Reading List: Recent DRK-12 Project Publications

Building on research on teacher noticing, the goal of this study was to understand what and how mathematics teacher educators notice critical events and how they make connections to consider the characteristics of distinguished coach noticing, meaning the noticing we would hope those coaching would attain to support teachers. We interviewed 29 mathematics teacher educators in two different experience groups and asked them to respond to vignettes of coach–teacher interactions.

Proportional reasoning is an important but challenging skill for students and teachers. This article, presents findings from two studies investigating whether four categories of reasoning identified by Copur-Gencturk et al. apply to a national sample of U.S. middle school mathematics teachers (N = 1,320) and can be captured consistently by similar tasks.

Water scarcity poses a significant global challenge, which is often overlooked, particularly in regions with abundant water resources. This article outlines a curriculum designed for middle school students (grades 6–8) that addresses the dynamics of water scarcity and sustainability through five detailed lessons centered around the water cycle.

Educative curriculum materials (ECM) have been shown to support K-12 teacher learning, but little is known about teacher educators’ use of ECM. In this study, we report on enactments of ECM designed to support the development of preservice elementary teachers’ content knowledge for teaching about matter in two different courses to understand how teacher educators use ECM.

Environmental education is essential for protecting and restoring natural water sources. Integrating education with positive environmental experiences can instill values and stewardship in the public, encouraging proactive steps to preserve and enhance water resources. Elementary teachers can incorporate real-world water-related environmental issues into their classrooms, promoting critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Place-based education, which involves experiential learning in local settings, effectively builds connections between students and their communities. Authentic water-focused climate science learning should anchor in local phenomena, fostering student inquiry and validating student voices.

Participatory science conducted in formal K–12 settings has many benefits, including the potential to engage teachers and students authentically in the scientific enterprise and to make learning more meaningful. Despite these benefits and others, school-based participatory science (SBPS) is not widespread. In this essay, we put forth a theory of SBPS that is emerging from a four-year study of efforts to integrate participatory science in elementary classrooms.

In this CADRE brief, the authors Jeremy Price and Shuchi Grover explore the exciting possibilities and critical challenges of generative AI (GenAI) for STEM teaching. They examine how GenAI may shape STEM classrooms in the near future and identify promising trajectories for integrating GenAI into STEM teaching, including the potential for personalized teaching approaches. This brief delves into the current state of GenAI research and development around five dimensions of STEM teaching: Justice, equity, and inclusion; curricular decision-making and lesson planning; pedagogy and instruction; assessing student work and progress; and teacher learning and leadership.

Throughout the brief, the authors reaffirm the essential role of teachers and emphasize the need to include teachers in the design, development, and study of GenAI tools that are intended to benefit STEM education. They also highlight areas of critical concern, urging those involved in research and development to prioritize GenAI efforts in addressing the substantive problems of practice central to STEM teaching with an overarching aim to create more inclusive learning environments.

The modern information landscape offers an abundance of options to learn about science topics, but it is also ripe for the spread of mis- and disinformation and science denial. Science education can play a pivotal role in mitigating harm from untruthful information, strengthening trust in science, and fostering a more informed and critically engaged public.

In this brief, The Potential of Using AI to Improve Student Learning in STEM: Now and in the Future, the authors examine the promise of AI as learning partner for students that offers personalized support and scaffolding.

Secondary students are increasingly involved in scientific research projects that include authentic disciplinary literacy components such as research proposals, posters, videos, and scientific research papers. More and more, students are also engaging in professional practice of publishing their scientific research papers through dedicated secondary science journals. How teachers and other mentors support the development of professional disciplinary literacies in students is critical to understand as part of supporting more student participation in research.

This study leverages natural language processing (NLP) to deepen our understanding of how students integrate their ideas about genetic inheritance while engaging in an adaptive dialog. 

Despite a growing effort to integrate students’ civic action projects into science and engineering curricula that address climate change and environmental justice, there are few frameworks that guide teachers and students to make well-informed decisions and actions towards a more just and sustainable future. This article presents a tool, Civic Action Matrix, that characterizes different types of students’ civic action projects. The tool attends to two dimensions of activities that capture important aspects of learning–the development of student agency and understanding the complexity of climate and environmental issues.

Making science accessible is an important and worthy goal, but for many students, science is inaccessible because what counts as science in the classroom is narrowly defined as what is known as western science, rooted in Europe in the 1600s and often privileging white, male-centric perspectives. In this article, we describe five examples of expanding what counts as science to help remove barriers to learning and to make school science more equitable and inclusive.

This paper describes an innovative mathematics learning partnership that engages teachers and parents of multilingual children ages 7–10 from schools in underserved communities. At the center of this transformative work is the use of two complementary approaches to advancing equity in education– funds of knowledge and positioning theory. While both theories have been applied in mathematics education, they have not been integrated in a parent-teacher partnership program aimed at enhancing collaboration between multilingual families and teachers.

AI in education has many potential uses as well as limits, challenges, and dangers. In this brief, the authors explore how to promote equitable and just educational futures with AI.

Children who live in under-resourced communities and attend under-resourced schools deserve access to high-quality teachers and educational opportunities to support their success and well-being. This study emerged from a professional development (PD) for urban teachers working in such schools, to expand educational opportunities for elementary students through outdoor science teaching.

This article presents a tool that teachers can use to support children in planning science investigations. Using an extended example from a second-grade investigation into seed dispersal, we describe strategies for structuring conversations that anchor investigations in phenomena and provide opportunities for students to be involved in making decisions about what materials to use in an investigation, how to use materials, and what to look for or count as evidence.

This qualitative study uses a nonlinear, iterative model of teacher learning (Interconnected Model of Professional Growth; Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002) alongside professional noticing to help understand why elementary teachers in science PD differentially make sense of and internalize new pedagogies.

This chapter describes an ongoing research-practice partnership with in-service teachers in communities across Oregon focused on broadening participation in STEM fields. We explore how our design-based work with teachers is shaping our collective efforts to enact new language and science practices for supporting students’ justice-centered STEM meaning-making.

The general aim of the research was to conduct a rare test of the efficacy of hypothetical learning progressions (HLPs) and a basic assumption of basing instruction on HLPs, namely teaching each successive level is more efficacious than skipping lower levels and teaching the target level directly. The specific aim was evaluating whether counting-based cardinality concepts unfold in a stepwise manner.

This self-reflective case study describes our project team’s efforts to promote equity in science professional learning (PL) by centering the voices of educators in the PL design process and within the course itself. In this case study, we share and critique the practices and tools that we have employed to center educator voices, rather than those of the PL designers and researchers.

The need for data literacy is an increasingly pressing priority in society, but most of the work in data-centred education has focused on developing skills at the middle school, secondary, and post-secondary levels, with little attention on the potential for engaging elementary-aged students in reasoning with and about data. This paper reports findings from a foundational study to explore the natural strengths, skills, and strategies that upper elementary students bring to reasoning about data-centred problems.

In this report, we present a novel solution to the problem of multiple-criterion-focused selection of research and PD participants when the number of applicants to participate outnumbers the availability of resources.

Aqueous solutions have proved to be a challenging topic for chemistry students at all levels. An understanding of what is happening at the molecular level in aqueous processes such as dissolution is key to understanding the macroscopic properties of the system as well as to communicating fluently with chemical symbols. In this study, we examined the storyboards of 28 high school students in the United States who participated in a series of lessons employing the VisChem Approach that addressed the topics of liquid water, solid sodium chloride, and finally sodium chloride dissolution in water over the course of a year.

In this paper, we introduce an epistemic scaffolding framework for understanding the nature of support for epistemic growth in science.

This 2-year qualitative case study focuses on one emergent mathematics teacher leader, Mr. Miller, and his conceptualization of Social Justice Mathematics (SJM). SJM is a justice-oriented pedagogical approach where students simultaneously learn dominant mathematics and explore social injustices to take action toward justice.

Teaching science to elementary school students is complex, and teacher preparation programs must support preservice teachers’ learning to communicate science content and practices with children. Science teachers bring the experiences they have as students to their teacher preparation, and these experiences may support or conflict with what they are learning about effective teaching. In this study, we present stories of two first-year teachers who attended a STEM-focused teacher preparation program in the U.S.

Although there has been increasing attention to the importance of teacher agency in professional development, there has been little attention to what it takes to facilitate collaborative work that both centers teachers’ assets and expertise and leads to productive learning. This paper presents a framework for focused and responsive facilitation of productive discourse around instructional practice in teacher learning communities.

This counterstory (Delgado, 1989; Martinez, 2020) is based on field notes (Oct. 19 & Nov. 1, 2022) from our collective’s ethnographic project working with upper elementary Latiné learners and their transition to middle school mathematics.

This study examines secondary mathematics teachers’ anticipations of student responses related to a series of cognitively demanding mathematics tasks from multiple mathematical domains presented in the context of voluntary and asynchronous online professional development modules.

