine mathematics coaches over four years as they engaged in video-based coaching with teachers from geographically distant, rural contexts.

This study examined how mathematics coaches leverage written annotations to support professional discourse with teachers about important classroom events during synchronous debriefing conversations. Coaches and teachers created the annotations while asynchronously watching video of an implemented lesson as part of online video-assisted coaching cycles. More specifically, this project examined the extent to which a coach and teacher discussed the

annotations during a debrief conversation in a coaching cycle. We present a rationale for needing new knowledge about the relationships between video annotations and professional discourse as well as the potential implications of such knowledge.

In this chapter, we describe a three-part fully online model for the professional development of middle school mathematics teachers. This chapter contributes to understanding how online contexts provide opportunities to collect and analyze data in ways that would be difficult to accomplish in face-to-face settings.

This article focused on creating virtual research experiences using digitized museum specimens.

This chapter discusses the capabilities of extended reality technology in informal learning environments, such as museums and cultural heritage sites. The chapter critically appraises several affordances of extended reality technologies while expanding on these notions by outlining the cognitive theory of multimedia learning to inform practical instructional design principles.

Museums are local-to-global organizations operating in a digitized, distributed, and diverse 21st century world. Museums leaders face significant challenges in achieving broader relevance, meaningful engagement, and equitable outreach. This article examines the transformative potential of digitized collections to increase public engagement and enhance authentic educational efforts of museums, with specific emphasis on visual media as a key resource to achieve these outcomes.

This article focuses on investigating the phenomenon of increasing surface air temperatures using a global climate modeling approach.

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 education has also increased. We used an exhaustive, stepwise process to search for and identify relevant literature, systematically analyzing 178 empirical, peer-reviewed studies focused on climate literacy and education in formal K-16 settings.

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 temperatures, a core dimension of global climate change (GCC).

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 understanding of CS standards and ability to adapt instruction based on student understanding of concepts underlying the CS standards. We share concrete examples of how to design standards-aligned educative resources and instructionally supportive tools that promote teachers' understanding of CS standards and common student challenges and develop teachers' formative assessment literacy, all essential components of CS pedagogical content knowledge.

In this study, we explored second and fifth graders’ noticing of negative signs and incorporation of them into their strategies when solving integer addition problems. For both grade levels, the order of the numerals, the location of the negative signs, and also the numbers’ absolute values in the problems played a role in students’ strategies used. Fifth graders’ greater strategy variability often reflected strategic use of the meanings of the minus sign. Our findings provide insights into students’ problem interpretation and solution strategies for integer addition problems and supports a blended theory of conceptual change.

We present findings from an online course designed to support teachers to frame video discussions as making sense of student thinking. In an engineering pedagogy course designed to emphasize responsiveness to students’ thinking, we documented shifts in teachers’ framing, with teachers more frequently making sense of, rather than evaluating, student thinking later in the course. These findings show that it is possible to design an asynchronous online course to productively engage teachers in video discussions and inform theory development in online teacher education.

The give-n task is widely used in developmental psychology to indicate young children’s knowledge or use of the cardinality principle (CP): the last number word used in the counting process indicates the total number of items in a collection. Fuson (1988) distinguished between the CP, which she called the count-cardinal concept, and the cardinal-count concept, which she argued is a more advanced cardinality concept that underlies the counting-out process required by the give-n task with larger numbers. One aim of the present research was to evaluate Fuson’s disputed hypothesis that these two cardinality concepts are distinct and that the count-cardinal concept serves as a developmental prerequisite for constructing the cardinal-count concept. Consistent with Fuson’s hypothesis, the present study with twenty-four 3- and 4-year-olds revealed that success on a battery of tests assessing understanding of the count-cardinal concept was significantly and substantially better than that on the give-n task, which she presumed assessed the cardinal-count concept.

This study illustrates how two secondary mathematics teachers used students’ incorrect answers as they supported students’ engagement in collective argumentation.

This review synthesized insights from 27 NSF-funded projects, totaling $62 million, that studied pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in STEM education from prekindergarten (PreK) to Grade 12, split roughly equally across mathematics and science education. The projects primarily applied correlational/observational and longitudinal methods, often targeted teaching in the middle school grades, and used a wide variety of approaches to measure teachers’ PCK. The projects advanced substantive knowledge about PCK across four major lines of research, especially regarding the measurement and development of PCK.

This review synthesizes findings from 18 NSF-funded projects, totaling nearly $22 million, that studied scientific modeling in science education from prekindergarten to Grade 12. The projects typically used descriptive designs to understand digital and nondigital modeling resources that help students explore scientific phenomena. Further, the projects provide initial evidence that resources supporting student modeling, such as modeling platforms and computer simulations, can promote science learning.

This review synthesizes insights from 23 NSF-funded projects, totaling $40 million, that studied mathematical and scientific argumentation in STEM education from prekindergarten (PreK) to Grade 12. The projects reported on both studies of argumentation interventions and naturalistic observations in “business-as-usual” settings. The projects advanced substantive knowledge about how to support student argumentation. In particular, the projects highlighted the importance of making an argument’s structure explicit and facilitating student-to-student discourse, especially with technological tools.

In this article, we describe the case of “Keri,” a fifth-grade teacher who had completed an Elementary Mathematics Specialist (EMS) certification program. Drawn from a larger study investigating the knowledge, beliefs, and practices of EMSs, Keri's case was unique in that she was teaching mathematics to four classes in a departmentalized structure, where students were placed into different classes according to perceived mathematics ability. Observations from the larger study revealed that Keri's instructional practices did not align with her reported beliefs and knowledge. To explore this deviation, we conducted a case study where we observed Keri's instruction across multiple classes and used interviews to explore reasons for Keri's instructional decisions in terms of her perceived professional obligations.

