Middle

Climate change, and the rise of the natural hazards that climate change brings, has been at the top of news feeds every week over the past year. Extreme events such as floods, droughts, and wildfires are expected to increase in the future. What does that mean for those of us living in the path of one of these hazards? Our GeoHazard project is exploring this question with middle and high school teachers and students across the country.

Understanding Earth’s tectonic plate system dynamics is complicated though it is the central paradigm to explain transformations of Earth’s surface. The landforms and geodynamic events resulting from plates interacting are too massive to observe at scales of human experience. It is difficult for students to connect plate movements to geologic features like the Andes Mountains and geodynamic events like earthquakes. As such, the conventional teaching of plate tectonics rarely involves student-led systematic explorations.

Our planet’s surface is in constant motion. Large pieces of Earth’s crust and upper mantle, known as tectonic plates, continually move toward and away from each other at a rate of millimeters to centimeters each year. Over geologic time, their relative motions determine everything from the types of boundaries they form to the distribution of rocks and landforms on Earth’s surface and the location and frequency of earthquake and volcanic eruptions.

Pallant, A., Lord, T., Pryputniewicz, S., & McDonald, S. (2022). Models for developing explanations of earth's dynamic plate system. Science Scope, 45(4), 20-28.

In this study, our team developed and is studying the use of an Online Practice Suite (OPS) composed of a coordinated and scaffolded collection of three practice-based online simulations designed to support the development of preservice teachers' (PSTs’) abilities, skills, beliefs, and understanding around one ambitious teaching practice within mathematics and science: facilitating discussions that engage students in argumentation.

Decades of motivation research have yielded a set of Motivation Design Principles (MDPs) that can be leveraged to support the development of student motivation and engagement in the classroom. This article addresses the translation of these guiding principles to teacher professional learning and subsequently, classroom practice.

Decades of motivation research have yielded a set of Motivation Design Principles (MDPs) that can be leveraged to support the development of student motivation and engagement in the classroom. This article addresses the translation of these guiding principles to teacher professional learning and subsequently, classroom practice.

Decades of motivation research have yielded a set of Motivation Design Principles (MDPs) that can be leveraged to support the development of student motivation and engagement in the classroom. This article addresses the translation of these guiding principles to teacher professional learning and subsequently, classroom practice.

Lee, H.S., Mojica, G. M., & Thrasher, E. (2022). Digging into data: Illustrating an investigative process. Statistics Teacher.

With a call for schools to infuse data across the curriculum, many are creating curricula and examining students’ thinking in data-intensive problems. As the discipline of statistics education broadens to data science education, there is a need to examine how practices in data science can inform work in K-12. We synthesize literature about statistics investigation processes, data science as a field and practices of data scientists. Further, we provide results from an ethnographic and interview study of the work of data scientists.