High

In various formats, students at the secondary and postsecondary levels participate in multiweek authentic science research projects. There have been many papers explaining the operations of such programs, but few have provided explicit instruction on how to incorporate authentic communication practices into the student research process. In this paper, we describe how we integrated primary literature into an 8-week online research program for 8th to 11th graders.

Science teacher leaders have been identified as an important lever for the implementation of science education reform. However, science reform implementation is locally controlled and not uniform across districts; therefore, the work of STLs within a reform context can vary. In this descriptive case study, we explore the work of 11 science teacher leaders who support science education reform in a variety of organizational contexts.

This article reports on the first three years of a teacher-led professional development program on the Navajo Nation. We draw on both quantitative and qualitative data from our end-of-year surveys to highlight some of the early lessons we have gathered from the Diné Institute for Navajo Nation Educators (DINÉ).

This study investigated novice mathematics teachers participating in an online teacher education course focused on covariational reasoning and understanding the behavior of functions. The analysis centered on documenting the emergence of participants’ sociomathematical norms for engaging in online asynchronous discussions. In this paper, we characterized participants’ initial mathematical discourse and documented two emergent sociomathematical norms, namely explaining why and emergent shape discourse.

This study investigated novice mathematics teachers participating in an online teacher education course focused on covariational reasoning and understanding the behavior of functions. The analysis centered on documenting the emergence of participants’ sociomathematical norms for engaging in online asynchronous discussions. In this paper, we characterized participants’ initial mathematical discourse and documented two emergent sociomathematical norms, namely explaining why and emergent shape discourse.

Why do some mathematics lessons captivate high school students and others not? This study explores this question by comparing how the content unfolds in the lessons that students rated highest with respect to their aesthetic affordances (e.g., using terms like “intriguing,” “surprising”) with those the same students rated lowest with respect to their aesthetic affordances (e.g., “just ok,” “dull”). Using a framework that interprets the unfolding content across a lesson as a mathematical story, we examine how some lessons can provoke curiosity or enable surprise.

In this study, we present a conceptual tool for guiding teachers’ principled pedagogical actions toward equitable instruction, referred to as the Transforming Science Learning (TSL) framework. The TSL framework was developed to address the challenges of enacting an ideological commitment in local contexts–promoting equity and justice through culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in K-12 science classrooms. TSL consists of five design principles that articulate the goals (the ‘why” of practice), instead of prescribing pedagogical activities (the “what” of practice).

A common approach to scaling up a professional development program is for the researchers who designed the program to prepare teacher leaders to facilitate it at their schools. When researchers eventually leave, however, teacher leaders may receive less support. To ensure that teacher leaders continue receiving support, researchers can prepare district mathematics specialists to assume responsibility for preparing the teacher leaders. Little is known, however, about district mathematics specialists’ role in sustaining, and potentially adapting, professional development programs.

To promote understanding of and interest in working with data among diverse student populations, we developed and studied a high school mathematics curriculum module that examines income inequality in the United States. Designed as a multi-week set of applied data investigations, the module supports student analyses of income inequality using U.S. Census Bureau microdata and the online data analysis tool the Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP).

An ability to engage in system thinking is necessary to understand complex problems. While many pre-college students use system modeling tools, there is limited evidence of student reasoning about causal relationships that interact in diverging and converging chains, and how these affect system behavior. A chemistry unit on gas phenomena was implemented in two successive years with 73 high school students. Although the phenomena could be explained with simple linear causal reasoning, many student models included surprising and problematic causal chains and non-linear patterns.