This conceptual paper introduces the honeycomb of engineering framework, which offers an epistemologically justified theoretical position and a pedagogical lens that can be used to examine ways engineering concepts and practices are taught in precollege education.

School science continues to alienate students identifying with nondominant, non-western cultures, and learners of color, and considers science as an enterprise where success necessitates divorcing the self and corporeal body from ideas and the mind. Resisting the colonizing pedagogy of the mind–body divide, we aimed at creating pedagogical spaces and places in science classes that sustain equitable opportunities for engagement and meaning making where body and mind are enmeshed. In the context of a partnership between school- and university-based educators and researchers, we explored how multimodal literacies cultivated through the performing arts, provide students from minoritized communities opportunities to both create knowledge and to position themselves as science experts and brilliant and creative meaning makers.

Science involves changing the scale of objects—particularly scales of size, time, and intensity—from what is experienced in the world. Similar to investigations conducted in science laboratories, classroom investigations involve re-representing and re-scaling entities, manipulating them, and observing effects in new locations and timescales. However, this aspect of investigation is under-studied and under-utilized as a resource for learning. We argue that, from elementary school, children can experience quantification, or identifying, developing, and working with variables, as consequential and can take up differences in representation and scale in empirical investigations as opportunities for sense-making and conceptual progress.

Socially relevant and controversial topics, such as the climate crisis, are subject to differences in the explanations that scientists and the public find plausible. Scaffolds can help students be evaluative of the validity of explanations based on evidence when addressing such topics and support knowledge gains. This study compared two scaffolds in which students weighed connections between lines of evidence and explanations for the topics of climate change and extreme weather events.

This paper introduces an approach for designing NGSS-aligned assessments that measure young learners’ science progress while also attending to the scientific language and literacy practices that are integral parts of the NGSS Performance Expectations.

Urban Title I schools need teachers who recognize and can help address challenges with broadening participation in science and inequities in access to quality science instruction found in elementary schools. The paper presents scholarly work supported by a National Science Foundation Discovery Research K-12 grant. A new science instructional model that intersects effective practices in science education with the theoretical principles of culturally relevant pedagogy is provided. Grounded in evidence-based practice, the new model, SCI-Bridge, features how culturally responsive classroom management, facilitated discourse, and contextual anchoring can be implemented as part of science instruction in elementary classrooms.

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 personal experiences with social competencies valued in classrooms through using heritage languages, engaging as brokers and collaborators, and attempting to realize goals of learning English and content simultaneously. Findings also show that misalignments between social competence and personal experience constrained meaning-making. This study illustrates a need for activities that reflect and expand newcomer resources and experiences, and for activities that can take shape through student participation.

This study investigates the emergence and cultivation of teachers' “epistemic empathy” in response to analyzing videos of student inquiry. We define epistemic empathy as the act of understanding and appreciating someone's cognitive and emotional experience within an epistemic activity—i.e., activity aimed at the construction, communication, and critique of knowledge. Our goals are (1) to conceptually develop the construct and contrast it to more general notions of caring and (2) to empirically examine epistemic empathy in the context of preservice teacher education. We discuss tensions in teachers' expressions of epistemic empathy, and we end with implications for research and practice.

Efforts to promote reform-based instruction have overlooked the import of affect in teacher learning. Drawing on prior work, I argue that teachers’ affective experiences in the discipline are integral to their learning how to teach the discipline. Moreover, I suggest that both affective and epistemological aspects of teachers’ experiences can serve to cultivate their epistemic empathy—the capacity for tuning into and valuing someone’s intellectual and emotional experience within an epistemic activity—in ways that support student-centered instruction.

Many of us have multiple stories that would be appropriate to tell given the theme of this Special Issue. I am compelled to tell a story about my work with teachers, teacher leaders, and other allies on the Navajo Nation. The Diné Institute for Navajo Nation Educators (DINÉ) was started by teacher leaders who envisioned a collaborative professional development institute specifically for K12 teachers on the Navajo Nation. In their rural, Indigenous-serving schools, teachers are often asked to deliver scripted curriculum that is decontextualized, dehistoricized, and therefore, dehumanizing for their students, themselves, and their communities. Their vision for the DINÉ was developed and honed over many years in response to this context. In this essay, I will briefly describe the DINÉ, how and why it began, and its current status. I will focus on three critical spaces that have opened up in and through the DINÉ: teacher leadership, connection/relationality, and activism/self-determination. In reflecting on these three spaces, I suggest that our work in the DINÉ is fundamentally about Native Nation building.

This article presents a tool and discusses the rationale for the authors’ development of a tool designed to assess the alignment of culturally responsive schooling principles within schools serving predominantly U.S. Indigenous students. Schools that serve a majority of Indigenous students are generally located on or bordering Native Nations that are federally recognized as being sovereign Nations with a government-to-government relationship to the federal government, so the more generic diversity, equity, and inclusion tools that currently exist are insufficient for the unique contexts of schools in Indian Country. Thus, we offer a tool that can be used to identify and strengthen the integration of culturally responsive principles specifically for, with, and in Indigenous-serving schools.