Teachers play a crucial role in guiding students through sensemaking by addressing uncertainties and assisting in solution development. Student uncertainty is recognized as a pedagogical resource, engaging them in sensemaking and enhancing agency levels. This study analyzed 28 whole-class discussions led by seven science teachers, identifying three phases: problematization, coherence negotiation, and new understanding enactment.

Situated in the context of advanced placement (AP) reform in the United States, we investigated profiles of teachers’ motivation for participating in professional development (PD) courses in a two-cohort sample of n_t1 = 2,369 and n_t2 = 2,170 chemistry teachers via multilevel latent class analysis.

This study investigated upper elementary teachers’ framings of their students’ mathematical thinking in written across the three component skills of noticing. Drawing on a situated perspective, the research examines the influences of teachers’ culturalhistorical backgrounds, attitudes, dispositions, interactions with students, and other situated elements of teaching on noticing mathematical thinking.

This article presents results from a design experiment intended to develop students’ understanding of linear functions and rates of change in a linguistically diverse ninth grade classroom. The intervention focused on fostering classroom discussions.

Teachers play a central role in designing structures which encourage the development of students’ individual creative capacity and the classroom’s sense of community. We offer considerations for designing engaging and collaborative experiences in elementary and intermediate computing education.

Despite interest in how students’ implicit theories—their growth and fixed mindsets about their own learning—affect students as learners, relatively little research on mindset has looked at teachers as learners. This study explores elementary teachers’ implicit theories about the malleability of mathematics intelligence and teaching ability. It also examines how implicit theories of learning relate to teacher noticing, a construct that has been linked to teachers’ classroom practice and their students’ learning outcomes.

The authors are developing a model for rural science teacher professional development, building teacher expertise and collaboration and creating high-quality science lessons: technology-mediated lesson study (TMLS).

In this article, we explore demands and tensions involved when schools implement ambitious mathematics teaching (AMT).

Mathematics education research tends to center on what Mathematics Teacher Educators-Researchers (MTERs) work on or the people (teachers and students) they work with. Rarely, research in mathematics education focuses on MTERs working with one another. This article decenters from these traditional foci and instead examines a heterogeneous group of MTERs describing their research collaborations for professional development efforts on social justice issues in mathematics education.

Evaluation of plausible alternative explanations of scientific phenomena is an authentic scientific activity. Instructional scaffolding can facilitate students’ engagement in such evaluations by facilitating their reflections on how well various lines of scientific evidence support alternative explanations. In the present study, we examined two forms of such scaffolding, with one form providing more autonomy support than the other, to determine whether any differential effects existed between the two.

To better understand integrated STEM education, this work explored scores on the STEM Observation Protocol (STEM-OP), a newly developed observation protocol for use in K-12 science and engineering classrooms. The goals of this work were to better understand how integrated STEM might look throughout an integrated STEM unit and identify limitations of the instrument when examining daily scores and full unit implementation scores.

Reform efforts in science and mathematics education highlight students’ experiences and sensemaking repertoires as valuable resources for instruction. Yet, there is much to learn about how to cultivate teachers’ capacity for eliciting, understanding, and responding to students’ contributions. We argue that the first step of this cultivation is teachers’ learning to listen: to attune and attend to the novel ways that students make sense of scientific phenomena and the natural world.

The purpose of this study was to explore the problem-solving behaviors of middle-school students with learning disabilities (SLD). Think-aloud interviews were performed with 20 seventh- and eighth-grade students who had learning disabilities to observe their behaviors while solving mathematical word problems (i.e., behaviors and patterns of behaviors).

This study aimed to examine an assumption regarding whether generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools can overcome the cognitive intensity that humans suffer when solving problems. We examine the performance of ChatGPT and GPT-4 on NAEP science assessments and compare their performance to students by cognitive demands of the items.

Research on teacher educators’ professional learning has gained increasing interest within science education. Curriculum materials have been suggested as a means of supporting teacher learning for several decades but have not yet been examined as a potential tool for supporting the learning of teacher educators. In this paper, we conceptualize a set of design heuristics to guide the development of educative curriculum materials for teacher educators.

This article explores science teachers’ implementation of science and engineering practices (SEPs) under different instructional settings.

With a decade passing since the release of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), it is timely to reflect and consider the extent to which the promise of science teaching and learning that values and centers learners’ varied epistemologies for scientific sensemaking has been realized. We argue that this potential, in part, lies in the hands of our science education research community becoming aware and intentional with how we situate learners’ language-related resources and practices in our work.

Thoughtful and purposeful displays can support students’ participation in argumentation. This report addresses how displays are used within collective argumentation. We examined a secondary mathematics teacher’s and her students’ use of displays during selected episodes of collective argumentation.

Language can affect cognition, but through what mechanism? Substantial past research has focused on how labeling can elicit categorical representation during online processing. We focus here on a particularly powerful type of language—relational language—and show that relational language can enhance relational representation in children through an embodied attention mechanism.

Engineering projects, such as designing a solar farm that converts solar radiation shined on the Earth into electricity, engage students in addressing real-world challenges by learning and applying geoscience knowledge. To improve their designs, students benefit from frequent and informative feedback as they iterate. However, teacher attention may be limited or inadequate, both during COVID-19 and beyond. We present Aladdin, a web-based computer-aided design (CAD) platform for engineering design with a built-in artificial intelligence teaching assistant (AITA). We also present two curriculum units (Solar Energy Science and Solar Farm Design), where students explore the Sun-Earth relationship and optimize the energy output and yearly profit of a solar farm with the help of the AITA.

Mathematical modeling (MM) - a cyclical process that involves using mathematics to make-sense of and analyze relevant, real-world situations - has the potential to advance equity and challenge spaces of marginalization in the elementary mathematics classroom. When informed by culturally responsive teaching practices, MM creates opportunities to center the knowledge and experiences that students from diverse racial, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds bring to the classroom as valuable resources to support learning and inform action. It can disrupt power and status hierarchies in the classroom that contribute to structural and ideological marginalization. This paper describes ways teachers connected their teaching of MM with key components of a culturally responsive mathematics teaching framework.

This report characterizes forms of dialogic support that a sixth-grade teacher generated during whole-class and small-group conversations to help students develop a practice of statistical modeling.

Teacher-facilitated whole-class conversations can help elementary students apply the full power of the NGSS science and engineering practices to an engineering design process. In this article we describe and provide examples for five kinds of Design Talks. Each type of Design Talk centers on a different framing question and is facilitated by specific prompts that help students voice their ideas and make connections to others' ideas.

Weaving computer science into the fabric of social studies, rather than teaching it as an isolated skill, makes both subjects more relevant, engaging, and beneficial to students.

This article provides a systematic review of the validity evidence related to measures used in elementary mathematics education. The review includes measures that focus on elementary students as the unit of analyses and attends to validity as defined by current conceptions of measurement.

Young children are naturally interested in light and shadows, thus providing a meaningful context to introduce preschool science investigations. As children explore how shadows are made and change, they also have opportunities to develop math skills, specifically visual spatial awareness. In this article, we describe a set of light and shadows activities.

In conversations about pedagogy, researchers often overlook how physical space and movement shape teacher sensemaking. This article offers a comparative case study of classroom videos using a dynamic visual method to map embodied interaction called “interaction geography.”

We explored how various contextual resources accumulated over multiple years operated together to facilitate a team of high school teachers' sustained and agentive learning after a 4-year research–practice partnership (RPP) grant concluded. Specifically, we examined constellations of resources that promoted the co-evolution of the teachers' collective inquiry in the professional learning community (PLC) and classroom instruction, focused on supporting students' scientific explanations.

Language is a fundamental tool for learning science. This study highlights the importance of teacher knowledge in utilising language as a tool for knowledge generation in the classrooms. This case study examines elementary teachers’ development of declarative, procedural, and epistemic knowledge related to using language, particularly focusing on how a three-year professional development programme centred around the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach influences the development of these knowledge bases.

Educating students about real-world, issues such as local invasive species aims to encourage wider engagement with STEM.

CADRE interviewed researchers to learn about their most effective strategies for recruiting and retaining participants for STEM education research. While there are no shortcuts to successful recruitment, a sustained commitment to understanding and addressing the needs of a district and its teachers is key to long-term success. In this new brief, CADRE share practices that have proven successful for experienced researchers. 

Mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) is a professional knowledge crucial for effective mathematics instruction, encompassing both content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The purpose of this study is to investigate the hierarchical structure of PCK for fractions by seeking further evidence for the PCK-Fractions assessment.

In this paper, we examine traditional psychosocial approaches to the study of student agency in science education, emphasizing the importance of incorporating sociocultural and critical perspectives.

The limited availability of research instruments that reflect the vision of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) restricts the field's understanding of whether and how teachers are making instructional shifts called for by the standards. The need for such instruments is particularly urgent with teachers of multilingual learners (MLs), who are called on to make shifts in how they think about and enact instruction related to both science and language. The purpose of this study was to develop and gather validity evidence for a questionnaire that measures elementary teachers' beliefs, preparedness, and instructional practices for teaching NGSS science with MLs.

