Science

There is the tendency to explain away successful urban schools as indicative of the heroic efforts by a tireless individual, effectively blaming schools that underperform for a lack of grit and dedication. This study reports the development of a research instrument (School Science Infrastructure, or SSI) and then applying that tool to an investigation of equitable science performance by elementary schools.

Crissman, S., Lacy, S., Nordine, J., and Tobin, R. (2015). Looking Through the Energy Lens. Science and Children, 52(6), 26-31.

The STEM School Study (S3) team sat down with inclusive STEM school leaders from over 25 inclusive STEM schools and asked them to describe the parts of their schools that are essential to their school models. We found that while STEM schools vary in many ways, there are eight major Elements common to them all. Each Element is comprised of a number of components and together, they illustrate what STEM schools are and lay the groundwork for understanding how STEM schools work to achieve their goals.

Automated assessment of student learning has become the subject of increasing attention. Students’ textual responses to short answer questions offer a rich source of data for assessment. However, automatically analyzing textual constructed responses poses significant computational challenges, exacerbated by the disfluencies that occur prominently in elementary students’ writing. With robust text analytics, there is the potential to analyze a student’s text responses and accurately predict his or her future success.

Real-time formative assessment of student learning has become the subject of increasing attention. Students’ textual responses to short answer questions offer a rich source of data for formative assessment. However, automatically analyzing textual constructed responses poses significant computational challenges, and the difficulty of generating accurate assessments is exacerbated by the disfluencies that occur prominently in elementary students’ writing. With robust text analytics, there is the potential to accurately analyze students’ text responses and predict students’ future success.

Mining learner generated sketches holds significant potential for acquiring deep insight into learners’ mental models. Drawing has been shown to benefit both learning outcomes and engagement, and learners’ sketches offer a rich source of diagnostic information. Unfortunately, interpreting learners’ sketches—even sketches comprised of semantically grounded symbols—poses significant computational challenges.

A common way for students to develop scientific argumentation abilities is through argumentation about socioscientific issues, defined as scientific problems with social, ethical, and moral aspects. Computer-based scaffolding can support students in this process. In this mixed method study, we examined the use and impact of computer based scaffolding to support middle school students’ creation of evidence-based arguments during a 3-week problem-based learning unit focused on the water quality of a local river.

This paper employs meta-analysis to determine the influence of computer-based scaffolding characteristics and study and test scorequality on cognitive outcomes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education at the secondary, college, graduate, and adult levels.

Argumentation is central to instruction centered on socio-scientific issues (Sadler & Donnelly in International Journal of Science Education, 28(12), 1463–1488, 2006. doi:10.1080/09500690600708717). Teachers can play a big role in helping students engage in argumentation and solve authentic scientific problems. To do so, they need to learn one-to-one scaffolding—dynamic support to help students accomplish tasks that they could not complete unaided.