This paper puts forth a detailed conceptual framework for K-12 integrated STEM education that can be used by researchers, educators, and curriculum developers as a common vision

This comprehensive volume advances a vision of teacher preparation programs focused on core practices supporting ambitious science instruction. The book advocates for collaborative learning and building a community of teacher educators that can collectively share and refine strategies, tools, and practices. 

Research suggests that if students use viable argumentation in their middle school classes, then they will increase their complex mathematical reasoning and mathematics achievement. This is a 2-page infographic detailing the results from a case study.

This is a technical report detailing the methods and findings for each of the research studies in the LLAMA project. 

This book aims to advance ongoing debates in the field of mathematics and mathematics education regarding conceptions of argumentation, justification, and proof and the consequences for research and practice when applying particular conceptions of each construct. Through analyses of classroom practice across grade levels using different lenses - particular conceptions of argumentation, justification, and proof - researchers consider the implications of how each conception shapes empirical outcomes. In each section, organized by grade band, authors adopt particular conceptions of argumentation, justification, and proof, and they analyse one data set from each perspective. In addition, each section includes a synthesis chapter from an expert in the field to bring to the fore potential implications, as well as new questions, raised by the analyses. Finally, a culminating section considers the use of each conception across grade bands and data sets.

Several recent studies have focused on helping students understand the limitations of empirical arguments (e.g., Stylianides, G. J. & Stylianides, A. J., 2009, Brown, 2014). One view is that students use empirical argumentation because they hold empirical proof schemes—they are convinced a general claim is true by checking a few cases (Harel & Sowder, 1998). Some researchers have sought to unseat students’ empirical proof schemes by developing students’ skepticism, their uncertainty about the truth of a general claim in the face of confirming (but not exhaustive) evidence (e.g., Brown, 2014; Stylianides, G. J. & Stylianides, A. J., 2009). With sufficient skepticism, students would seek more secure, non-empirical arguments to convince themselves that a general claim is true. We take a different perspective, seeking to develop students’ awareness of domain appropriateness (DA), whether the argument type is appropriate to the domain of the claim. In particular, DA entails understanding that an empirical check of a proper subset of cases in a claim’s domain does not (i) guarantee the claim is true and does not (ii) provide an argument that is acceptable in the mathematical or classroom community, although checking all cases does both (i) and (ii). DA is distinct from skepticism; it is not concerned with students’ confidence about the truth of a general claim. We studied how ten 8th graders developed DA through classroom experiences that were part of a broader project focused on developing viable argumentation. 

Students’ difficulties with argumentation, proving, and the role of counterexamples in proving are well documented. Students in this study experienced an intervention for improving their argumentation and proving practices. The intervention included the eliminating counterexamples (ECE) framework as a means of constructing and critiquing viable arguments for a general claim. This framework involves constructing descriptions of all possible counterexamples to a conditional claim and determining whether or not a direct argument eliminates the possibility of counterexamples. This case study investigates U.S. eighth-grade (age 13) mathematics students’ conceptions about the validity of a direct argument after the students received instruction on the ECE framework. We describe student activities in response to the intervention, and we identify students’ conceptions that are inconsistent with canonical notions of mathematical proving and appear to be barriers to using the ECE framework.

Students’ difficulties with contrapositive reasoning are well documented. Lack of intuition about contrapositive reasoning and lack of a meta-argument for the logical equivalence between a conditional claim and its contrapositive may contribute to students’ struggles. This case study investigated the effectiveness of the eliminating counterexamples intervention in improving students’ ability to construct, critique, and validate contrapositive arguments in a U.S. eighth-grade mathematics classroom. The intervention involved constructing descriptions of all possible counterexamples to a conditional claim and its contrapositive, comparing the two descriptions, noting that the descriptions are the same barring the order of phrases, and finding a counterexample to show the claim is false or viably arguing that no counterexample exists.

Estimating and monitoring the construct-irrelevant variance (CIV) is of significant importance to validity, especially for constructed response assessments with rich contextualized information. To examine CIV in contextualized constructed response assessments, we developed a framework including a model accounting for CIV and a measurement that could differentiate the CIV.

In this article, the authors present evidence from teachers' reflections that this stability was supported by the teachers' intellectual and emotional experiences as learners. Specifically, they argue that engaging in extended scientific inquiry provided a basis for the teachers having epistemic empathy for their students—their tuning into and appreciating their students' intellectual and emotional experiences in science, which in turn supported teachers' responsiveness in the classroom.

In this paper we argue for the need to design and develop transformative learning ecologies that explicitly position the diverse voices of youth from nondominant communities as central to re-defining and re-envisioning relationally just, pluralistic, and sustainable futures. To this end, we seek to provide examples from participatory design-based learning ecologies to illustrate the centering of middle school youth voices and agencies from multilingual Black, Brown, and Latinx communities through critical response-ability.

This study explored the verb clauses and thematic development evident in curriculum materials and in transcripts of teachers planning lessons using the materials.

The Visual Access to Mathematics (VAM) project developed and studied teacher professional development (PD) focused on linguistically-responsive teaching to facilitate ELs’ mathematical problem solving and discourse. This study examines whether VAM PD has a positive impact on teachers’ self-efficacy in supporting ELs in mathematics and how components of the PD may have influenced teacher outcomes.

This study used an easy-to-implement prompting intervention in the context of collaborative (pair) programming with upper elementary students to demonstrate the potential of Epistemic Network Analysis to understand the impact of the intervention.

This article describes one mathematics professional development program designed to support all K-5 students' engagement in productive mathematical discussions, in particular emergent multilingual learners.

In this paper, authors analyze a PD design, examining its activities and the sequencing of professional learning tasks.