Foregrounding climate education in formal science learning environments provides students with opportunities to develop critical climate-related knowledge and skills. However, research has shown many challenges to teaching and learning about Earth’s climate and global climate change (GCC). This longitudinal study aims to establish how secondary science teachers, over time, implement model-based climate curricula in support of students’ climate and GCC education by utilizing EzGCM. The model (EzGCM) is a data-driven, computer-based climate modeling tool use to explore global climate data.

We explored the semiotic choices children in grades 1–6 made that nurtured embodied, dramatizing performances in science classes at urban public schools, serving predominantly students of color in a large US city. We studied how such choices in school and home settings (when instruction was remote during the COVID-19 pandemic) were implicated in the children’s knowledge and identity construction and related to available resources and positionings.

Elementary teachers face many challenges to implementing reform-based science instruction in their classrooms. Some teachers may choose to enhance their students’ science experiences by introducing them to citizen science (CS) projects. Unfortunately, few CS projects offer substantial guidance for teachers seeking to implement the projects for instructional purposes, placing a heavy burden on teachers. To address these burdens, our research team collaborated with Teacher Advisory Group (TAG teachers) during the development and revision of educative support materials for two CS projects.

What are the opportunities and challenges for establishing community partnerships among K–12 STEM education researchers and Black and Brown communities? CADRE partners interviewed five community partners from diverse backgrounds in STEM education to understand how STEM education researchers can better engage with communities and share their insights in this brief.

From the experiential learning perspective, this study investigates middle and high school students (n = 1009) who used an online module to learn about wildfire hazards, risks, and impacts through computational simulations of wildfire phenomena.

Teacher-facilitated whole-class conversations can help elementary students apply the full power of the NGSS science and engineering practices to an engineering design process. In this article we describe and provide examples for five kinds of Design Talks. Each type of Design Talk centers on a different framing question and is facilitated by specific prompts that help students voice their ideas and make connections to others' ideas.

Studying moths is an excellent way to include students in science practices by introducing them to a ubiquitous but under-appreciated animal group that can be found in their local places, including urban, suburban, agricultural, forested, and other habitats. In this paper, we share a simple, low-cost method that can allow individual students or groups to collect moth specimens and begin to ask and answer questions about moth diversity and abundance in their local community.

In this paper, we describe three challenges (conflict between multiple dimensions of science proficiency, authentic data, and grade-appropriate graphing tools) that we faced when designing for a specific Next Generation Science Standard, and the theoretical and design principles that guided us as we ideated design solutions. Through these designs we maintained alignment to our multidimensional assessment targets, a critical component of our larger assessment validity argument.

In this study, we examine the results of high school teacher implementation of the VisChem Approach in four classrooms following an intensive professional development program.

This study takes advantage of advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to build an idea detection model that can identify ideas grounded in students’ linguistic experiences.

Open innovation challenge to mitigate global warming.

Professional noticing involves attending to and interpreting children’s mathematical reasoning. In a similar manner, pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is defined as the knowledge teachers need to interpret and respond to children’s reasoning. The present study reports on an initial exploration of the relationship between these two constructs using eye-tracking technology and the PCK-Fractions measure.

The authors designed a science and engineering curricular program that includes design features that promote student interest and motivation and examined teachers' and students' views on meaningfulness, motivation and interest.

Design-based research is uniquely positioned to adapt instructional resources quickly to meet the needs of teachers and students. This chapter explores how researchers adapted and improved two educative tools over the course of two academic years. The educative tools were designed to support scientific argumentation through supporting students to develop task models of NGSS storyline routines.

Our conceptual framework for justice-centered STEM education engages all students in multiple STEM subjects, including data science and computer science, to explain and design solutions to pressing societal challenges and their disproportionate impact on minoritized groups. In the first part of this article, we extend our conceptual framework by articulating the affordances of justice-centered STEM education for one minoritized student group that has been traditionally denied meaningful STEM learning experiences: multilingual learners (MLs). In the second part of the article, we report on an initial inquiry into how 14 undergraduate pre-service teachers made sense of our conceptual framework after participating in lessons from our COVID-19 instructional unit.

Arts-integration is a promising approach to building students’ abilities to create and critique arguments with data, also known as informal inferential reasoning (IIR). However, differences in disciplinary practices and routines, as well as school organization and culture, can pose barriers to subject integration. The purpose of this study is to describe synergies and tensions between data science and the arts, and how these can create or constrain opportunities for learners to engage in IIR.

This descriptive case study examines the process of productively navigating socio-emotional risks and interpersonal tensions encountered by a veteran and pre-service physics teacher during one episode of discussing physics content.

A growing body of research has supported the implementation of innovative and immersive video for teaching and learning across the lifespan. Immersive video, delivered through eXtended Reality (XR) tools like 360 video, provides users with new ways to see real or created environments. Unfortunately, most of the existing research has highlighted immersive video without accompanying immersive audio. The purpose of this study was to respond to this gap in the literature by exploring the use of ambisonic audio and its impact on preservice teacher noticing and variability of viewing focus when watching 360 video.

Practical research article from Science Scope.

Nancy Butler Songer, from the University of Utah, makes a call for collective action to create a new curriculum focused on the design of solutions.

In this report section, we discuss the importance of aligning classroom assessments with learning goals and instructional practices to both shape and evaluate students’ learning opportunities.

This section presents an overview of critical developments in technology-driven, classroom-based innovative assessment practices. It uses a framework organized around cognitive constructs, assessment functionality, and automaticity to review the technological developments of innovative assessments and identify how they have been advanced to meet researcher and practitioner needs.

We developed an analytic framework related to the suggestions coaches provided to mathematics teachers as they engaged in content-focused coaching cycles. We analyzed 712 suggestions from nine coaches and 58 coaching conversations. Analysis focused on what the suggestion entailed and how suggestions were made.

Significant science education resources, namely the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) framework, need an intentional aim of centering social justice for minoritized communities and youth as well as practices to enact it. While NGSS and AST provide concrete guidelines to support deep learning, revisions are needed to explicitly promote social justice. In this study, we sought to understand how a commitment to social justice, operationalized through culturally sustaining pedagogy might shape the AST framework to promote more critical versions of teaching science for equity.

In today’s technologically complex and connected world, students’ needs to develop competencies and confidence with data have never been greater. The authors describe effective practices for engaging all students with data in the classroom.

This book is a guide for K-12 school leaders and educators who are planning to implement new bilingual and dual language (BDL) elementary programs for multilingual learners in the United States, focusing on the integration of subject matter knowledge of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) with biliteracy development goals, both in English and a partner language other than English (LOTE).

Providing high-quality professional development for teachers with diverse backgrounds and classroom experience is a challenging task. In this work, we investigate the Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS) partnership program, which provides instructional resources and a network of support for high school physics teachers through a partnership with the University of Illinois.

Unified systems for multi-sensor devices, particularly eye-tracking in Virtual Reality (VR), are intricate and often require the listening and streaming of multichannel data. In this project, we propose a visual analysis framework for replicating a participant's viewing involvement by interpreting head movements as rotations and point-of-gaze (POG) as on-screen indicators.

Research on socio-scientific issues (SSI) has revealed that it is critical for learners to develop a systematic understanding of the underlying issue. In this paper, we explore how modeling can facilitate students’ systems thinking in the context of SSI. Building on evidence from prior research in promoting systems thinking skills through modeling in scientific contexts, we hypothesize that a similar modeling approach could effectively foster students’ systematic understanding of complex societal issues.

Engineering design systematically identifies needs, wants, and problems and then devises solutions to address them. A central component of our work is guiding students in the engineered design of solutions to local environmental problems.

This case study examines how material resistance (limitations posed by the physical world) and graph interpretation intersected during a high school biology investigation using digital sensors.

Unlike many types of educational crises, the COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis leaders could not have prepared for. But research is only starting to examine how leaders’ responses and organisational context have played a role. This mixed-methods study accordingly examines how leaders have mitigated challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, and what local factors are most salient.

Our research explores possibilities for cultivating new spaces for preservice secondary science teachers to engage in science. In a content-focused education course, we designed for and studied preservice teachers' engagement in expansive and connective sensemaking, incorporating heterogeneity, power, and historicity in pursuits of explanatory accounts of the natural world. In this article, we examined how this course design can support preservice teachers to attune to heterogeneity in ways of knowing in science and to connect to identity and historicity in scientific sensemaking.

Abstract concepts, such as gravity, may provide the perfect opportunity to bring phenomena into the classroom. Using phenomena and summary writing together might help student learning since it requires making connections between their ideas and words to explain the natural phenomena. This article describes how anchoring phenomena and summary writing were integrated into a cohesive unit by using five generative activities that include different language and epistemic practices.

