Technology

Understanding How Integrated Computational Thinking, Engineering Design, and Mathematics Can Help Students Solve Scientific and Technical Problems in Career Technical Education

INITIATE is a 3-year, STEM+C Partnership Program Design and Development project that partners high school Mathematics and Career Technical Education (CTE) teachers in Toledo Public Schools (TPS). Due to mathematics oftentimes serving as a gatekeeper for further STEM study, including technical careers, and to the strong reciprocal relationship between mathematics, computational thinking, and preparation for STEM careers, the project includes teachers of Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, and Statistics/Analysis.
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Discipline/Topic:
Computer Science
Engineering
Mathematics
Science
Technology
Broadening Participation
Curriculum
Disciplinary Content Knowledge
Target Audience:
High School

Transforming Scientific Practices to Promote Students Interest and Motivation in the Life Sciences: A Teacher Leadership Development Intervention

Principal Investigator:
Pauline Chinn

How Do Teacher Leaders Transform Scientific Practices to Promote Students Interest and Motivation in STEM? Formal and informal K-12+ educators learn to employ strategies of community mapping, curricular mapping and place-based, culturally sustaining pedagogy to write, teach, and evaluate NGSS lessons that engage underrepresented students in mathematics, life, earth, and physical sciences. Two case studies highlight how educators apply these strategies to intersect three domains: experiential/place-based learning, culturally sustaining learning, and disciplinary learning .

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Discipline/Topic:
Engineering
Mathematics
Science
Technology
Assessment
Broadening Participation
Curriculum
Disciplinary Content Knowledge
Educational Technology
Pedagogical Content Knowledge
Systems Reform
Target Audience:
Teachers

Environmental Innovation Challenges: Teaching and Learning Science Practices in the Context of Complex Earth Systems

Principal Investigator:
Gillian Puttick

This project investigates learning as students, supported by social media and crowdsourcing, design and test innovations focused on reducing carbon emissions. Our hypothesis is: Competitive Challenges supported by social media and crowdsourcing will engage a diverse array of students in sustained and meaningful scientific inquiry. We anticipate that team members will engage with each other and other teams, using such science practices as modeling, experimentation, error-analysis, argumentation, representation and communication.

Co-PI(s): Brian Drayton, TERC

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Discipline/Topic:
Technology
Broadening Participation
Target Audience:
Middle School
High School

Taking STEM Enrichment Camps Virtual: Strategies & Reflections from Quick Pivot Due to COVID-19

Engineering
Science
Technology
Broadening Participation
Gaming/Virtual Environments
Middle

Since COVID-19 began spreading in the US and quickly established as a global pandemic in March of 2020, the NSF-funded STEM SEALS team at North Florida College faced the touch decision to either

Author/Presenter

Rebecca Zulli Lowe

Adrienne Smith

Christie Prout

G. G. Maresch

Christopher Bacot

Lura Sapp

Bill Eustace

Lead Organization(s)
North Florida Community College (NFCC)
Year
2021
Short Description

This exploratory study aimed to (1) identify the  barriers to moving STEM enrichment programming in a rural environment from in-person to virtual activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, (2) describe key decisions that were made in transitioning to the virtual format along with the rationale behind those decisions, and (3) disseminate best practices that emerged from the inaugural effort.

Resource(s)
Submission_3.9.2021.pdf

STEM Sea, Air, and Land Remotely Operated Vehicle Design Challenges for Rural, Middle School Youth

Principal Investigator:
Guenter Maresch
STEM SEALs builds collaborative partnerships between North Florida College and local middle schools to bolster STEM pathways for students in this region. It involves the development of inexpensive, rigorous, and versatile design challenges to expose rural middle school students to high quality STEM experiences. Researchers study the feasibility and efficacy of these experiences to promote greater awareness of STEM pathways, increase readiness for STEM study; and generate student identity as STEM-able, STEM-skilled, and STEM-belonging.
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Discipline/Topic:
Computer Science
Engineering
Mathematics
Science
Technology
Curriculum
Target Audience:
Middle School

Supporting Science Learning and Teaching in Middle School Classrooms through Automated Analysis of Students' Writing (Collaborative Research: Passonneau and Puntambekar)

Principal Investigator:
Sadhana Puntambekar
This project will design a sociotechnical system to automatically assess students written scientific explanations during science problem solving. The project will use two complementary mechanisms to provide feedback: automated assessment and feedback to students’ science explanations using using NLP techniques, and feedback to teachers provided through aggregated data about students’ writing generated by the system.
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Discipline/Topic:
Science
Technology
Educational Technology
Target Audience:
Middle School

Professional Development Supports for Teaching Bioinformatics through Mobile Learning

Principal Investigator:
Susan Yoon
Bioinformatics is an emerging area of research that develops new knowledge through computational analysis of vast biological data. This project investigates the professional development (PD) supports needed for teaching bioinformatics at the high school. Building from a robust literature in PD design research, project team worked with science teachers to co-design instructional modules to engage students with core bioinformatics concepts and data literacies, by focusing on local community health issues supported through mobile learning activities.
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Discipline/Topic:
Mathematics
Science
Technology
Classroom Practice
Curriculum
Disciplinary Content Knowledge
Educational Technology
Professional Development
Target Audience:
High School

PBS News Hour Student Reporting Labs StoryMaker: STEM-Integrated Student Journalism

Principal Investigator:
Leah Clapman
Sneak peek at StoryMaker, a video storytelling platform /educator co-learning community supporting students to produce videos about STEM projects.
PI: Leah Clapman, PBS NewsHour
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Discipline/Topic:
Science
Technology
Broadening Participation
Classroom Practice
Curriculum
Educational Technology
Pedagogical Content Knowledge
Target Audience:
Middle School
High School

Online Practice Suite: Practice Spaces, Simulations and Virtual Reality Environments for Preservice Teachers to Learn to Facilitate Argumentation Discussions in Math and Science

Principal Investigator:
Jamie Mikeska

This poster provides an overview of our three-year project where researchers are using a design-based research approach to develop, pilot, and refine a set of coordinated and complementary practice-based activities that teacher education programs can deploy to provide practice-based learning opportunities for preservice teachers. The goal is to help the preservice teachers to engage in authentic, purposeful, and scaffolded approximations of practice as they develop their ability to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions in mathematics and science.

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Discipline/Topic:
Mathematics
Science
Technology
Assessment
Curriculum
Educational Technology
Target Audience:
Post-secondary

Assessing College-Ready Computational Thinking (Collaborative Research: Brown and Wilson)

Principal Investigator:
Mark Wilson

This project seeks to develop and validate learning progressions and items with dynamic features to generate machine-scorable student responses for assessing computational thinking, in a test of college-ready critical reasoning skills, and to integrate these items into an existing online assessment system, the Berkeley Assessment System Software (BASS). This assessment is intended to be useful for formative and summative purposes in high-school and introductory college-level STEM classes, including mathematics and computer science courses.

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Discipline/Topic:
Computer Science
Technology
Assessment
Educational Technology
Target Audience:
High School
Post-secondary
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