High

No teacher is an island: Bridging the gap between teacher’s professional practice and research findings

Despite decades of research regarding best practices for the teaching and learning of chemistry, as well as two sets of national reform documents for science education, classroom instruction in high school chemistry classrooms remains largely unchanged. One key reason for this continued gap between research and practice is a reliance on traditional, prescriptive professional development (PD) in place of PD that focuses on changing teachers’ ideas and beliefs. The former view treats teachers as technicians, workers who are supposed to follow a manual to produce student results.

Author/Presenter

Deborah Herrington

Patrick L. Daubenmire

Year
2016
Short Description

This paper outlines some key considerations for developing productive teacher collaborations and provides examples of teacher PD programs that have successfully brought chemistry education research faculty and high school chemistry teachers together to build knowledge and transform teaching.

Kinematics card sort activity: Insight into students’ thinking for students and teacher

Kinematics is a topic students are unknowingly aware of well before entering the physics classroom. Students observe motion on a daily basis. They are constantly interpreting and making sense of their observations, unintentionally building their own understanding of kinematics before receiving any formal instruction. Unfortunately, when students take their prior conceptions to understand a new situation, they often do so in a way that inaccurately connects their learning.

Author/Presenter

Erin Berryhill

Deborah Herrington

Keith Oliver

Year
2016

Tool Trouble: Challenges with using self-report data to evaluate long-term chemistry teacher professional development

The purpose of this study was to compare the ability of different instruments, independently developed and traditionally used for measuring science teachers’ beliefs in short-term interventions, to longitudinally measure teachers’ changing beliefs.

Author/Presenter

Deborah G. Herrington

Ellen J. Yezierski

Senetta F. Bancroft

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2016
Short Description

The purpose of this study was to compare the ability of different instruments, independently developed and traditionally used for measuring science teachers’ beliefs in short-term interventions, to longitudinally measure teachers’ changing beliefs.

Using students' conceptions of air to evaluate a guided-inquiry activity classifying matter using particulate models

This paper describes a guided-inquiry activity designed for the first week of a first-year high school chemistry course. Students manipulated magnetic models of atoms in depicting air and learned to connect the three domains of chemistry: macroscopic, symbolic, and particulate. The purpose of the activity was 2-fold: to remediate misconceptions of foundational chemical concepts such as atoms, molecules, compounds, subscripts, and coefficients; and to help students begin to think in the particulate domain of Johnstone’s triangle when studying chemistry.

Author/Presenter

Amanda Vilardo

Ann H. MacKenzie

Ellen J. Yezierski

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2016
Short Description

This paper describes a guided-inquiry activity designed for the first week of a first-year high school chemistry course.

EarSketch: An Authentic, STEAM-based Approach to Computing Education

Demand for computer scientists is robust, but the pipeline for producing them is not. US universities are only meeting about a third of demand for computer scientists, and recruiting a diverse student body is a struggle; the number of women in computer science has actually declined in the past decade. To help change the perception of the computing field, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology developed EarSketch. EarSketch is an authentic STEAM (STEM + Arts) environment for teaching and learning programming (i.e.

Author/Presenter

Roxanne Moore

Douglas Edwards

Jason Freeman

Brian Magerko

Tom McKlin

Anna Xambo

Year
2016
Short Description

In this paper, we present a description of the EarSketch environment and curriculum. We also present an overview of the classroom environments in which EarSketch has been implemented to date, including professional development feedback, student artifacts, student engagement data, and student achievement.

Iterative Composition, Coding, and Pedagogy: A Case Study in Live Coding With EarSketch

Pervasive definitions of live coding in music focus on the simultaneous modification and execution of code in a live performance setting where a performer shares his screen with the audience. This article considers a role for live coding that does not focus on live performance but rather on educational contexts.

Author/Presenter

Jason Freeman

Brian Magerko

Year
2016
Short Description

This article considers a role for live coding that does not focus on live performance but rather on educational contexts.

EarSketch: A STEAM-Based Approach for Underrepresented Populations in High School Computer Science Education

This article presents EarSketch, a learning environment that combines computer programming with sample-based music production to create a computational remixing environment for learning introductory computing concepts. EarSketch has been employed in both formal and informal settings, yielding significant positive results in student content knowledge and attitudes toward computing as a discipline, especially in ethnic and gender populations that are currently underrepresented in computing fields.

Author/Presenter

Brian Magerko

Jason Freeman

Tom Mcklin

Mike Reilly

Elise Livingston

Scott Mccoid

Andrea Crews-Brown

Year
2016
Short Description

This article presents EarSketch, a learning environment that combines computer programming with sample-based music production to create a computational remixing environment for learning introductory computing concepts.

Assessment design patterns for computational thinking practices in secondary computer science: A first look

This report gives an overview of a principled approach to designing assessment tasks that can generate valid evidence of students’ abilities to think computationally. Principled assessment means designing assessment tasks to measure important knowledge and practices by specifying chains of evidence that can be traced from what students do (observable behaviors) to claims about what they know.

Author/Presenter

Marie Bienkowski

Eric Snow

Daisy Rutstein

Shuchi Grover

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2015
Short Description

This report gives an overview of a principled approach to designing assessment tasks that can generate valid evidence of students’ abilities to think computationally.

Learning to Notice Important Student Mathematical Thinking in Complex Classroom Interactions

Noticing students' mathematical thinking is a key element of effective instruction, but novice teachers do not naturally engage in this practice. Prospective secondary school mathematics teachers were engaged in an intervention grounded in analysis of minimally edited video from local secondary school mathematics classrooms; the goal was to support their ability to notice important student thinking within the complexity of instruction.

Author/Presenter

Shari L. Stockero

Rachel L. Rupnow

Anna E. Pascoe

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2017
Short Description

Noticing students' mathematical thinking is a key element of effective instruction, but novice teachers do not naturally engage in this practice. Prospective secondary school mathematics teachers were engaged in an intervention grounded in analysis of minimally edited video from local secondary school mathematics classrooms; the goal was to support their ability to notice important student thinking within the complexity of instruction. Evidence of participants' learning in five iterations of the intervention is discussed, including their focus on student mathematical thinking, their ability to discuss the mathematics in that thinking, and their ability to notice particular high-leverage instances of student thinking.

Thematic Analysis of Students’ Talk While Solving a Real-world Problem in Geometry

From a social semiotic perspective, students’ use of language is fundamental to mathematical meaning making. We applied thematic analysis to examine students’ use of geometric and contextual ideas while solving a geometry problem that required them to determine the optimal location for a new grocery store on a map of their local community. Students established semantic patterns to connect the problem context to geometry.

Author/Presenter

Anna F. DeJarnette

Gloriana González

Year
2016
Short Description

From a social semiotic perspective, students’ use of language is fundamental to mathematical meaning making. We applied thematic analysis to examine students’ use of geometric and contextual ideas while solving a geometry problem that required them to determine the optimal location for a new grocery store on a map of their local community. Students established semantic patterns to connect the problem context to geometry. Groups differed in how they used geometry in their discussion of the solution, in particular with how students used distance to describe the location of a new grocery store. Overall, students’ knowledge of the problem context served as a resource for them to establish geometric meanings. Thematic analysis, which describes the connections in students’ talk between out-of-school and discipline-specific knowledge, highlights ways in which instruction can build upon students’ prior experiences for the purpose of learning in school.