Given the importance of early mathematics to academic success in all subjects, children need and deserve to build a robust knowledge of early math concepts in their earliest years. In this chapter, we consider the approach of the Young Mathematicians (YM) project at EDC, which for the past ten years, has partnered with families, teachers, and early childhood programs in richly diverse communities with large populations of students of color, linguistically minoritized students, and students living in poverty, to support math learning across home and school environments.

This study applied the many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM) to assess students’ knowledge-in-use in middle school physical science.

Drawing on Gee's notion of discourses, we examine how teachers incorporate language legitimizing socially and culturally constructed values and beliefs. In particular, we focus on the discourse of ability hierarchy—reflecting dominant values of sorting and ranking students based on perceived academic abilities—and the discourse of individual blame—reflecting dominant framings of educational problems as solely the responsibility of individual students or families.

A School Science and Mathematics Journal editorial.

Extended reality (XR) is increasingly used to support preservice and inservice teacher training. Its use in teacher education has shown promise in improving future educators’ engagement, self-confidence, and noticing skills. Despite this evidence, the field lacks innovative measures to assess outcomes such as those offered through biometric data collection. This article addresses this gap by presenting the findings of a study involving 18 PSTs, who watched a 360 video of an elementary classroom while their heart rate data was gathered.

Justice-centred science pedagogy has been suggested as an effective framework for supporting teachers in bringing in culturally relevant pedagogy to their science classrooms; however, limited instructional tools exist that introduce social dimensions of science in ways teachers feel confident navigating. In this article, we add to the justice-centred science pedagogy framework by offering tools to make sense of science and social factors and introduce socioscientific modelling as an instructional strategy for attending to social dimensions of science in ways that align with justice-centred science pedagogy.

Limited research has explored elementary preservice teachers' responsiveness while navigating an argumentation-focused discussion, particularly in an online simulated teaching experience. The purpose of this study was to examine preservice teachers' responsiveness to students' ideas while eliciting students' initial constructed arguments and encouraging argument critique in two online simulated teaching experiences.

Cognitive interviews play an important role in articulating the intended construct of educational assessments. This paper describes the iterative development of protocols for cognitive interviews with kindergarten through second-grade children to understand how their spatial reasoning skill development aligns with intended constructs.

Despite an increasing focus on integrating engineering design in K-12 settings, relatively few studies have investigated how to support students to engage in systematic processes to optimize the designs of their solutions. This study explored how middle school, high school, and pre-service students optimized the design of a home for energy efficiency, size, and cost using facets of fluency, flexibility, closeness, and quality.

This article examines how federal/state-level policy guidance and local context have influenced district and school leader responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as how these external/internal factors might provide a window into K-12 crisis leadership and policy sensemaking more broadly.

With an ultimate goal of characterizing teachers' movement toward understanding the epistemic complexity of generative learning environments, this study refers to adaptive teaching expertise (AdTex) as a developmental teaching capacity observable through a teacher's ability to utilize various resources to address the epistemic complexity of knowledge generation practices. The study shows a new way to create systematic profiles of AdTex based on the multiple qualitative data sources, including vignettes, interviews, and reflections collected through a multiple-case study with 24 teachers.

Build a classroom community by building representations and visualizations of data related to students’ names.

Teacher–teacher feedback is an important feature of professional learning. However, deeply ingrained socio-pedagogical norms may affect both the nature and content of feedback, constraining its effectiveness. Prior studies have reported that avoiding critique and providing excessively generic information can hinder pedagogical inquiry and adoption of reform-based instruction. To better understand the nuances of socio-pedagogical norms for chemistry-specific settings, we investigate the conversational functions and the ways in which teacher–teacher feedback addresses macroscopic, symbolic, and particulate levels of representation within lessons they experienced as students.

Teachers can play critical roles in challenging or reinscribing dominant narratives about what counts as STEM, who is seen within STEM disciplines, and how these disciplines should be taught. However, teachers have often experienced STEM in limited ways in their own education and are thereby provided with few resources for re-imagining these disciplines.

Women and many people of color continue to be minoritized in STEM and notably in physics. We conducted two studies demonstrating that exposure to counternarratives about who does physics and why one does physics significantly increases high school students—especially women’s—physics-related career intentions.

This study investigated how preservice elementary teachers' (PSTs) noticed the discourse practices they used to position students and their scientific thinking as they engaged a group of student avatars in argumentation-based simulated discussions.

The early development of spatial reasoning skills has been linked to future success in mathematics, but research to date has mainly focused on the development of these skills within classroom settings rather than at home. The purpose of the current study is to develop a survey instrument to better understand Kindergarten through Grade 2 students’ opportunities to learn spatial reasoning skills at home.

In rural, geographically dispersed school districts, access to high-quality face-to-face professional development (PD) is challenging. Our study developed and compared the effectiveness of an online PD for middle-school science teachers working in remote, rural areas of Kansas with an evidence-based traditional face-to-face PD with the goal of supporting change in teachers’ conceptual understanding and self-efficacy in utilizing Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), change in instructional practices, and overall student content learning.

Adopting a complexity perspective, we attempt to understand how teachers shift over time by examining their epistemic orientation to knowledge generation and their understanding of the nature of the epistemic tools of language, dialogue and argument that underpin these environments.

In this article, we describe a professional learning community (PLC) for science teacher educators that supported changes in pedagogy through educative curriculum materials and vignette writing.

Measuring and Visualizing Space in Elementary Mathematics Learning explores the development of elementary students’ understanding of the mathematics of measure, and demonstrates how measurement can serve as an anchor for supporting a deeper understanding of number operations and rational numbers.

The project research team developed two active learning lessons examining the diverse profiles of individuals who earned a bachelor’s degree in physics, and issues of marginalization of women in physics. After participating in the lessons, research showed that both the students’ sense of physics identity and their intentions to pursue a physics major increased, especially among female-identifying students.

There is strong agreement in science teacher education of the importance of teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT), which includes their subject matter knowledge and their pedagogical content knowledge. However, there are limited instruments that can be easily administered and scored on a large scale to assess and study elementary science teachers' CKT. Such measures would support strategic monitoring of large groups of science teachers' CKT and the investigation of comparative questions about science teachers' CKT longitudinally across the professional continuum or across teacher education or professional development sites. To address this gap, this study focused on designing an automatically scorable summative assessment that can be used to measure preservice elementary teachers' (PSETs') CKT in one high-leverage science content area: matter and its interactions.

This chapter describes our middle school energy literacy project to develop, implement, and test curriculum materials for a unit titled Energy and Your Environment (EYE). EYE fosters place-based education by using the school building to enhance systems thinking about energy consumption and flow between the building and surrounding environment.

Knowing how science teachers develop their professional knowledge has been a challenge. One potential way to determine the professional knowledge of teachers is through videos. In the study described here, the authors recruited 60 elementary and secondary science teachers, showed them one of two 10-min videos, and recorded and analyzed their comments when watching the videos.

A curriculum developer on the DataPBL project details his journey searching for data about the Japanese American internment for 8th grade students to explore with CODAP.

In-service professional development is important for improving teaching. However, little research has examined how the roles, beliefs, and backgrounds of the individuals providing professional development can best be leveraged to create effective professional development programmes. A particularly understudied group are community-based On-Site Teacher Educators (OSTEs) who can serve as the bridge between university-based faculty and school employees. In this exploratory qualitative multiple case study, the perspectives and practices of three OSTEs are examined as they supported elementary science teachers (n = 119) in multi-year professional development.

In this paper we describe a technical infrastructure, entitled Open Game Data, for conducting educational game research using open science, educational data mining and learning engineering approaches.

This article uses cause and effect as a lens and thinking tool to observe and make sense of phenomena in elementary science.

Our research study examines the community-based partnership PD model and its impact on school teachers’ self-efficacy and their success in engaging students in the NGSS science practices through citizen science projects.

In this study, 82 middle and high school teachers engaged with the InSTEP online professional
learning platform to develop their expertise in teaching data science and statistics. We
investigated teachers’ engagement within the platform, aspects of the platform that were most
and least effective in building teachers’ expertise, and the extent to which teachers’ self-efficacy
changed.

In this article, we describe our implementation of an innovative approximation of practice in teacher education: chat-based role-play. In so doing, we share our collective experiences as teacher educators about how the preservice teachers (PSTs) across our four methods courses—two elementary science courses, one elementary mathematics course, and one middle school mathematics course—practiced eliciting students’ initial arguments about a matter investigation (for science) or a fractions or ratio problem (for mathematics).

We examined secondary (6-12) mathematics teachers’ participation in a professional development (PD) model where they collectively investigated video cases of students engaging with ambitious instructional materials. We leveraged frame analysis, frame processes, and the Teaching for Robust Understanding framework to characterize the learning of professional learning communities.

This study concerns the cognitive process of mathematical problem posing, conceptualized in three stages: understanding the task, constructing the problem, and expressing the problem. We used the eye tracker and think-aloud methods to deeply explore students’ behavior in these three stages of problem posing, especially focusing on investigating the influence of task situation format and mathematical maturity on students’ thinking.

