Elementary

Engineering design challenges offer important opportunities for students to learn science and engineering knowledge and practices. This study examines how students’ engineering notebooks across four units of the curriculum Engineering is Elementary (EiE) support student work during design challenges. Through educational ethnography and discourse analysis, transcripts of student talk and action were created and coded around the uses of notebooks in the accomplishment of engineering tasks.

We evaluated the effects of three instructional interventions designed to support young children’s understanding of area measurement as a structuring process.

In this chapter, we examine what aspects of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching of Proving (MKT-P) can be observed in written scenarios of classroom interactions, produced by pre-service teachers (PSTs) of mathematics. A group of 27 elementary and middle school PSTs completed an online interactive module, intended to trigger reflection on, and crystallization of their knowledge of the roles of examples in proving.

Although teacher education is the formal means by which novices are prepared for teaching, they come having already had significant experience in schools. Preservice teachers have formed habits of “teaching” which influence their learning to teach. This article reports a study of the specific knowledge of and skills with teaching practice that novices bring to teacher education with respect to one teaching practice, eliciting student thinking in elementary mathematics, and describes the use of a standardized teaching simulation to learn about novices’ skills.

Cunningham, C. M., & Kelly, G. J. (2017). Framing Engineering Practices in Elementary School Classrooms. International Journal of Engineering Education, 33(1B), 295–307.

We describe a four-step strategy used in our professional development program to help elementary science teachers recognize and create lesson plans with coherent conceptual storylines. The conceptual storyline of a lesson refers to sequencing its scientific concepts and activities to help students develop a main scientific idea and, often, is an implicit component of a lesson plan.

Measurement is paired with data as a fundamental domain of K–grade 5 mathematics in the Common Core State Standards, and it is one of five core content areas in NCTM’s Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. This book presents lively activities that dovetail with standards and research-based stages of development to support students’ steady growth of understanding of measurement.

This article summarizes how a group of undergraduate regional university faculty built a program for rigorous and research-based science teacher preparation at the elementary level—namely, the “Model of Research-Based Education for Teachers” (MORE for Teachers). First, we discuss the research upon which the program is built: (1) a preparation infrastructure that includes rigorous content, focused teaching methods, and integrated field experiences with an emphasis on quality mentoring from cooperating teachers and (2) a conceptual framework for how people learn science.