In this chapter, authors use the Framework for Teaching Practice (Grossman, et al., 2009) as a conceptual tool for analzying the design of professional development.

Science teachers must sometimes teach outside of their expertise, and this type of teaching assignment is referred to as being out-of-field. Among newly hired teachers, this type of assignment may have a detrimental impact in the development of their instruction. This study explored the classroom instruction of 17 newly hired teachers who were teaching both in-field and out-of-field in the physical sciences during their first three years.

Special issue of the Journal of Science Teacher Education focused on out-of-field teaching in science.

This exploratory study aimed to (1) identify the  barriers to moving STEM enrichment programming in a rural environment from in-person to virtual activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, (2) describe key decisions that were made in transitioning to the virtual format along with the rationale behind those decisions, and (3) disseminate best practices that emerged from the inaugural effort.

A teacher uses formative assessment interviews to uncover evidence of students’ understandings and to plan targeted instruction in a mathematics intervention class. Authors present an example of a student interview, a discussion of the benefits and challenges of conducting interviews, and actionable suggestions for implementing them.

This study explored the potential impact of teaching outside of one’s field of expertise. This longitudinal cross-case study examined the development of enacted pedagogical content knowledge (ePCK) among a group of in-field and out-of-field (OOF) physical science teachers during their first 3 years of teaching.

Teacher education programs have a critical role in supporting prospective teachers’ connections between theory and practice. In this study, authors examined three prospective secondary mathematics teachers’ discourses regarding collective argumentation during and after a unit of instruction addressing collective argumentation and ways they recontextualized their on-campus coursework (theory) into their student teaching (practice) as demonstrated by their support for students’ mathematical arguments during student teaching.

Argumentation enables students to engage in real world scientific practices by rationalizing claims grounded in supporting evidence. Student engagement in scientific argumentation activates the negotiation process by which students develop and defend evidence-based claims. Little is known, however, on the intricate process and potential patterns of negotiation between students during scientific argumentation. The present study seeks to fill this gap by exploring how a group of university science education students negotiated when evaluating the relationship between lines of evidence and alternative explanatory models of a phenomena (i.e., climate change).

This study explores design strategies used by experienced designers in Energy3D, a computer-aided design (CAD) simulation environment designed for learning settings, to provide insight into supporting students' use of CAD simulation environments in precollege settings.

This article presents lessons learned from an ongoing attempt to conceptualize, develop, and refine a way for teachers to gather formative assessment evidence about classroom argumentation as it happens.

In this article, it is argued that processes of co-production can support teachers and students in organizing resources for justice through science learning. Drawing upon a critical justice conceptual framework, critical ethnographic data from one urban middle school classroom during a unit focused on engineering for sustainable communities were analyzed.

The study reported in this article examined the ways in which new mathematics learning influences students’ prior ways of reasoning. Authors conceptualize this kind of influence as a form of transfer of learning called backward transfer. The focus of the study was on students’ covariational reasoning about linear functions before and after they participated in a multi-lesson instructional unit on quadratic functions.

This study examines how three cognitive instructional principles including worked examples, representations, and deep questions are used in eight experienced elementary teachers’ early algebra lessons in the U.S.

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.

Drawing on rich classroom observations of educators teaching in China and the U.S., this book details an innovative and effective approach to teaching algebra at the elementary level, namely, "teaching through example-based problem solving" (TEPS).

An NSF-funded program partnering preservice teachers and undergraduate engineering students to teach robotics to fifth graders was adapted to a virtual format via Zoom. A case study intimately explored one team’s experience as they engineered bio-inspired robots over five weekly sessions.

This chapter offers lessons learned by teacher educators who guided preservice teachers in the modification of hands-on engineering lessons for virtual implementation during the spring 2020 semester as part of an NSF-funded project.

This peer-reviewed research journal publication addresses one of the grant goals with respect to how students performed on a set of proof tasks.

The Mathematics Immersion for Secondary Teachers at Scale program engages sets of teachers in local school sites, connected synchronously and asynchronously to colleagues in other sites, in doing mathematics designed to promote experiences of mathematical immersion, community, and connection to the work of teaching. This study of two groups of sites over one year examines fidelity to the program as a model for systematically providing these opportunities, and the extent to which teacher participants experienced immersion, community, and connection in their collaborative work with the course facilitator and their local and distant colleagues.

In this paper, authors network five frameworks (cognitive demand, lesson cohesion, cognitive engagement, collective argumentation, and student contribution) for an analytic approach that allows us to present a more holistic picture of classrooms which engage students in justifying.

Echoing calls to expand environmental education research through design, this study explores the role of design in garden-based education and illustrate its contributions towards practical impact and theoretical insight.

This paper examines the use of Imaginative Education (IE) to create an NGSS-aligned middle school engineering curriculum that supports transfer and the development of STEM identity.

Selected response items and constructed response (CR) items are often found in the same test. Conventional psychometric models for these two types of items typically focus on using the scores for correctness of the responses. Recent research suggests, however, that more information may be available from the CR items than just scores for correctness. In this study, we describe an approach in which a statistical topic model along with a diagnostic classification model (DCM) was applied to a mixed item format formative test of English and Language Arts.

This qualitative study examines the processes by which science faculty reshape their pedagogical practices through facilitating professional development for K–12 teachers, and how individual characteristics, social interactions, and organizational contexts influence their choices.

This study takes a person‐centered approach by applying latent profile analysis to examine how cognitive (pedagogical content knowledge) and motivational (instructional goal orientations, self‐efficacy beliefs, and reform values) characteristics combine to form science teacher profiles in middle school.