The DataPBL project enlisted a team of teachers, data science educators, and researchers to co-design data experiences for the eighth grade Japanese American Internment curriculum module developed by EL Education.

The dimensionality of the epistemic orientation survey (EOS) was examined across four occasions with item factor analysis (IFA). Because of an emphasis on the knowledge generation of epistemic orientation (EO), four factors were selected and built into a short form of EOS (EOS-SF) including knowledge generation, knowledge replication, epistemic nature of knowledge, and student ability.

The real-time detection of when a player is struggling presents an opportunity for game designers to design timely and meaningful interventions, as well as to provide targeted support that improves student learning and engagement. In this paper, we present a struggle detector in the context of students playing the learning game, Wake: Tales from the Aqualab.

In this article we introduce a National Science Foundation-funded research project called TecRocks that has developed new interactive simulations and an innovative online curriculum module that weaves rock formation and plate tectonics together such that secondary teachers and students can approach these two topics as integrated systems.

Teacher education has begun to embrace the use of 360 videos to improve preservice teachers' (PSTs) engagement and immersion. While recent research on such use is promising overall, there are specific questions that have been left unanswered about the construct of presence in 360 videos. More specifically, research has yet to fully explore how video delivery devices and PST characteristics may impact presence. The purpose of this study was to respond to this gap in the literature by examining PST major, delivery device (ie, head mounted display vs. flat screen), and the interaction between the two in informing presence.

Nancy Butler Songer, Associate Provost of STEM Education at the University of Utah, discusses the importance of supporting and including young people as part of environmental decision-making teams and key problem-solvers of our futures.

Collaboration between ecologists and learning scientists can give rise to powerful models for scientific outreach within ecology. This paper presents a process by which learning scientists and ecologists codesigned a science curriculum that invites students to join an ecological community of practice.

Professional development providers often struggle with how some teachers take up and internalise new instructional practices while others have difficulty implementing new ideas and strategies. Teacher personal characteristics account for only part of this differentiation in learning, and there are unanswered questions regarding how organisational conditions shape teacher learning in professional development (PD). To address these questions, we examined U.S. elementary teachers’ learning and change in a science professional development project.

Rachel Folger laughs when she recounts the time one of the students in her eighth grade social studies class exclaimed, “Whoa, Ms. Folger! Did you know that this is just what we’re doing in math?” Rachel is thrilled that her students—who typically “walk through their day in these very isolated subject areas”—are making connections across the curriculum.

We investigated how the level of variance in students’ prior knowledge may have influenced their collaborative interactions and science learning in small groups. We examined learning outcomes from 102 groups from seven science teachers’ classes and discourse from two contrasting groups: Homogeneous versus heterogeneous. We examined individual and group outcomes using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to explore the effect of membership in a homogeneous or heterogeneous group on students’ learning. We then used social network analyses (SNA) to identify any differences in interaction patterns between the two contrasting groups as they conducted multiple compost simulations. Finally, we examined students’ discussions in these groups to better understand their interactions.

This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of a professional development program rooted in knowledge generation theory. Specifically, it sought to examine the changes in teachers' three orientations following the completion of the first-year workshop, and how these changes impacted their classroom implementation.

Determining the most appropriate method of scoring an assessment is based on multiple factors, including the intended use of results, the assessment's purpose, and time constraints. Both the dichotomous and partial credit models have their advantages, yet direct comparisons of assessment outcomes from each method are not typical with constructed response items. The present study compared the impact of both scoring methods on the internal structure and consequential validity of a middle-grades problem-solving assessment called the problem solving measure for grade six (PSM6).

Questions regarding the construction of mathematical authority have implications for learning, specifically for students’ views of themselves as mathematics learners and doers with valuable contributions. We consider the ideas proposed by eight first-grade students who had the most airtime during 12 lessons of a classroom teaching experiment.

In many schools across the world, students experience mathematical concepts as ideas empty of wisdom and possibility. In this paper the authors analyze a philosophical conversation in which fifth-grade students were caught up in the animacy of the concept of space. Challenging the common view of mathematics as dealing with absolute truths and certainty, these students, the materials, and the concept itself formed dynamic assemblages that, through movement and the senses reanimated philosophical considerations regarding the concept of space.

Educational policies exist as part of complex systems of many policies, all of which science teachers must make sense before using in practice. Using Actor-Network Theory to view policy translation in assemblages, we examine how networked actors mediate teachers’ policy play.

Review of the recent literature on integrated STEM curriculum development and implementation. Included are frameworks for integrated STEM curriculum development and research assessments to evaluate curriculum quality. Details and examples from a large integrated STEM research project in the United States are included. The paper concludes with a call for future research related to STEM curriculum implementation, including the need for new observation protocols.

Adopting a pretest–posttest experimental design with repeated measures, this study examined the effects of three types of game-based learning supports in the form of modeling on knowledge development that contributed to successful math problem solving and students’ perceived game flow.

This study sought to explore math and science teacher educators' use of various media to represent practice within methods courses. There is little understanding of why certain media is used over other representations and the rationale for these choices. Specifically, the study focused on the prevalence and familiarity of teacher educators with comics and animations, standard videos, and 360 videos. This mixed methods study utilized a survey and interviews to ascertain math and science teacher educators' level of familiarity and perceived usefulness of representations of practice.

This report takes stock of what we currently know as well as what we need to know to make classroom assessment maximally beneficial for the teaching and learning of STEM subject matter in K–12 classrooms.

Teacher noticing scholars are just beginning to explore how to support noticing that is responsive to students' cultural resources. The theoretical basis of the teacher noticing literature affords scholars a range of paths for understanding student resources, only some of which are described in the literature. In this article, we offer a conceptual model showing how the theoretical roots related to teacher noticing and responsive teaching (N/RT) are closely aligned with theories foundational to culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP).

To best support students in developing competence, assessments that allow students to use knowledge to solve challenging problems and make sense of phenomena are needed. These assessments need to be designed and tested to validly locate students on the learning progression and hence provide feedback to students and teachers about meaningful next steps in their learning. Yet, such tasks are time-consuming to score and challenging to provide students with appropriate feedback to develop their knowledge to the next level.

Digital game-based math learning environments (math DGBLE) are promising platforms that provide students with opportunities to master conceptual understanding and cultivate mathematical thinking, on which the contemporary mathematics education places an emphasis. Literature on learning support in digital game-based learning (DGBL) rarely investigate learners' support-use behaviors and interaction patterns in relation to math learning. We addressed this research gap in this exploratory mixed-methods study. We designed and developed a packet of learning supports (i.e., Task Planner and Math Story) in a math DGBLE.

Big ideas in science education are meant to be interpretive frameworks that empower student learning. Unfortunately, outside of the broad conception of scientific evaluation, there are few theoretical explanations of how this might happen. Therefore, we contribute one such explanation, an instructional concept called integrative analysis wherein students use a big idea to interconnect isolated scenarios and enrich their meanings.

This article introduces a new framework for articulating how educational assessments can be related to teacher uses in the classroom. It articulates three levels of assessment: macro (use of standardized tests), meso (externally developed items), and micro (on-the-fly in the classroom).

This paper investigates how mathematics instructors' recognition of the professional obligations of mathematics teaching varies based on their institutional environment, specifically whether they teach high school or college mathematics.

In this paper, we describe Legitimation Code Theory as an analytical framework and provide an analysis of semantic patterns of an integrated STEM unit (written discourse) and a middle school teacher’s enactment of that unit (oral discourse). Specifically, this analysis focused on the semantic gravity (SG), or level of context dependency, of the activities and dialogue present throughout the unit.

Science learning is an important part of the K-12 educational experience, as well as in the lives of students. This study considered students’ science learning as they engaged in the instruction of scientific issues with social relevance. With classroom environments radically changing during the COVID-19 pandemic, our study adapted to teachers and students as they were forced to change from more traditional, in-person instructional settings to virtual, online instruction settings.

Science teacher leaders have been identified as an important lever for the implementation of science education reform. However, science reform implementation is locally controlled and not uniform across districts; therefore, the work of STLs within a reform context can vary. In this descriptive case study, we explore the work of 11 science teacher leaders who support science education reform in a variety of organizational contexts. Through the analysis of multiple data sources, we describe the roles that these science teacher leaders take up in their work and identified how variation in these roles related to localized contexts and priorities for science education.

Teachers must know how to use language to support students in knowledge generation environments that align to the Next Generation Science Standards. To measure this knowledge, this study refines a survey on teachers’ knowledge of language as an epistemic tool.

The Delphi method has been adapted to inform item refinements in educational and psychological assessment development. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design using Delphi is a common approach to gain experts' insight into why items might have exhibited differential item functioning (DIF) for a sub-group, indicating potential item bias. Use of Delphi before quantitative field testing to screen for potential sources leading to item bias is lacking in the literature. An exploratory sequential design is illustrated as an additional approach using a Delphi technique in Phase I and Rasch DIF analyses in Phase II. We introduce the 2 × 2 Concordance Integration Typology as a systematic way to examine agreement and disagreement across the qualitative and quantitative findings using a concordance joint display table.

