Elementary

Strategies and strategic processing within science education are designed to help students learn not only what scientists have come to understand about the world but also how they learn it. Although many domain-general strategies can be implemented in science classrooms, some strategies are either specific to science or are encouraged within science. Historically, concept development and conceptual change approaches and empirical investigations dominated science’s strategies and strategic processing. More recently, argumentation, science as modeling, and the incorporation of socio-scientific topics dominate the strategies and strategic processing within science teaching and learning. Challenges to more widespread use of these approaches include lack of teacher experience and pedagogical knowledge around the strategies, as well as time and curricular limitations. Teacher education and professional development programs should seek to explicitly implement contemporary science strategy interventions to improve upon their use in K-12 classrooms and other learning environments. Doing so effectively will require well-researched and validated instructional scaffolds to facilitate the teaching and use of contemporary science learning strategies. This paper was prepared for the 2020 AERA Annual Meeting.

This study compares web usage data with interviews from 41 participants, who are members of an online professional development site called the Everyday Mathematics Virtual Learning Community (VLC), to explore how elementary school teachers learn from classroom video.

This poster shares data from a Grades K–2 cross sectional study that examined how students' thinking about equations and the meaning of the equal sign were shaped by their experiences exploring equations with pan balances and number balances. The study found that these tools afforded students opportunities to reconsider their initial interpretations of equations, connect the idea of a balancing scale to a balancing equation, and notice structure in equations. In addition, these tools helped reveal student difficulties with the ways in which they interpreted equations and the meaning of the equal sign. This poster was created for the SREE Spring 2020 Conference.

The context for this study was an intervention that provided professional development (PD) for preschool (pre-K) and kindergarten (K) teachers and science engagement activities for families. The research sought to determine the impact of the intervention and the extent to which parent engagement adds to student learning. These presentation slides were prepared for the 2020 Annual International NARST Conference.

Each short video provides ideas for family science activities for preschool-grade 3 students that reinforce NGSS 3D learning.