Conference proceedings from the 2019 Science Education at the Crossroads Conference.

This study explores disciplinary literacy instruction integrated within an elementary engineering unit in an urban classroom.

Providing science instruction is an ongoing priority and challenge in elementary grades, especially in high-need rural schools. Nonetheless, few studies have investigated the factors that facilitate or limit teachers’ science instruction in these settings, particularly since the introduction of the Next Generation Science Standards. In this study we investigated affordances and constraints to elementary science instruction in high-need rural schools.

This study investigated teachers’ responses to a common set of instances of student mathematical thinking (SMT) with varied potential to support students’ mathematical learning, as well as the productivity of such responses.

Ambiguity is a natural part of communication in a mathematics classroom. In this paper, a particular subset of ambiguity is characterized as clarifiable. Clarifiable ambiguity in classroom mathematics discourse is common, frequently goes unaddressed, and unnecessarily hinders in-the-moment communication because it likely could be made more clear in a relatively straightforward way if it were attended to. We argue for deliberate attention to clarifiable ambiguity as a critical aspect of attending to meaning and as a necessary precursor to productive use of student mathematical thinking.

We draw on our experiences researching teachers’ use of student thinking to theoretically unpack the work of attending to student contributions in order to articulate the student mathematics (SM) of those contribution.

In this paper, the relationship between high school chemistry teachers’ self-generated “best practices” for developing formative assessments and the assessments they implement in their courses are examined.

This study seeks to better understand what teachers notice when interpreting assessment results and how the design of the assessment may influence teachers’ patterns of noticing. The study described herein investigates high school chemistry teachers’ interpretations of student responses to formative assessment items by identifying patterns in what teachers notice.

Designing high school chemistry assessments is a complex and difficult task. Although prior studies about assessment have offered teachers guidelines and standards as support to generate quality assessment items, little is known about how teachers engage these supports or enact their own beliefs into practice while developing assessments. Presented in this paper are the results from analyzing discourse among five high school chemistry teachers during an assessment item generation activity, including assessment items produced throughout the activity

The article describes our project that was designed to provide experiences to support paraeducators' professional growth in a large urban district by building their mathematical knowledge for teaching and leadership. Providing paras with professional learning opportunities can open pathways to teaching positions, giving them the potential to diversify the teaching pool and address teacher shortages.

Introduction to special issue focusing on think alouds and response process evidence. This work cuts across STEM education scholarship and introduces readers to robust means to engage in think alouds.

This is a description of a new methodological tool to gather response process validity evidence. The context is scholarship within mathematics education contexts.

The Responsive Math Teaching (RMT) project’s 3-year model for professional development introduces teachers to a new instructional model through a full year of monthly Math Circles, where they experience problem solving and productive struggle from the student perspective while working through challenging open-ended tasks, engaging in mathematical discussions, and reflecting on the process. This paper examines teachers’ views of what they learned from this experience and how it affected both their instructional practices and their visions of mathematics teaching and learning.

Research has provided evidence of the value of producing multiple representationsof content for learners (e.g., verbal, visual, etc.). However, much of the research has acknowledged changes in visual technologies while not recognizing or utilizing related audio innovations. The purpose of this study was to respond to this gap by comparing the outcomes of watching 360 video with either monophonic or ambisonic audio.

This theoretical paper summarizes of technology initiatives across science and STEM education from the past 30 years to present perspectives on the role of technology in science-focused STEM education.

This paper explores the theoretical connection between STEM and emergent technologies, with a focus on learner behaviors and the potential of technology-mediated experiences with computational participation (CP) in shaping STEM learning.

Learning goals differ from performance goals. This article elaborates on their function and importance as the guiding force behind maintaining cognitive rigor during mathematics learning.

One of the most relentless areas of difficulty in mathematics for children with learning disabilities (LDs) and difficulties is fractions. This article reports the development and initial testing of an intervention designed to increase access to and advancement in conceptual understanding.

Describes development and pilot testing of a 3-dimensional, phenomenon-based unit that integrates evolution and heredity. The 8-week unit is designed for introductory-level high school biology courses. Results from a national pilot test with 944 grade nine and ten students in 16 teachers' classrooms show statistically significant gains with large effect sizes from pretest to posttest in students' conceptual understanding of evolution and heredity. Students also gained sill in identifying claims, evidence and reasoning in scientific arguments.

Describes a scaffolded claims-evidence-reasoning (CER) argumentation framework that is embedded within a new eight-week, freely available curriculum unit developed by the Genetic Science Learning Center – Evolution: DNA and the Unity.

Designed to be integrated with any curriculum, each grade level includes 18-20 one-hour lessons to be conducted throughout the school year. Each LEAP lesson lasts about an hour is designed to fit within a typical daily math instructional period.

This article explores how scholars have framed studies of preservice science teacher (PST) knowledge and learning over the past twelve years.

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 skills, PSTs are more deliberate to focus on mathematically significant aspects of student thinking while analyzing written artifacts of student work compared to video-records.

This study evaluated a portion of our learning trajectory, focusing on the instructional component. We found that the instruction was successful in promoting a progression from one level to the next for 40% of the children, with others developing positive new behaviors (but not sufficient to progress to a new level).

This study uses a meta-analytic approach to investigate the relationship between attending an inclusive STEM high school and a set of high school outcomes known to predict college entry and declaration of a STEM college major.

