Thursday

The objective of this session is to enable researchers to use scenario-based questionnaires in the study and assessment of teaching knowledge and practice. Presenters show examples of items from 15 instruments developed to study teachers’ decisions in instructional situations, their recognition of specific norms of mathematics instruction, and their dispositions toward professional obligations of teaching. After participants peruse the items and instruments, they are walked through the steps taken by presenters to develop, pilot, revise, and implement this set of instruments.

What does preK–12 education need to look like in order to prepare our future workforce and citizenry? Trends and forecasts lead us to understand that the future of work will be vastly different from what we know today, particularly the relationship between humans and machines both in routine work environments across industry sectors, and also in designing solutions to formerly intractable problems. With more work tasks being performed by machines, the role of humans in the world of work is changing. What does this mean for teaching and learning in the 21st century?

This session provides applied training in the principles and practice of designing and analyzing studies to address questions of moderation and mediation. Presenters outline the motivation and critical value of complementing “what works”-type questions with explanatory investigations that address for whom a program works, under what conditions it works, and how it works for different groups. A practical outline of the concepts of moderation and mediation is presented through several STEM case studies.

Improvement science offers a promising set of tools and methods for assessing the implementation of instructional improvement strategies (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahieu, 2015). Improvement sciences utilizes rapid assessments of change to guide the development, revision, and continued fine-tuning of new tools, processes, work roles and relationships.

This roundtable discussion begins by framing the affordances and challenges in the context of broadening the participation of Latinx middle school students in STEM+C using an equity lens (Gutiérrez, 2012). Four axes are included as part of this framework: access, achievement (in our case, understandings), identity, and power. Participants are asked to share their understandings of the issues in relation to this equity lens and share stories of opportunities and challenges, as well as ideas of how to address those challenges.

This roundtable session begins with the presentation of a model of language-rich STEM inquiry for broadening participation of English learners (ELs) in formal and informal spaces. This model, developed through the work of this DRK–12 project, brings together EL students, their families, and their STEM teachers in both formal and informal STEM learning spaces. The goal of the model is to support teachers in better utilizing their EL students’ conceptual and linguistic assets to support STEM learning goals with the larger aim of broadening participation in STEM to include more ELs.