Curriculum

Over a period of five years the SmartGraphs project developed HTML5 software for teaching and learning STEM subjects that make use of line graphs and scatter plots. SmartGraphs activities help students understand the “story” represented by a graph. The project created dozens of activities for algebra, physical science, and other STEM subjects, as well as an authoring system allowing non-computer-programmers to create and disseminate free online activities.

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) offer an opportunity for districts to push teachers to enact ambitious practices around instruction and curriculum use. However, taking up ambitious practices entails a number of challenges, some of which were evident during the NCTM Standards reform movement in the 1990s and early 2000s, and some of which reflect new approaches and new policy contexts.

The Next Generation Science Standards present important shifts for science teaching, assessment, and curriculum materials—focusing on core explanatory ideas, a central role for science and engineering practices, and coherence across time and science disciplines. These challenges for practice require new theoretical advances.

The goal of this session is to discuss possibilities, progress, and problems in using learning progression research to support improved assessment and instruction in middle school and high school classrooms.

In this session, several learning progression-related DR K–12 projects share findings and discuss questions around two issues:

The three panelists in this session are in the last one or two years of their game-based learning projects, and all have done extensive work in supporting use of their games in classroom learning. As their work has progressed, each has discovered valuable ways to support teachers as well as encountered surprises in what teachers wanted (and didn’t want), and now recognize things they wished they had learned in the beginning of their projects. Session participants leave with recommendations they can use in their current projects, including: