Professional Development

We investigate in-service teachers’ scientific engagement in a blended online science inquiry course. We analyze a shift from teachers following instructions to doing science themselves, and we characterize it at two levels: first, in how teachers engaged in individual sense-making; and second, in how they oriented to the online community as a space for collaboration and collective knowledge building.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012) on which they are based, describe a new vision for science education that includes having students learn science in a way that more closely aligns to how scientists and engineers work and think. Accomplishing this goal will require teacher educators to make important shifts in the ways they prepare future science teachers (NRC, 2012). Many science teaching methods courses are being reformed to better support future science teachers to meet the ambitious goals of the NGSS.

The present study examined changes in high school biology and technology education pedagogy during the first year of a three-year professional development (PD) program using the INSPIRES educative curriculum. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) calls for the integration of science and engineering through inquiry-based pedagogy that shifts the burden of thinking from the teacher to the student. This call is especially challenging for teachers untrained in inquiry teaching and engineering or science concepts.

Flourishing in today's global society requires citizens that are both intelligent consumers and producers of scientific understanding. Indeed, the modern world is facing ever‐more complex problems that require innovative ways of thinking about, around, and with science. As numerous educational stakeholders have suggested, such skills and abilities are not innate and must, therefore, be taught (e.g., McNeill & Krajcik, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 45(1), 53–78. 2008).

This executive summary captures the results of the National Survey on Supporting Struggling Mathematics Learners in the Middle Grades, a study designed and conducted by EDC. The survey was conducted as part of the Strengthening Mathematics Intervention project, which was funded by the National Science Foundation. This executive summary describes the key results from schools across the United States, highlighting the national landscape of mathematics intervention (MI) classes.

American Museum of Natural History. (2018). Writing a Scientific Explanation. Retrieved from https://www.amnh.org/explore/curriculum-collections/integrating-literac….

Disruptions in Ecosystems is a middle school curriculum unit with supporting teacher materials. The unit includes five chapters, each focused on a specific phenomenon related to ecosystem disruption, including questions around the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone and the invasion of zebra mussels in the Great Lakes and Hudson River.

Kastel, D. (2017, August 25). Classroom videos from disruptions in ecosystems unit [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.teachingchannel.org/blog/2017/08/25/ngss-from-theory-to-pra…

Much of the literature on science teaching suggests that elementary teachers lack relevant prior experiences with science. This study begins to reframe the deficit approach to research in science teaching by privileging the experiences elementary teachers have had with science – both in and out of schools – throughout their lives. Our work uses identity as a lens to examine the complexities of elementary teachers’ narrative accounts of their experiences with science over the course of their lives.