This article provides content maps for two widely used teacher assessment instruments in the USA relative to the widely adopted Common Core State Standards. This common reference enables comparisons of content alignment both between the instruments and between parallel forms within each instrument.

This paper describes a partnership between a university and an urban school district, formed with a goal of preparing mathematics teacher leaders to conduct professional development (PD) at their schools.

This article offers six suggestions for middle school principals to implement or strengthen mathematics intervention classes at their schools, based off the findings of the authors' NSF-funded research.

This article focuses on discussion and preliminary findings from classroom testing of the prototype learning module: Investigating Income Inequality in the U.S.

This paper focuses on three simulation-based scientific argumentation tasks called Trap, Aquifer, and Supply. These tasks were part of an online science curriculum module addressing groundwater systems for secondary school students.

This article elaborates a theoretical, methodological, and analytical approach intended to highlight the materiality and reciprocity of noticing in mathematics classrooms.

This article reports on the development of a novel, video-based measure of teachers’ moment-to-moment noticing as knowledge-filtered perception.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine elementary teachers' pedagogical reasoning in an online graduate program. Authors asked: What stances do teachers take toward learning and teaching engineering design? How do these stances shift over the course of the program?

The authors studied how the distal policy mechanisms of curricular aims and objectives articulated in official curriculum documents influenced classroom instruction, and the factors that were associated with the enactment of those curricular aims and objectives.

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a self‐assessment using critical components of successful inclusive STEM high schools for school personnel and educational researchers who wish to better understand their STEM programs and identify areas of strength.

This study compared prospective mathematics teachers' (PMTs) noticing while teaching a lesson during their student teaching internship of PMTs who participated in a noticing intervention to those who did not participate in the intervention to determine whether the two groups of PMTs noticed different aspects of instruction.

The purpose of this study was to better understand the process by which a community emerges in such a PD setting by examining how the cohesiveness of 21 mathematics teachers’ social network evolves and associated shifts in the quality of mathematics teachers’ mathematical discourse.

This exploratory study investigated 32 teachers’ use of knowledge resources in two mathematically similar tasks (one a paper and pencil task, the other a dynamic task) around proportional reasoning.

This study explores how a design combining social capital mechanisms with essential teacher learning and PD characteristics supported teachers’ abilities to participate in the online course and collaboratively build knowledge.

This article describes the general and engineering mindsets of students in fifth‐grade U.S. classrooms (ages 10 and 11) who received engineering instruction. It explores how general mindsets may predict engineering learning outcomes and how engineering mindsets may be predicted by general mindset and other variables.

The purpose of this study is to develop a statistical framework and tools for the effective and efficient design of multisite randomized trials (MRTs) probing moderated treatment effects.

This article examines the teacher learning that results from participating in a two-year professional development intervention that combined lesson study, video clubs, and animation discussions.

This Research in Science Education article focuses on characterizing classroom discourse in science.

This research focuses on ways in which balance scales mediate students’ relational understandings of the equal sign.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how teachers understand one specific aspect of proportional reasoning - the extent to which practicing teachers were able to make sense of reasoning that involved the fixed number of variable-sized parts perspective.

This article discusses the implementation of innovative teaching approaches in mathematics.

This study investigated the efficacy of the Precision Mathematics Level 1 (PM-L1) intervention, a Tier 2 print- and technology-based mathematics intervention designed to increase first-grade students’ conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills around the areas of measurement and data analysis.

The production of the first-grade Precision Mathematics intervention was grounded in the Curriculum Research Framework (CRF), which involves a series of iterative cycles of development, implementation field-testing, analysis, and revision. Results from initial implementation studies suggest that teachers and students can feasibly implement the first-grade Precision Mathematics intervention in authentic education settings. Challenges faced in developing technology-based mathematics interventions are discussed.

Students who earned high marks during the proof semester of a geometry course were interviewed to understand what high-achieving students actually took away from the treatment of proof in geometry. The findings suggest that students had turned proving into a rote task, whereby they expected to mark a diagram and prove two triangles congruent.

This chapter explores a way of describing the teacher education curricular materials being developed by mathematics teacher educators through their interaction with the LessonSketch online platform.

In The Price of Nice, an interdisciplinary group of scholars explores Niceness in educational spaces from elementary schools through higher education to highlight how this seemingly benign quality reinforces structural inequalities.

This book provides a single "go to" source on the disciplinary history, theoretical framework, methodology, and empirical applications of the anthropology of education policy across a range of education topics, policy debates, and settings.

This article describes one effort to strengthen early childhood teaching in schools on the Navajo Nation that centers the work of two teachers within a program attempting to support teachers in the development of academically rigorous, culturally responsive curriculum across the Navajo Nation.

This Science Scope article discusses how to foster critical-thinking skills in middle school science.

A cluster randomized trial design was used to examine the effectiveness of a Grades 3 to 5 early algebra intervention with a diverse student population.

This article describes opportunities for primary and secondary ecology education in formal and informal settings.

This article describes the 4‐Dimensional Ecology Education (4DEE) framework. Developed by a task force of ESA members who solicited input from a variety of groups, the framework takes a fresh and innovative approach toward the teaching of ecology.

In this paper, authors present a design narrative of our experience developing dashboards to support middle school mathematics teachers’ pedagogical practices, in a multi-university, multi-school district, improvement science initiative in the United States.

This study explores the pathways to K–12 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics instruction among Black/African American males in the Discovery Research Education for African American Men in STEM to Teach (DREAMS to Teach) program at Morehouse College

In this study, authors examine the consequences of within-school churn for the pedagogical content knowledge of elementary teacher participants in an NSF-funded science PD program.

