Equity

This paper examines the use of Imaginative Education (IE) to create an NGSS-aligned middle school engineering curriculum that supports transfer and the development of STEM identity. In IE, cognitive tools—such as developmentally appropriate narratives, mysteries and fantasies—are used to design learning environments that both engage learners and help them organize knowledge productively. We have combined IE with transmedia storytelling to develop two multi-week engineering units and six shorter engineering lessons.

Hayes, K. (2019). Justice in Science Education: How to Honor Student Epistemologies While Supporting 3-Dimensional Science Teaching. In J. Settlage & A. Johnston (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2019 Science Education at the Crossroads Conference (pp. 28-29). Montgomery, AL.

One of the most relentless areas of difficulty in mathematics for children with learning disabilities (LDs) and difficulties is fractions. We report the development and initial testing of an intervention designed to increase access to and advancement in conceptual understanding. Our asset-based theory of change—a tested and confirmed learning trajectory of fraction concepts of students with LDs grounded in student-centered instruction—served as the basis for our multistage scientific design process.

This brief describes how to support equity for students, teachers, and communities through place-based science education strategies.

Coleman, S., Chinn, P., Morrison, D., & Kaupp, L. (2019). How place-based science education strategies can support equity for students, teachers, and communities. STEM Teaching Tools.

This brief describes how to support equity for students, teachers, and communities through place-based science education strategies.

Coleman, S., Chinn, P., Morrison, D., & Kaupp, L. (2019). How place-based science education strategies can support equity for students, teachers, and communities. STEM Teaching Tools.

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.

In this article, we turn our attention to context-based approaches to science instruction. We studied the effects of changes to a set of secondary science teacher education programs, all of which were redesigned with attention to the Secondary Science Teaching with English Language and Literacy Acquisition (SSTELLA) instructional framework, a framework for responsive and contextualized instruction in multilingual science classrooms. Contextualizing science activity is one of the key dimensions of the SSTELLA instructional framework.

Dig deeper into classroom artifacts using research-based learning progressions to enhance your analysis and response to student work, even when most students solve a problem correctly.

Ebby, C. B., Hulbert, E. T., and Fletcher, N. (2019). What can we learn from correct answers? Teaching Children Mathematics, 25(6), 346-353.