Educational Technology

Target Audience:

Read more about Invigorating Statistics Teacher Education Through Professional Online Learning (InSTEP)

Developing Teachers' Epistemic Cognition and Teaching Practices for Supporting Students' Epistemic Practices with Scientific Systems

Principal Investigator:

Susan Yoon

This project aims to investigate needs and challenges in developing an informed public able to evaluate empirical evidence generated from scientific activities. This includes understanding teachers' epistemic goals and practices and how to provide professional development (PD) to improve instruction. The resulting instruction will offer new affordances to advance students' and teachers' learning.

Co-PI(s): Clark Chinn, Rutgers University

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Discipline/Topic:

Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Target Audience:

Read more about Developing Teachers' Epistemic Cognition and Teaching Practices for Supporting Students' Epistemic Practices with Scientific Systems

Design and Development of a K-12 STEM Observation Protocol (Collaborative Research: Dare, Ring-Whalen, and Roehrig)

Principal Investigator:

Elizabeth Ring-Whalen

The purpose of this project is the design and development of a K-12 classroom observation protocol for integrated STEM instruction (STEM-OP). Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, the STEM-OP will be a valid and reliable instrument for use in a variety of educational contexts. The STEM-OP and associated training materials will be available for use by education stakeholders, (e.g., K-12 teachers and district administrators), through a publicly available online platform.

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Target Audience:

Elementary School

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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:

Broadening Participation

Curriculum

Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Systems Reform

Target Audience:

Teachers

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Teaching STEM with Robotics: Design, Development, and Testing of a Research-based Professional Development Program for Teachers

Principal Investigator:

Vikram Kapila

To lower the barriers in STEM disciplines for students, using evidence-based research, we designed and conducted a professional development program that built middle school teachers' capacity to use hands-on robotics and engineering design as the curriculum focus. Through summer workshops, teachers learned to: build and program LEGO robots; create and implement standards-aligned robotics-based STEM lessons; and develop, practice, and examine optimal pedagogical approaches for STEM learning using robotics.

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Target Audience:

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A Practice-Based Online Learning Environment for Scientific Inquiry with Digitized Museum Collections in Middle School Classrooms

Principal Investigator:

Kirsten Butcher

EPIC Bioscience engages middle school students in authentic scientific practices via NGSS-aligned investigations of museum specimens. Students complete interactive activities to build prior knowledge and context, then use digitized specimens to collect and analyze relevant data. Findings are applied to pressing global issues such as biodiversity loss, geographic range changes in populations, and diminishing resources. Key challenges in the development of online, specimen-based science investigations are addressed using example interactions and analyses from EPIC investigations.

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Discipline/Topic:

Science

Cognitive Science

Target Audience:

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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 studentsâ€™ science explanations using using NLP techniques, and feedback to teachers provided through aggregated data about studentsâ€™ writing generated by the system.

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Discipline/Topic:

Science

Technology

Target Audience:

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

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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Target Audience:

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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

Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Target Audience:

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

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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