Science

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.

The “Genes, Traits & Change over Time” middle school curriculum unit integrates core ideas in genetics, heredity, and natural selection. This 4-5 week, NGSS-friendly unit includes scaffolded practice in working with models, crafting explanations, and identifying cause and effect relationships. We will report findings from a nation-wide efficacy test of the unit as well as case studies of classroom implementation and individual students’ learning.

Building Insights through Observation is an early stage design and development project that is studying the application of arts-based approaches to support students in observing and analyzing visual information, and to improve teachers’ knowledge and practice related to teaching with scientific data. This design-based research, conducted over four years, will iteratively develop, test, and refine a cross-disciplinary instructional framework and professional development model with two cohorts of middle school science teachers.

Young children naturally engage in science and engineering practices (SEPs) through play in sophisticated ways. We are developing professional learning modules for early childhood and elementary educators to recognize and deepen children's engagement with SEPs while leveraging SciEPOP, as a professional online learning tool. This poster explores the design of these modules to engage educators in recognizing when children are engaging in SEPs through play and consider approaches to deepening and extending such engagements.