This resource contains advice from CAREER awardees in the DRK-12 portfolio about how to develop a competitive proposal and successfully manage a CAREER project based on their experience.

In this article, we describe an example of differentiating instruction (DI) involving middle school students from a five-year project funded by the National Science Foundation.

In this paper, using written responses of 37 PSTs preparing to teach grades 1-8 mathematics, authors examined explanations they constructed to support their problem solutions and explanations they provided in support of their critiques of student-generated explanations.

This article describes an identity-based curriculum, Mathematics for Justice, Identity, and meta-Cognition (or MaJIC), that provides a form of mathematics therapy through a restorative justice framework.

This column provides ideas and techniques to enhance your science teaching.

In the article, the authors locate how mathematics instruction may actively respond to the influence of the discipline of mathematics and exemplify how obligations to other stakeholders may participate in the practical rationality of mathematics teaching as those influences are incorporated into instruction.

In this paper we describe a qualitative study in which we examine individual student engagement during implementation of an instructional scaffold for critical evaluation of scientific models during Earth and space science lessons. We coded dialogic interactions of one student group in a sixth grade science classroom across three observations, wherein we analyzed the trajectory of engagement for a single student - Ray (a pseudonym), within the co-constructed learning of the group. The first of these observations involved implementation of a preconstructed scaffold, called the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) diagram, on the topic of hydraulic fracturing (fracking). With the MEL, students use evidence to compare a scientific model to an alternative model. In the second two observations, students used a more agentic variation of the activity called the build-a-MEL, to study the topics of fossils and freshwater resources respectively. After three observations, we transcribed and coded each interaction of students in the group. We then categorized and identified emerging patterns of Ray’s discourse and interactions with group members by using both a priori engagement codes and open coding. This paper was prepared for the 2020 AERA Annual Meeting. 

Strategies and strategic processing within science education are designed to help students learn not only what scientists have come to understand about the world but also how they learn it. Although many domain-general strategies can be implemented in science classrooms, some strategies are either specific to science or are encouraged within science. Historically, concept development and conceptual change approaches and empirical investigations dominated science’s strategies and strategic processing. More recently, argumentation, science as modeling, and the incorporation of socio-scientific topics dominate the strategies and strategic processing within science teaching and learning. Challenges to more widespread use of these approaches include lack of teacher experience and pedagogical knowledge around the strategies, as well as time and curricular limitations. Teacher education and professional development programs should seek to explicitly implement contemporary science strategy interventions to improve upon their use in K-12 classrooms and other learning environments. Doing so effectively will require well-researched and validated instructional scaffolds to facilitate the teaching and use of contemporary science learning strategies. This paper was prepared for the 2020 AERA Annual Meeting.

This study compares web usage data with interviews from 41 participants, who are members of an online professional development site called the Everyday Mathematics Virtual Learning Community (VLC), to explore how elementary school teachers learn from classroom video.

This chapter describes curricula that use WorldWide Telescope in teaching key topics in Astro 101 and K–12 science, including parallax, Hubble’s Law and large-scale structure in the universe, seasons, Moon phases and eclipses, and life in the universe.

In this article, authors propose a framework that centers the investigation as a key locus for constructing alignments among phenomena, data, and explanatory models and makes visible the work that scientists engage in as they develop and stabilize alignments.

This article investigates whether teachers’ subject matter knowledge (SMK) and knowledge of students’ misconceptions (KOSM) in high school life science are associated with students’ posttest performance on multiple-choice test items designed to reveal student misconceptions.

In this paper, authors offer a framework for teacher monitoring routines—a consequential yet understudied aspect of instruction when teachers oversee students’ working together.

This study is a case of using second-order models of students’ mathematical thinking to differentiate instruction, and it reveals that inquiring into research-based knowledge and inquiring responsively into students’ thinking are at the heart of differentiating mathematics instruction.

Informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics and Latent Dirichlet Allocation analyses, this study utilizes an innovative bilingual (Spanish–English) constructed response assessment of science and language practices for middle and high school students to perform a multilayered analysis of student responses.

Using findings from a 4‐year research and development effort, we propose an updated model of sheltered instruction for science classrooms that leverages the opportunities provided by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to better support multilingual learners in middle and high school science.

In this study, analyzing lesson plans using the rubrics provided opportunities for suggestions and feedback for improvement to developers and it informs the development of new lessons by the project team.

This paper describes how the design canvas of Kline et al. was adopted and implemented in our workshop and investigates its benefits.

This paper analyzes teaching practices that successfully integrate robotics in middle school science and math classrooms.

This paper describes a program to engage teachers to learn about mechatronics, robotics, and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) through hands-on activities and collaborative research.

This paper will describe the process and result of developing a LEGO robotics, NGSS, and 5E aligned middle school curriculum during a three-week summer PD program for teachers who teach urban students-of-color.

This paper investigates classroom-related factors such as pedagogical strategies and management of robotics-based educational content that contribute to the formation of student perceptions in robotics-enhanced classes.

Drawing upon a social practice theory analytical lens with a focus on power and using critical participatory ethnography methods, this study investigated the ways middle school students restructured power hierarchies as they worked to complete the design challenge of making their classroom community more sustainable, and how power hierarchy restructuring impacted students' opportunities to enact critical science agency (CSA).

In this paper, authors focus on the design of assessments of mathematics teachers’ knowledge by emphasising the importance of identifying the purpose for the assessment, defining the specific construct to be measured, and considering the affordances of particular psychometric models on the development of assessments as well as how they are able to communicate learning or understanding.

