Science

This project seeks to support students to creatively combine science, engineering and social or community knowledge to address Earth Science problems in their local communities. Through a collaborative project based learning platform with built in scaffolding and an AI design mentor, students will engage in front-end design practices to understand and frame problems and explore solutions. We examine how this impacts science conceptual knowledge, design skills and creativity for middle and high school students.

Written science explanations are central to learning and practicing science. However, there are two main challenges: first, students struggle to explain their ideas and use supporting data appropriately. Second, it is not realistic for teachers to provide real-time, comprehensive feedback to each student. We will present how PyrEval, a natural language processing (NLP) technology, provided students with timely, personalized, automated feedback. We will discuss opportunities and challenges for using automated feedback in classrooms.

This project supports students’ writing of science explanations. One main goal is to develop novel, automated natural language processing (NLP) technology to provide middle school students and teachers with real-time feedback on their science essays, to help them reflect on the quality of their explanations, and to foster their ability to write scientific explanations grounded in scientific evidence. A science unit on roller coasters is presented to students in a web-based environment that includes a roller coaster simulation to conduct experiments.

This project studied the utility of a machine learning-based assessment system for supporting middle school science teachers in making instructional decisions based on automatically generated student reports (AutoRs).

This project is developing and testing a high school climate change unit and professional learning experience in which teachers localize part of the unit to make it relevant to their students and community context. The study is using a cohort-control quasi-experimental design to examine the impact of the unit and professional learning experience on dimensions of teacher practice and students' sense of agency with environmental science.

The goal of TL4CS is to explore how elementary school citizen science (CS) can support students’ engagement with science content and practices. The study addresses three research questions: (1) What kinds of supports foster teacher learning about effective school-based CS? (2) How do supports for teacher learning shape the way teachers enact school-based CS? and (3) What is the potential of school-based CS for positively influencing student learning and student attitudes toward nature and science?

Indigenous students experience persistent inequitable outcomes in schools, particularly in STEM. Since teacher quality is one of the most important school-based factors impacting K12 students’ learning and engagement in schools, our project provides long-term professional development to teachers in rural, Indigenous-serving schools to support teachers’ development of culturally responsive STEM curriculum units. We provide an overview of our professional development model, and share findings from our work with over 100 teachers during four program years.

The STEM SEALs program at North Florida College explores methods for improvement of teaching and learning STEM in rural areas. It consists of three disciplines, “Sea”, “Land”, and “Air”, and three phases, design, review and summer institute for each of the disciplines.
 

The poster will look at the impact of the annual STEM for All Video Showcases as well as the STEM for All Multiplex. It will discuss implications for knowledge sharing among grantees and dissemination efforts in the future.

Teacher portfolios have long been used to support professional reflection and learning. We developed a new type of e-portfolio tool enabling teachers to efficiently capture, annotate, and share multimedia evidence of student learning and instruction (documents, pictures, video) in mobile devices. This tool supported vertical professional learning communities with teachers in multiple grades, reflecting the spiraling structure of the Next Generation Science Standards, where concepts are covered multiple times in increasing depth and sophistication.