Science

This project investigated the development of middle-school students’ understandings and practices of modeling in the context of investigations of variability and change in ecosystems. The project studied how and to what extent students’ participation in distinct forms of modeling informs their classroom-based citizen science investigations.

After meeting our research goals, we have focused on practitioner dissemination. This poster captures the strategies and outcomes of this effort: Restructuring our website to be a sustainable VisChem Community of Practice (CoP) hub to access VisChem animations and resources, promoting the CoP via webinars from the AMTA and AACT and a post on ChemEd X and delivering the VisChem Express Institute to hundreds of secondary chemistry teachers. The VisChem CoP has over 1,400 members.

The Center for Advancing Elementary Science through Assessment, Research, and Technology (CAESART) is a national R&D center lead by EDC with University of Miami, CRESST-UCLA, and Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley. CAESART aims to improve high-quality science instruction and assessment for early elementary learners. Activities include:

Building Insights Through Observation is a project designed to advance our understanding of how science teachers can learn to incorporate arts-based teaching methods and visualizations of authentic science data into their pedagogical practices in order to improve students’ data literacy and critical thinking skills. This project uses geospatial visualizations along with arts-based pedagogies for observing visual features of data visualizations to develop critical thinking skills and practices required to effectively make meaning from scientific data.

Our poster addresses the focal area of Building Partnerships and Collaborating, by examining how the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and Fabens Independent School District (FISD) partnership was created and how collaboration developed among the partners. We examine the implementation of Liberating Structures to develop authentic relationships, establish interaction norms, and open and transparent communication. These three elements of our partnership development resulted in flattening the traditional hierarchy often present in research-practice partnerships.

This research project aims to enhance elementary teacher education in science and computational thinking pedagogy through the use of Culturally Relevant Teaching, i.e. teaching in ways that are relevant to students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The project will support 60 elementary teachers in summer professional development and consistent learning opportunities during the school year to learn about and enact culturally relevant computational thinking into their science instruction.

This research project aims to enhance elementary teacher education in science and computational thinking pedagogy through the use of Culturally Relevant Teaching, i.e. teaching in ways that are relevant to students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The project will support 60 elementary teachers in summer professional development and consistent learning opportunities during the school year to learn about and enact culturally relevant computational thinking into their science instruction.