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Inquiry-based educative curricula and teachers who use these curricula as intended are major factors in achieving successful student learning outcomes in science. Educative curricula can also bring about significant change in teacher practice. Educative curricula are generally accompanied by carefully designed print teacher guides that facilitate the implementation of curricula, encourage new instructional strategies, and accommodate curriculum modifications while retaining fidelity to the developers’ content sequencing and pedagogy.

Background/Context: Educational and societal phenomena can converge to draw attention to a new focus, such as ELs and STEM, and then trigger new research interests. A funding program can play a critical role in shaping these new research interests by prioritizing specific research topics and designs or by requiring particular specializations of researchers.

This brief gives an overview—and by no means a comprehensive one—of several NGSS-aligned projects in the areas of curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional development.

No one curriculum can meet the needs of all students and teachers. This video describes why a teacher might want to modify a curriculum and how he or she would go about it.

An effective curriculum helps you support students' science learning, understanding, and achievement. But what does "effective" mean? This video gives you the inside scoop on what makes a curriculum effective and flags some common pitfalls to avoid.

New technologies are increasingly giving science teachers the ability to access and customize science lessons. However, there is substantial debate in the literature about whether and under what conditions teacher customization benefit student learning. In this study, we examined teacher customization of inquiry-based science lessons from an online lesson portal. We found that students who completed teacher-customized lessons had greater improvements in science content understanding than students who completed non-customized lessons.

The Innovative Technology in Science Inquiry (ITSI) project is a learning portal with hundreds of free, customizable science, math,