High

School engagement researchers have historically focused on academic engagement or academic-related activities. Although academic engagement is vital to adolescents’ educational success, school is a complex developmental context in which adolescents also engage in social interactions while exploring their interests and developing competencies. In this article, school engagement is re-conceptualized as a multi-contextual construct that includes both academic and social contexts of school.

What are evidence standards for evaluating math and science programs? Watch this webinar recording with experts from the American Institutes for Research (AIR) for an engaging webinar about evidence standards. Presenters discussed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) Tiers of Evidence and the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence rating system and how these evidence standards relate to evaluating math and science programs. The presenters discussed how participants can use these resources to strengthen their existing and proposed study designs.

Gould, R. R., S. Sunbury, & Dussault, M. (2014). In praise of messy data: Lessons from the search for alien worlds. The Science Teacher, 31.

The search for habitable planets offers excellent opportunities to advance students’ understanding of core ideas in physics, including gravity and the laws of motion, the interaction of light and matter, and especially the nature of scientific inquiry. Thanks to the development of online telescopes, students can detect more than a dozen of the known exoplanets from the classroom, using data they gather, assess, and interpret for themselves. We present a suite of activities in which students apply basic physics concepts to their investigations of exoplanets.

As part of the STEP UP project, a national initiative to empower high school teachers to inspire young women to pursue physics degrees in college, we developed two lessons for high school physics classes that are intended to facilitate the physics identity development of female students. One discusses physics careers and links to students' own values and goals; the other focuses on a discussion of underrepresentation of women in physics with the intention of having students elicit and examine stereotypes in physics.

As part of the STEP UP project, a national initiative to empower high school teachers to inspire young women to pursue physics degrees in college, we developed two lessons for high school physics classes that are intended to facilitate the physics identity development of female students. One discusses physics careers and links to students' own values and goals; the other focuses on a discussion of underrepresentation of women in physics with the intention of having students elicit and examine stereotypes in physics.