Curriculum

The Framework for K‐12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards propose that students learn core ideas and practices related to engineering as well as science. To do so, students will need high‐quality curricular materials designed to meet these goals. We report an efficacy study of an elementary engineering curriculum, Engineering is Elementary (EiE) that includes a set of hypothesized critical components designed to encourage student engagement in practices, connect engineering and science learning, and reach diverse students.

The CRIS “7e” lesson plan template, adapted from the Next Generation Science “5e”, centers the importance of including Elders and Environment in Indigenous STEM teaching and learning. The template is a way for teachers to weave Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Western Science into lessons, and has been formative in helping team members integrate community knowledge and land-based education into science learning experiences. 

We report on the use of bilingual constructed response science assessments in the context of a research and development partnership with secondary school science teachers. Given the power that assessments have in today’s education systems, our project provided a series of workshops for teachers where they explored students’ emergent reform-oriented science meaning-making in our project-designed assessments.

The success of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and similar reforms is contingent upon the quality of teaching, yet the shifts in teaching practice required are substantial. In this study, we propose and validate a model of adaptive expertise needed for teachers to successfully deliver NGSS-informed computer-supported complex systems curricula in high school science classrooms.

Incorporating scientific uncertainty as part of science teaching means acknowledging that there may be incomplete or potentially limited scientific information when scientists draw conclusions. In the geosciences, scientists routinely make inferences about the Earth based on observations of the present, and test those observations against hypotheses about Earth’s history and processes that are not readily observable.

Recent reform efforts in science education include a focus on science practices. Teachers require support in integrating these practices into instruction. Multimedia educative curriculum materials (MECMs), digital materials explicitly designed to support teacher learning, offer one potential resource for this critical need. Consequently, the authors investigated how teachers used MECMs and whether that use impacted their beliefs about the practice of scientific argumentation. They conducted a randomised experimental study with 90 middle school science teachers in the USA.

Implementation of reform curricula requires teachers to adopt new approaches to teaching. Research has provided promising results about the influence of educative curriculum on teachers’ learning and instruction. However, this approach generally focuses on teachers as isolated learners. Using a design-based research approach, the authors developed a web-based tool, iPlan, which provides access to educative curriculum materials in an online interactive learning platform.