Curriculum

Teachers play a central role in designing structures which encourage the development of students’ individual creative capacity and the classroom’s sense of community. We offer considerations for designing engaging and collaborative experiences in elementary and intermediate computing education.

Studying moths is an excellent way to include students in science practices by introducing them to a ubiquitous but under-appreciated animal group that can be found in their local places, including urban, suburban, agricultural, forested, and other habitats. In this paper, we share a simple, low-cost method that can allow individual students or groups to collect moth specimens and begin to ask and answer questions about moth diversity and abundance in their local community.

This collection of curriculum units focus on the biology topics of natural selection, matter and energy, and genetics. Each unit contains a series of lessons, videos, and materials for students and teachers.

This curriculum workbook details a design process for engaging elementary students in citizen science investigations that are relevant to their school district’s curriculum and school site. The citizen science guide is designed to help users critically examine potential citizen science projects to determine whether they can be easily adapted for use in a classroom curriculum and schoolyard setting.

The ASET Toolkit is a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) planning toolkit designed to help science educators plan lessons and units that integrate the 3 dimensions outlined in the Framework (NRC, 2012). The toolkit includes: 1) Dialogic tools that foster and support deepening awareness and understanding of how to make the significant shifts in instruction, learning, and formative assessment required by the new science reform documents, and 2) Analytical tools for revising existing and/or developing new curriculum that better supports 3-dimensional teaching, learning, and formative assessment of student learning.

With the LRHE curriculum, student learning is used in the generation of solutions to local problems, such as increasing indigenous populations of insects within local urban neighborhoods. The learning approach—solutioning—emphasizes learning life science content through the NGSS science and engineering practices.

Do you want to learn more about complex ecological systems, nature-culture relations, and field-based science? These storyline frameworks are designed for educators working in a variety of places (community-based organizations of all types, homes, schools). Each framework provides in-depth, research-based information about its topic, as well as a variety of appendices that help educators put their new learning into practice. These include vignettes that show the ideas in practice and a self-assessment that educators can use to reflect on their current and future thinking and practice.

This collection offers K-12 curricula, activity guides, and other resources to support hands-on, inquiry-based investigations of the ecosystems and organisms around us. Themes include: Hudson River ecology, urban ecosystems, schoolyard ecology, biodiversity, water and watersheds, and data exploration and nature of science. Additional resources are available for home and distance learning.

The Transition to Algebra (TTA) curriculum seeks to quickly give students the mathematical knowledge, skills, and confidence to succeed in a standard first-year algebra class and to show them that they can explore mathematics and actually enjoy it. TTA is a full-year algebra support curriculum that can run concurrently with first-year algebra. It is designed to build students' algebraic habits of mind as they explore algebraic logic puzzles that connect to and extend algebra course topics and learn broadly applicable tools and strategies to help them make sense of what they are learning in algebra. Students discuss and refine their ideas as they work through mental mathematics activities, written puzzles, spoken dialogues, and hands-on explorations that engage them in cultivating mathematical knowledge, intuition, and skills.

This portal contains classroom-ready assessments for elementary and middle school teachers to use formatively to gain insights into their students’ progress on achieving NGSS performance expectations.