When integrated into online curriculum modules for students, educative curriculum materials (ECMs) can enhance teachers’ enactment of these modules. This study investigated (1) the use of digitally enhanced ECMs built into an online plate tectonics curriculum module by teachers with different backgrounds and teaching experience, (2) the relationship between teachers’ use of ECMs and student learning gains, and (3) teacher reflections on the value of the ECMs they used.

In various formats, students at the secondary and postsecondary levels participate in multiweek authentic science research projects. There have been many papers explaining the operations of such programs, but few have provided explicit instruction on how to incorporate authentic communication practices into the student research process. In this paper, we describe how we integrated primary literature into an 8-week online research program for 8th to 11th graders.

This qualitative study examines how a group of undergraduate and graduate students in an upper-level ecosystem ecology course at a research university in the southeastern part of the United States engage in a task that requires constructing an abstract representation of how biogeochemical cycles work by using a specific approach to modelling, namely synthesis modelling.

Despite years of research and practice inspired by chemistry education research, a recent report shows that US secondary instruction is not aligned with current national reform-based efforts. One means to mitigate this discrepancy is focusing on pedagogical conceptual change, its precursors (higher self-efficacy and pedagogical discontentment), and the subtleties of its mechanisms (assimilation and accommodation). In this study, we investigate the final reflections of participants (N = 35) who completed our professional development program known as the VisChem Institute (VCI).

Students need “critical data literacy” skills to help make sense of the multitude of information available to them, especially as it relates to high-stakes issues of social justice. The authors describe two curriculum modules they developed—one on income equality, one on immigration—that help students learn to analyze data in order to shed light on complex social issues and evaluate claims about those issues.

This article pilots ChatGPT in tackling the most challenging part of science learning and found it successful in automation of assessment development, grading, learning guidance, and recommendation of learning materials.

The Socioscientific Issues Teaching and Learning (SSI-TL) framework is a guide for developing an instructional approach to learning experiences focused on socioscientific issues (SSI). Despite the potential benefits of SSI learning, teachers often struggle to implement this approach in their classrooms, and one of the most prominent reasons for this struggle is science teacher concerns and hesitation associated with incorporating social dimensions of the issues into their instruction. The purpose of this article is to provide science teacher educators with tools to help teachers better manage the integration of the social dimensions of SSI in issues-based teaching.

Science identity development begins in school-aged years, when multilingual students (MLs) are often marginalised in the classroom due to language challenges and low expectations placed on them. This descriptive multiple case study explores the science identities expressed by six US high school MLs in their biology classrooms.

Specific to the topic of oxidation–reduction (redox), teachers are obligated by the discipline to prioritise symbolic traditions such as writing equations, documenting oxidation states, and describing changes (e.g., what undergoes oxidation/reduction). Although the chemistry education research community endorses connecting the vertices of Johnstone's triangle, how symbolic traditions undermine chemistry concept development, especially during lesson planning and teaching, is underexplored. To clarify this gap, we use the Mangle of Practice framework to unpack the clash between symbolic vs. particulate-focused instruction.

We need STEM knowledge programs in formal and informal settings that guide learners in applying STEM learning to the creation of solutions.

Civic Statistics by its nature is highly interdisciplinary. From a cross-curricular perspective, teaching and learning Civic Statistics faces specific challenges related to the preparation of teachers and the design of instruction. This chapter presents examples of how Civic Statistics resources and concepts can be used in different courses and subject areas.

Explaining phenomena associated with a system involves describing a system’s structure and articulating the process through which the system’s structure changes over time. This paper defines geo-sequential reasoning in the context of plate tectonics and uses it to analyse how students explain the geological processes that occur along convergent boundaries as part of the plate tectonics system.

It is essential for items in assessments of mathematics’ teacher knowledge to evoke the desired response processes – to be interpreted and responded to by teachers as intended by item developers. In this study, we sought to unpack evidence that middle school mathematics teachers were not consistently interacting as intended with constructed response (i.e. open-ended) items designed to assess their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK).

Science education literature has highlighted socio-scientific issues (SSI) as an effective pedagogy for teaching science in a social and political context. SSI links science education and real-world problems to engage students in real-world issues, making it ideal for teaching global climate change (GCC). Additionally, technological advances have created a unique opportunity for teaching climate by making previously inaccessible computer-based computational models and data visualizations accessible to the typical K-12 learning environment. Here, we present the findings from the 2020–2021 school year pre-/post-implementation of a 3-week, model-based climate education curriculum module (EzGCM).

Urban school leaders can support mathematics instruction that acknowledges and sustains students’ racialized and cultured ways of knowing and being. Yet, leadership for racial justice is often discussed separately from instructional improvement. In this conceptual inquiry, we investigate how leadership can integrate antiracist practices into teaching and learning.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is prevalent in nearly every aspect of our lives. However, recent studies have found a significant amount of confusion and misunderstanding surrounding AI. To develop effective educational programs in the field of AI, it is vital to examine and understand learners' pre- and misconceptions as well as myths about AI. This study examined a corpus of 591 studies.

Research on geometric transformations suggests that early learners possess intuitive understandings grounded in motion metaphors, transitioning to mappings. The processes through which students transition between these two conceptions are not fully understood. We propose that Vygotskian hybridizing (related to Vygotsky’s articulation of everyday and scientific concepts) may provide a lens for thinking about the relationship between these conceptions.

Global climate change (GCC) is one of the greatest challenges of our age and a highly significant socio-scientific issue (SSI). Developing secondary students’ understanding about the Earth’s climate and GCC is critical for empowering future citizens and a key focus of the Next Generation Science Standards. In this cross-sectional study, we investigated secondary students’ evidence-based reasoning about GCC grounded in a curricular intervention involving the use of a data-driven, computer-based global climate model—EzGCM—over 3 years with four teachers who adapted the module in their own courses.

Effective K-12 integrated STEM education should reflect an intentional effort to adequately represent and facilitate each of its component disciplines in a meaningful way. However, most research in this space has been conducted within the context of science classrooms, ignoring mathematics. Also missing from the literature is research that examines the level of cognitive demand required from mathematical tasks present within integrated STEM lessons. In order to seek insight pertaining to this gap in the literature, we sought to better understand how science teachers use mathematics within K-12 integrated STEM instruction.

This article offers spatial reasoning math activities for school and home learning.

The ability for an educational game designer to understand their audience's play styles and resulting experience is an essential tool for improving their game's design. In this paper we present a simple, reusable process using best practices for data clustering, feasible for use within a small educational game studio.

In this paper we use an existing history learning game with an active audience as a research platform for exploring how humor and "snarkiness" in the dialog script affect students' progression and attitudes about the game.

TU professor studies avatar-based classroom simulations in three-year, $3 million NSF grant.

Educational games are an increasingly popular teaching tool in modern classrooms. However, the development of complementary tools for teachers facilitating classroom gameplay is lacking. We present the results of a participatory design process for a teacher-facing, real-time game data dashboard.

The InSTEP professional learning platform aims to support grades 6-12 teachers’ professional learning in teaching statistics and data science through a personalized online learning platform. While statistics and data analysis are included in standards for both mathematics and science, there are also many states across the country envisioning high school course pathways that include a heavier emphasis on statistics and even stand alone courses on data science. In this brief research report, we aim to share how we have designed supports for teachers to personalize their professional learning and results from a collective case study of 37 participants engaged in a field test of the platform in Fall 2022.

In super-diverse classroom contexts, students come from varied migration channels, immigration statuses, languages, countries of origin, and religions, which contribute to new and complex social configurations of the classroom. Super-diversity thus encourages educators and researchers to draw on nuanced understandings of the complexity that it brings to bear in educational settings and reconsider instructional approaches that we have believed to be effective. This chapter provides an insight into the complexity of teaching science in linguistically super-diverse classrooms with the case of Riverview High School.

This study explores how the interplay between data and model design shifts 6th graders’ students' ideas about diffusion as they build a range of models (“paper and pencil” and computational models). We present a new web-based environment and approach that integrates model-based and data-based features in the same display which facilitates the comparison of models and real-world data.

While tragedy has struck an inordinate number of students in the past several years, not all areas of the country are at risk for every natural hazard all the time. To avoid having students feel like Chicken Little under a falling sky, the GeoHazard project uses simulations, data, experimentation, and scientific argumentation to teach about risk and uncertainty. We have created three scaffolded online modules focused on hurricanes, wildfires, and inland flooding to help teach these concepts. Through investigations using both simulations and real-world data, these curriculum units introduce students to the scientific factors responsible for these hazards and provide practice in interpreting forecasts.

Involving students in scientific modeling practice is one of the most effective approaches to achieving the next generation science education learning goals. Given the complexity and multirepresentational features of scientific models, scoring student-developed models is time- and cost-intensive, remaining one of the most challenging assessment practices for science education. More importantly, teachers who rely on timely feedback to plan and adjust instruction are reluctant to use modeling tasks because they could not provide timely feedback to learners. This study utilized machine learning (ML), the most advanced artificial intelligence (AI), to develop an approach to automatically score student-drawn models and their written descriptions of those models.

