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By taking a responsive approach to the design and enactment of teacher professional development (PD), PD instruction can be tailored to teachers' needs, interests, and concerns. This is of considerable importance in the high school physics teacher PD space, wherein teacher needs turn out to be particularly complex and diverse due to differences in teacher preparation within the discipline. More generally, understanding the degree to which PD programs are responsive to their teachers' needs can support increased responsiveness.

Although most teachers recognize the importance of taking investigative, open-ended approaches to students’ learning experiences, implementing them in high school classes can be challenging for teachers.

Using social network analysis, we sought to characterize the professional collaboration and advice networks among rural science teachers. Furthermore, we explored how the characteristics of individual teachers and distance between teachers affected the likelihood of forming connections. Science teachers in publicly funded rural schools were asked whom they collaborate with and seek advice from and the mode and frequency of their communications. Results were analyzed using UCINET to calculate statistical significance of tie formation.

This study examines how secondary teachers incorporated the six-phase Data Investigation Process (Lee et al., 2022) into classroom lessons following a professional learning experience. Analysis of 13 lesson plans, interviews, and survey responses revealed that while most lessons addressed multiple phases, few supported full engagement across all six. Framing the Problem was the most consistently attended-to phase, often grounded in authentic contexts and clear investigative questions.

When assisting students in a data investigation, it can be useful to help them develop key ways of thinking and dispositions that are helpful in developing expertise in conducting data investigations like a statistician or data scientist. It can be useful for students to see a reminder of this process and key considerations. This poster version of the Data Investigation Process that can be used in your classroom for this purpose.
 

Today, the ability to make sense of data is essential. K-12 students need educational experiences that can assist them in developing data literacy for global citizenry, and career and college pathways related to statistics and data science (e.g., Engel, 2017; Gould, 2017). Statistics and practices with data are included in standards and goals across the K-12 curriculum. Science puts a heavy emphasis on reasoning from and with data to understand scientific phenomena.

This paper describes the design of an innovative online platform that has over 50 hours of learning experiences to support educators in further advancing their understandings and pedagogical skills in teaching statistics and data science to learners age 11-18+. Two frameworks are described that support effective classroom practices: a Data Investigation Process and Seven Dimensions of Teaching Statistics and Data Science.

Teachers’ professional learning often includes online components. This study examined how a case of 37 teachers utilized a specific online asynchronous professional learning platform designed to support teachers’ growth in learning to teach statistics and data science in secondary schools in the United States. The platform’s features and learning materials were designed based on effective online learning designs, supports for self-guided learning, and research on the teaching and learning of statistics and data science.

Science instruction should involve learners in generating and warranting ideas, what we call epistemic generation. In modeling instruction, epistemic generation should be achieved by coordinating a model structure with the experienced world in reciprocal directions denoted as developing models and using models. In the former, a model structure is shaped from experience. In the latter, experience is shaped by a model structure.