Science

The goals of the project include foundational research and development work related to the assessment of content knowledge for teaching (CKT) about matter and its interactions, as well as supporting the development of this CKT in teacher education settings. The project has four major goals including:

CKT for Matter: The project designed and developed assessment tools and instructional materials for use in teacher education programs, and is supporting a professional learning community as part of an implementation study of the impacts of the materials on preservice teacher and teacher educator learning.

This project will develop and test a learning progression for middle school physical science that incorporates the three dimensions identified in Next Generation of Science Standards (NGSS). Bringing together all three NGSS dimensions is an innovation that allows for the project to explore the variety of learning pathways that students may follow as they apply scientific knowledge and practices to make sense of compelling phenomena or solve complex problems. This has the potential to help teachers, researchers, and curriculum developers improve how they support students.

Wake is a new grade 6-9 educational video game designed to teach the scientific practices of experimentations, modeling and arguing from evidence in the context of life sciences content. The game has been deployed at scale and we are using data from tens-of-thousands of players to develop new learning progressions theory and new educational data mining methods.

The project builds upon prior successful work using the Cultural Connections Process Model (CCPM) to co-produce engaging place-based STEM education resources working with rural Indigenous communities. The CCPM is now applied to develop 10 educational videos and corresponding hands-on high-school lessons with participants from four Alaska Native Tribes (Iñupiat, Gwich'in Athabascan, Tlingit/Tsimshian, and Alutiiq) to determine if the model is adaptable and if the resources are transferrable and sustainable to a variety of contexts.

This collaboration between Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Bowdoin College, and Vanderbilt University engages middle-school students in building and revising models of variability and change in ecosystems and studies the learning and instruction in these classroom contexts. Students construct and critique models that they and peers invent and develop foundational knowledge about the roles of variability and change in ecosystem functioning, as well as the roles of models and argumentation in scientific practice.

Developing, critiquing, and revising models is part of the core work of science, but this process is usually invisible to students who more often encounter “final” models of systems or phenomena rather than modeling for sensemaking. The DMOS project endeavors to understand how and to what extent development of teachers’ comfort and proficiency with the modeling practice in the context of community science changes students’ opportunities to participate in modeling within and beyond those investigations.

Our project is a four-year research-practice partnership which examines elementary students’ understanding of and agency with science content knowledge and practices during a community-engaged, place-based environmental science research and monitoring program. We investigate how research informed design features influence these learning outcomes. Our findings will inform replicable models for science standards-aligned school-based community and citizen science (CCS) for youth agency in and with science.

Our project is a four-year research-practice partnership which examines elementary students’ understanding of and agency with science content knowledge and practices during a community-engaged, place-based environmental science research and monitoring program. We investigate how research informed design features influence these learning outcomes. Our findings will inform replicable models for science standards-aligned school-based community and citizen science (CCS) for youth agency in and with science.

This project is a Research and Practice Partnership between two universities and the DC school district to address two problems of practice at the high school level. First, students will engage in computational modeling in science classes to provide all students opportunities to learn computational thinking. Second, teachers will have the opportunity to learn more about the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and develop curriculum to support the standards. The project will create units for four science subjects and investigate the design and implementation of those units.