In this report, authors describe the results of a rigorous two-year study of the impacts of a mathematics initiative called Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP) on teacher and student learning in grades 3-5 in two Philadelphia area school districts.

This study explored how teachers interpreted and responded to their own student work during the process of formative assessment.

In this chapter, the authors present the design rationale for and empirical results from a predominantly synchronous three-part online model for the professional development of mathematics teachers in rural contexts.

This article describes online video coaching model used with middle-grades, rural mathematics teachers.

Authors investigate ways to support students in integrating their understanding of density concepts through a graph that is linked to a simulation depicting the relationship between mass, volume, and density.

In this article, authors use meta-analysis to analyze 42 design and comparison studies involving data from 7699 students spanning over 35 years.

We describe an experience within mathematics teacher preparation that engages pre-service teachers of mathematics (PMTs) in Making and design practices that we hypothesized would inform their conceptual, curricular, and pedagogical thinking.

The purpose of this study was to describe how families utilize science activity packs at home.

In this editorial, authors discuss the first of the five overarching problems: defining and measuring learning opportunities precisely enough to study how to maximize the quality of the opportunities experienced by every student.

Authors discuss the possibilities of retaining and sharing professional knowledge as a way of addressing the problem of always starting over.

Presented in this paper are the results from analyzing a discussion between five high school chemistry teachers as they generated a set of best practices for inquiry assessments.

The present report summarizes the analyses of the calibration data for the electronic Test of Early Numeracy (e-TEN), an adaptive, iPad-based test of early numeracy achievement.

Drawing on a situated perspective on learning, authors analyzed written, open-ended journals of 52 pre-service teachers (PSTs) concurrently enrolled in mathematics and pedagogy with field experience courses for elementary education majors.

This article looks at the 2017 STEM for All Video Showcase, a multimodal environment, that enabled educational researchers to share and discuss short videos depicting their federally-funded work to improve STEM education. In a mixed methods study, authors investigate the forms of participation that took place and the benefits that accrued to those who presented.

From 2012–2015, Advanced Placement (AP) science courses underwent a large-scale curricular reform to include more scientific inquiry and reasoning, reduce emphasis on broad content coverage, and focus on depth of understanding, with corresponding changes in high-stakes AP examinations. In this study, authors explore how teachers prepared for and adapted to this reform over a three-year period.

In this study, authors examined middle-school students’ naturally occurring design conversations in small design teams and their learning of science as a result of engaging in an engineering and science unit.

In this article, authors examined classroom videos of nine experienced teachers of elementary, middle, and high school science, aiming to create a model of FA enactment that is useful to teachers.

In this paper, authors describe the design and implementation of Getting Unstuck, a 21-day, email-based learning experience for K-12 teachers interested in developing greater familiarity and fluency with Scratch.

This manuscript focuses on longitudinal research with four primary inservice teachers’ learning and engagement in model-based teaching about water over three years, investigating teachers conceptualizations and practice modelling water related phenomena over time. Findings from the study indicate while each teacher had individual trajectories in conceptualising and enacting scientific modelling in the classroom, we observed unique approaches within teachers.

This article describes how diagrams can be a powerful tool to develop and communicate mathematical understanding for English language learners.

This conversion mixed method study analyzed student work samples and teacher lesson plans from seven exemplary inclusive STEM high schools to better understand at what level teachers at these schools are engaging and developing student 21st Century skills.

In this article, authors explore a variety of types of responsive teaching and elaborate a specific type of responsive teaching—epistemologically responsive science teaching.

This case study investigates U.S. eighth-grade (age 13) mathematics students’ conceptions about the validity of a direct argument after the students received instruction on the eliminating counterexamples (ECE) framework.

This paper investigates how one elementary school child with specific visual motor integration differences constructed a unit fraction concept.

This mixed-method study was designed to examine whether middle school students’ in-game actions are likely to promote certain types of learning engagement (i.e., content and cognitive engagement).

This study analyzes the engineering design behaviors of 108 ninth-grade U.S. students using principal component analysis and cluster analysis.

This study investigates a formative feedback system integrated into an online science curriculum module teaching climate change.

This article reports an efficacy study of an elementary engineering curriculum, Engineering is Elementary, that includes a set of hypothesized critical components designed to encourage student engagement in practices, connect engineering and science learning, and reach diverse students.

This article reports on how three prospective teachers had differing opportunities to demonstrate their skills in the context of the field assessment, but similar opportunities in the context of the simulation assessment.

This brief describes how to support equity for students, teachers, and communities through place-based science education strategies.

In this article, authors explain how 114 years of Hawaiian-language newspapers starting in 1834 extend our knowledge of natural disasters into the nineteenth century and to precontact times.

In this Journal of Science Teacher Education article, Jarod Kawasaki and William Sandoval report on one teachers’ efforts to re-design an entire instructional unit as a coherent storyline about forces and motion as a part of a multiyear professional development project around the NGSS.

This article discusses supporting inquiry in an online learning environment.

The purpose of this report is to sketch a tentative theoretical structure with the potential to anchor curricular decisions and inform further research on early probability learning.

This paper discusses the extent to which one case study elementary school child with identified learning disabilities (LDs) made sense of composite units and unit fractions.

In this article, authors present a comparative case study examining the epistemological framing dynamics of two novice urban teachers and argue that the stances that novice teachers adopt toward engineering learning and knowledge are consequential for the opportunities they create for students.