Science

MindHive is an open science, citizen science initiative that supports authentic human brain and behavioral science inquiry experiences for high school learners, educators, and their communities. The online platform features a suite of tools that enable learners’ research activities, paired with teaching materials. The program s co-designed by a team of educational researchers, teachers, scientists, UX researchers, and developers; and supports collaboration between students from schools across the country, professional scientists, and community organizers.

This novel project draws upon teachers to contribute or modify existing test items, then immediately pilots them using crowdsourced subjects. Psychometric analysis generates measures of item quality and then “recycles” items to participating teachers for improvement. In this way, a large test item bank is constructed utilizing teacher input with each item possessing: appropriate reading levels, NGSS alignment, scientific accuracy, appropriate difficulty, high statistical discrimination, and minimal difference by gender, race, or ethnicity.

This project enhances two interdisciplinary project-based learning (PBL) modules from EL Education with authentic data experiences co-designed with science, math, and social studies middle school teachers. Applying “messy” datasets to relevant societal issues within their existing curriculum and subject matter, we used CODAP to introduce data science education skills and ways of thinking and we examined how engaging and empowering students and teachers can help them develop acumen with data and agency as learners.

We designed a learning approach and associated curricular program that builds from the 5Es (Bybee) model to harness STEM learning toward the engineered design of solutions (phases: Engage, Explore, Explain. Engineer, and Educate). Curricular activities emphasized design features that promote interest and motivation (e.g., choice, appropriately challenging, personal relevance). Research results demonstrated significant learning gains overall and on subparts (e.g., arguments). Teacher and student interviews articulated sustained engagement and motivation.

This project explores how to cultivate novel disciplinary spaces for secondary teachers to experience science. We are designing a content-focused education course for preservice secondary science teachers to engage in expansive and connective sensemaking, incorporating heterogeneity, power, and historicity in pursuits of explanatory accounts of the natural world. We examine how this space supports teachers to expand what counts in science and to attune to their (and their future students’) sociopolitical identities, histories, and future-making.

In our project we design and study opportunities for mathematics and science teachers to coordinate their instruction to support a more coherent approach to teaching statistical model-based inference in middle school. We aim to help more students develop a deeper understanding of ideas and practices related to measurement, data, variability, and inference.

This poster describes and presents findings from a multi-year design-based research study. The focus of the work is how to design and implement science investigations that make productive use of the uncertainty that scientists experience as they conduct investigations. Specifically, we have developed a framework that situates empirical activity in a modeling enterprise, and names and situates common forms of uncertainty found in science investigations.

One goal of this project is to improve Latinx and multilingual students’ opportunities to engage in complex thinking in secondary science classrooms through a district and university partnership. In this poster, we present the success and challenges of co-designing and enacting equity/justice centered units that promote civic engagement with five teams of secondary science teachers (n=20) and teacher leaders (n=3) in one school district.

This design-based research project investigates ways to understand and cultivate science and mathematics teachers’ “epistemic empathy”—their capacity for tuning into and valuing students’ intellectual and emotional experiences in constructing, communicating, and critiquing knowledge. The project team develops educative experiences aimed at cultivating teachers’ epistemic empathy, examines the role of such empathy in facilitating responsive teaching, and explores how epistemic empathy can promote more equitable and humanizing learning environments.

In this project, we investigate haptic systems that are readily available for rendering visual STEM content through sight, sound, and touch. We use combinations of visual display, text-to-speech, vibrations, and the movement of one’s hands for interacting with STEM content (such as charts and graphs in math and science-based simulations) multimodally on touchscreens. Our investigations extend into "smart" tangible manipulatives that pair with interactive PhET simulations and enable rich kinesthetic manipulation of on-screen content through touch.