Ed+gineering, an NSF-funded program, adapted hands-on robotics instruction for online delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This qualitative multiple case study shares the experiences of participating education students in spring 2021 as they collaborated virtually with engineering students and fifth graders to engineer bioinspired robots in an afterschool technology club adapted to be virtual.

Posterior Predictive Model Checking (PPMC) is frequently used for model fit evaluation in Bayesian Confirmatory Factor Analysis (BCFA). In standard PPMC procedures, model misfit is quantified by comparing the location of an ML-based point estimate to the predictive distribution of a statistic. When the point estimate is far from the center posterior predictive distribution, model fit is poor. Not included in this approach, however, is the variability of the Maximum Likelihood (ML)-based point estimates. We propose a new method of PPMC based on comparing posterior predictive distributions of a hypothesized and saturated BCFA model.

This article presents a vision for 2025 to implement low cost and effective extended reality (XR) technologies to supplement teacher education field experiences, regardless of if and when another global or local crisis occurs (e.g., pandemic, war, weather). In doing so, empirical and theoretical research is presented that argues for teacher educators to seek out and employ more immersive representations of practice that take advantage of the perceptual capacity of XR.

Young researchers are often excluded from the scholarly processes of peer-review and publication, which are cornerstones of scholarly work. The Journal of Emerging Investigators is an open access journal dedicated to publishing the research of middle and high school students. We surveyed student authors before and after they participated in the peer-review and publication process of their scientific articles. Following peer-review and publication, students report gains in their confidence and self-efficacy in science, and increased feelings of identity and belonging in science.

Bioinformatics—a rapidly developing discipline that integrates mathematical and computational techniques with biological knowledge for applications in medicine, the environment, and other important aspects of life—is an example of an emerging field that illustrates the need for a greater focus on STEM integration in K12 education. Studies on teaching bioinformatics in high school reveal difficulties that arise from a lack of curricular resources and teacher knowledge to effectively integrate disciplinary content. In this study, we investigated challenges teachers experienced in teaching a problem-based bioinformatics unit after participating in professional development (PD) activities that were carefully constructed using research-based effective PD characteristics.

This study explores undergraduate engineering and education students’ perspectives on their interdisciplinary teams throughout the rapid transition to online learning and instruction from a face-to-face to a virtual format.

Immersive 360 videos are increasingly being used in pre-service teachers (PST) education. There is preliminary evidence that this technology may benefit future educators’ focus and attention to classroom settings and events. However, more analytical efforts are needed to better understand its potential impact on reported focus of attention (RFA) among future educators. This article addresses this gap by presenting the findings of a study on 360 videos that involved 92 PSTs.

The lack of formal training in peer review can be detrimental to the publishing activities of early career researchers, including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Lack of recognition of the work of early career researchers (ECRs) in review means that journals cannot easily identify them as potential reviewers in the future. Participation as peer-reviewers increases understanding in early career researchers of their own writing and review process. ECRs can be highly motivated to volunteer for journal editorial work—Journal of Emerging Investigators encourages this by offering many different roles. Publishers that utilize and train early career researchers as peer-reviewers can prevent poor reviewer practices.

In this paper, we present an overview of the design research used to develop a digital collaborative environment with an embedded problem-based curriculum. We then discuss the student and teacher features of the environment that promote inquiry-based learning and teaching.

In the United States, national and state standardized assessments have become a metric for measuring student learning and high-quality learning environments. As the COVID-19 pandemic offered a multitude of learning modalities (e.g., hybrid, socially distanced face-to-face instruction, virtual environment), it becomes critical to examine how this learning disruption influenced elementary mathematic performance. This study tested for

differences in mathematics performance on fourth grade standardized tests before and during COVID-19 in a case study of a rural Ohio school district using the Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) mathematics test.

Despite the importance of developing elementary science teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT), there are limited assessments that have been designed to measure the full breadth of their CKT at scale. Our overall research project addressed this gap by developing an online assessment to measure elementary preservice teachers' CKT about matter and its interactions. This study, which was part of our larger project, reports on findings from one component of the item development process examining the construct validity of 118 different CKT about matter assessment items.

Although prior research has highlighted the significance of representations for mathematical learning, there is still a lack of research on how students use multimodal external representations (MERs) to solve mathematical tasks in digital game-based learning (DGBL) environments. This exploratory study was to examine the salient patterns problem solvers demonstrated using MERs when they engaged in a single-player, three-dimensional architecture game that requires the acquisition and application of math knowledge and thinking in game-based context problem solving.

Teachers’ professional noticing has been described as transitioning from descriptions of general pedagogy to analysis of students’ mathematical procedures and conceptual reasoning. Such a shift is described as a transition towards more student-centered noticing. In the present study, we used screen recordings of pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) 360 video viewing to examine the relationship between where and what PSTs’ looked at and what they attended to in writing.

The research contained in this article used qualitative methods to articulate and test the design underlying our professional learning cycle by advancing conjecture mapping, a device by which the embodiments of the design are made transparent to be analyzed in practice.

Teachers experience challenges in effectively using formative assessment practices in their classrooms. In the US, only 28% of elementary teachers report using formative assessment. This study highlights the need to design resources to meet teacher needs and support teachers in making sense of assessment information to inform three-dimensional learning and teaching.

MindHive is an online, open science, citizen science platform co-designed by a team of educational researchers, teachers, cognitive and social scientists, UX researchers, community organizers, and software developers to support real-world brain and behavior research for (a) high school students and teachers who seek authentic STEM research experiences, (b) neuroscientists and cognitive/social psychologists who seek to address their research questions outside of the lab, and (c) community-based organizations who seek to conduct grassroots, science-based research for policy change.

Facilitating discussions is a key approach that science teachers use to engage students in scientific argumentation. However, learning how to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions is an ambitious teaching practice that can be difficult to learn how to do well, especially for preservice teachers (PSTs) who typically have limited opportunities to tryout and refine this teaching practice. This study examines secondary PSTs’ perceptions and engagement with a science performance task—used within an online, simulated classroom consisting of five middle school student avatars—to practice this ambitious teaching practice.

Diagnostic classification models (DCMs) are psychometric models for evaluating a student’s mastery of the essential skills in a content domain based upon their responses to a set of test items. Currently, diagnostic model and/or Q-matrix misspecification is a known problem with limited avenues for remediation. To address this problem, this paper defines a one-sided score statistic that is a computationally efficient method for detecting under-specification at the item level of both the Q-matrix and the model parameters of the particular DCM chosen in an analysis.

Implemented was a 45-minute per day Primary Science IDEAS intervention in grades 1–2 integrating reading and writing within science instruction in a multi-year study conducted in 8 experimental and 9 control schools. Results found a significant direct achievement effect in grades 1–2 on both the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) Science and Reading. In addition, the direct effect of the intervention in grades 1–2 also resulted in significant achievement transfer from grades 1–2 to grade 3 on both the ITBS Science and Reading.

The Innovate to Mitigate project adapts crowdsourcing to support project-based STEM education, posing design challenges for secondary-school students. Students are charged with designing feasible innovative strategies to mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. The paper draws on data from 3 project teams. The paper presents evidence that a web-mediated community of practice supports STEM learning of concepts and STEM practices and examines conditions under which the environment can enable an account of microgenesis of that learning.

Do your students ever share ideas that are only peripherally related to the discussion you are having? We discuss ways to minimize and deal with such contributions.

Eliciting and interpreting students’ ideas are essential skills in teaching, yet pre-service teachers (PSTs) rarely have adequate opportunities to develop these skills. In this study, we examine PSTs’ patterns of discourse and perceived learning through engaging in an interactive digital simulation called Eliciting Learner Knowledge (ELK). ELK is a seven-minute, chat-based virtual role play between a PST playing a “teacher” and a PST playing a “student” where the goal is for the teacher to find out what the student knows about a topic.

This study investigated novice mathematics teachers participating in an online teacher education course focused on covariational reasoning and understanding the behavior of functions. The analysis centered on documenting the emergence of participants’ sociomathematical norms for engaging in online asynchronous discussions.

This position paper advocates supporting CS teacher professional learning by supplementing existing curriculum-specific teacher 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.

This study explored the use of a three-part suite of practice-based activities -- one- and two-player online simulations, an avatar-based simulation, and a virtual teaching simulator—for supporting preservice teachers in learning how to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions in elementary mathematics and science.

Examining teachers’ knowledge on a large scale involves addressing substantial measurement and logistical issues; thus, existing teacher knowledge assessments have mainly consisted of selected-response items because of their ease of scoring. Although open-ended responses could capture a more complex understanding of and provide further insights into teachers’ thinking, scoring these responses is expensive and time consuming, which limits their use in large-scale studies. In this study, we investigated whether a novel statistical approach, topic modeling, could be used to score teachers’ open-ended responses and if so, whether these scores would capture nuances of teachers’ understanding.

A growing number of studies have shown the benefits of K-12 integrated science and engineering education. With this study, we add to the literature by documenting the relationship between STEM learning and engagement, and the demographic characteristics that impact achievement in STEM.

To address the lack of a classroom observation protocol aligned with integrated STEM, the author team developed one to measure the degree of integrated STEM instruction implemented in K-12 science and engineering classrooms. This study demonstrates how our instrument can be used to uncover the dimensions of integrated STEM instruction practiced in K-12 classrooms and to determine which protocol items are associated with each of these dimensions.

In this article we describe an Informal Science Institution (ISI)-based professional learning program for science teacher leaders (STLs) developed within the context of a research-practice partnership (RPP).

To build a sustainable future, science and engineering education programmes should emphasise scientific investigation, collaboration across traditional science topics and disciplines, and engineering design, including design and evaluation of solutions. We adopted a qualitative case study design to address the research question, What is the process of team co-construction of instructional materials that emphasize learning through both science investigation and engineering design? The paper outlines the first year of our team co-construction activities involving the design, implementation, and evaluation of instructional materials for secondary science.

Coordinating modeling and real-world data is central to building scientific theories. This paper examines how a complementary focus on modeling and data contributed to 8th grade students’ learning of mechanisms underlying wildfire smoke spread in MoDa, a web-based environment that integrates computational modeling side-by-side with real-world data for comparison and validation.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of different data conditions on item parameter recovery and classification accuracy of three dichotomous mixture item response theory (IRT) models: the Mix1PL, Mix2PL, and Mix3PL.

This article reports on the first three years of a teacher-led professional development program on the Navajo Nation. We draw on both quantitative and qualitative data from our end-of-year surveys to highlight some of the early lessons we have gathered from the Diné Institute for Navajo Nation Educators (DINÉ). We highlight two guiding principles that have developed through this work, cultural responsiveness and teacher leadership, and we suggest that these guiding principles could be useful for other professional development efforts in Indigenous-serving contexts, many of which would be characterized as “rural.”

Concord Consortium’s new Earth Rocks Map displays a generalized representation of Earth’s geology, focused primarily on the distribution of the three major rock types (igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary). What makes this map different is that it strips out information about geologic eras, highlighting the distribution of rocks found on Earth’s surface.

Mastery goal structures, which communicate value for developing deeper understanding, are an important classroom support for student motivation and engagement, especially in the context of science learning aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. Prior research has identified key dimensions of goal structures, but a more nuanced examination of the variability of teacher-enacted and student-perceived goal structures within and across classrooms is needed. Using a concurrent mixed-methods approach, we developed case studies of how three 7th-grade science teachers enacted different goal structures while teaching the same chemistry unit and how their students perceived these goal structures.

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.

This study examines technology-enhanced teacher responses and students’ written mathematical explanations to understand how to support effective teacher responding and the centering of students’ mathematical ideas. Although prior research has focused on teacher noticing and responding to students’ mathematical ideas, few studies have explored the revisions that students make to their written explanations after teacher responding and very few explore this in authentic classroom contexts.

Why do some mathematics lessons captivate high school students and others not? This study explores this question by comparing how the content unfolds in the lessons that students rated highest with respect to their aesthetic affordances (e.g., using terms like “intriguing,” “surprising”) with those the same students rated lowest with respect to their aesthetic affordances (e.g., “just ok,” “dull”). Using a framework that interprets the unfolding content across a lesson as a mathematical story, we examine how some lessons can provoke curiosity or enable surprise.

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

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

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.

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.

One challenge facing the fields of mathematics education and special education is how to design instruction on fraction concepts that can meet the needs of diverse learners. An innovation that shows promise is to base instructional design upon well-established trajectories of students’ fraction learning. However, little research has been done to establish the effectiveness of this approach. We report the results of the second of two small studies of an intervention developed using a validated trajectory of students’ fraction concepts.

This study contributes to the growing body of research that highlights the usefulness of professional noticing of children’s mathematical thinking for understanding the complexity and variability in teaching expertise. We explored the noticing expertise of 72 upper elementary school teachers engaged in multi-year professional development focused on children’s fraction thinking. Our assessment addressed the three component skills of professional noticing of children’s mathematical thinking: (a) attending to children’s strategy details, (b) interpreting children’s understandings, and (c) deciding how to respond on the basis of children’s understandings.

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.

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.

An ability to engage in system thinking is necessary to understand complex problems. While many pre-college students use system modeling tools, there is limited evidence of student reasoning about causal relationships that interact in diverging and converging chains, and how these affect system behavior. A chemistry unit on gas phenomena was implemented in two successive years with 73 high school students. Although the phenomena could be explained with simple linear causal reasoning, many student models included surprising and problematic causal chains and non-linear patterns.

Problem solving is a central focus of mathematics teaching and learning. If teachers are expected to support students' problem-solving development, then it reasons that teachers should also be able to solve problems aligned to grade level content standards. The purpose of this validation study is twofold: (1) to present evidence supporting the use of the Problem Solving Measures Grades 3–5 with preservice teachers (PSTs), and (2) to examine PSTs' abilities to solve problems aligned to grades 3–5 academic content standards.

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.

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.

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.

This review synthesized insights from 25 NSF DRK-12 projects that studied prekindergarten (PreK) and elementary science teaching. This review covered 25 of the 27 projects funded between 2011 and 2015. We synthesized the empirical findings from interventions in four common areas: preservice PreK and elementary preparation programs, in-service teacher professional development, instructional materials for PreK and elementary teachers, and strategies for diverse learners. Many of these projects studied interventions in more than one of the common areas. Researchers found that DRK-12 projects showed promise in increasing preservice and in-service teachers’ self-efficacy and pedagogical content knowledge and students’ science content knowledge.

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 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.

To promote understanding of and interest in working with data among diverse student populations, we developed and studied a high school mathematics curriculum module that examines income inequality in the United States.

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.

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 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).

Women and ethnic minoritized individuals are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domains in postsecondary education and in the workforce. The aim of the current study was to examine whether adolescents' perceptions of inclusivity, belonging, and discrimination in high school STEM classes are related to their STEM class engagement in and outside of school.

Black and Brown girls are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Although studies have examined the reasons for this by exploring Black and Brown girls' experiences based on culture, gender, and race, there is a need for specifically understanding how language contributes to racialized experiences in science education. This study fills this critical gap by presenting narratives of three academically talented multilingual girls from Black and Brown communities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Narrative as a game design feature constantly yields mixed results for learning in the literature. The purpose of this exploratory mixed-methods case study was to examine design heuristics and implications governing the role of narratives in a digital game-based learning (DGBL) environment for math problem solving.

A common approach to scaling up a professional development program is for the researchers who designed the program to prepare teacher leaders to facilitate it at their schools. When researchers eventually leave, however, teacher leaders may receive less support. To ensure that teacher leaders continue receiving support, researchers can prepare district mathematics specialists to assume responsibility for preparing the teacher leaders. Little is known, however, about district mathematics specialists’ role in sustaining, and potentially adapting, professional development programs. We examined district mathematics specialists’ facilitation of an adaptive teacher leadership preparation program.

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.

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.

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.

This article addresses the nature of student-generated representations that support students’ early algebraic reasoning in the realm of generalized arithmetic.

In this study, we present a conceptual tool for guiding teachers’ principled pedagogical actions toward equitable instruction, referred to as the Transforming Science Learning (TSL) framework. The TSL framework was developed to address the challenges of enacting an ideological commitment in local contexts–promoting equity and justice through culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in K-12 science classrooms.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

We use an online Content Knowledge for Teaching (CKT) assessment that measures PSTs’ CKT in one science area: matter and its interactions. In this study, we analyzed process data from administering the online CKT matter assessment to 822 PSTs from across the US to better understand PSTs’ behaviors and interactions on this computer-based science assessment.

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.

This book is about scientific inquiry. Designed for early and mid-career researchers, it is a practical manual for conducting and communicating high-quality research in (mathematics) education. Based on the authors’ extensive experience as researchers, as mentors, and as members of the editorial team for the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education (JRME), this book directly speaks to researchers and their communities about each phase of the process for conceptualizing, conducting, and communicating high-quality research in (mathematics) 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.

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 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 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?

Diagnostic classification models (DCMs) are restricted latent class models with a set of cross-class equality constraints and additional monotonicity constraints on their item parameters, both of which are needed to ensure the meaning of classes and model parameters. In this paper, we develop an efficient, Gibbs sampling-based Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation method for general DCMs with monotonicity constraints.

In this work, we extend variational auto encoders (VAE) to estimate item parameters and correlated latent abilities, and directly compare the ML2P-VAE method to more traditional parameter estimation methods, such as Monte Carlo expectation-maximization. The incorporation of a non-identity covariance matrix in a VAE requires a novel VAE architecture, which can be utilized in applications outside of education.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.