Undergraduate

Creating Inclusive PreK–12 STEM Learning Environments

Brief CoverBroadening participation in PreK–12 STEM provides ALL students with STEM learning experiences that can prepare them for civic life and the workforce.

Author/Presenter

Malcom Butler

Cory Buxton

Odis Johnson Jr.

Leanne Ketterlin-Geller

Catherine McCulloch

Natalie Nielsen

Arthur Powell

Year
2018
Short Description

This brief offers insights from National Science Foundation-supported research for education leaders and policymakers who are broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, and/or mathematics (STEM). Many of these insights confirm knowledge that has been reported in research literature; however, some offer a different perspective on familiar challenges.

‘If You Wanted to Take this Model and Throw Nitrogen at It, It Would Fit’: Synthesis Approach to Modelling to Learn About Biogeochemical Cycles

The literature on scientific modelling practices in science education has provided a fruitful discussion on how learners tend to view models vs. how and what they should think about them. One approach is to teach students that models are abstractions so that they do not view them as a copy of phenomena they represent. Although teaching students that models are abstractions is a successful strategy in modelling instruction, we still do not know how students engage in and work towards the process of abstraction while they develop a model to understand scientific ideas.

Author/Presenter

Ayça K. Fackler

Daniel K. Capps

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2023
Short Description

This qualitative study examines how a group of undergraduate and graduate students in an upper-level ecosystem ecology course at a research university in the southeastern part of the United States engage in a task that requires constructing an abstract representation of how biogeochemical cycles work by using a specific approach to modelling, namely synthesis modelling.

Comparing How College Mathematics Instructors and High-School Teachers Recognize Professional Obligations of Mathematics Teaching when Making Instructional Decisions

This paper investigates how mathematics instructors' recognition of the professional obligations of mathematics teaching varies based on their institutional environment, specifically whether they teach high school or college mathematics. Using an instrument that measures instructors’ recognition of four hypothesized professional obligations, we surveyed 471 US high school mathematics teachers and 239 university mathematics instructors to measure the extent to which they recognized professional obligations when evaluating the appropriateness of certain instructional actions.

Author/Presenter

Inah Ko

Patricio Herbst

Mollee Shultz 

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2023
Short Description

This paper investigates how mathematics instructors' recognition of the professional obligations of mathematics teaching varies based on their institutional environment, specifically whether they teach high school or college mathematics.

COVID-19 as a Magnifying Glass: Exploring the Importance of Relationships as Education Students Learn and Teach Robotics via Zoom

Ed+gineering, an NSF-funded program, adapted hands-on robotics instruction for online delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This qualitative multiple case study shares the experiences of participating education students in spring 2021 as they collaborated virtually with engineering students and fifth graders to engineer bioinspired robots in an afterschool technology club adapted to be virtual.

Author/Presenter

Jennifer Kidd

Krishnanand Kaipa

Kristie Gutierrez

Min Jung Lee

Pilar Pazos

Stacie I. Ringleb

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2022
Short Description

Ed+gineering, an NSF-funded program, adapted hands-on robotics instruction for online delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This qualitative multiple case study shares the experiences of participating education students in spring 2021 as they collaborated virtually with engineering students and fifth graders to engineer bioinspired robots in an afterschool technology club adapted to be virtual.

Investigating the Mangle of Teaching Oxidation–Reduction with the VisChem Approach: Problematising Symbolic Traditions that Undermine Chemistry Concept Development

Specific to the topic of oxidation–reduction (redox), teachers are obligated by the discipline to prioritise symbolic traditions such as writing equations, documenting oxidation states, and describing changes (e.g., what undergoes oxidation/reduction). Although the chemistry education research community endorses connecting the vertices of Johnstone's triangle, how symbolic traditions undermine chemistry concept development, especially during lesson planning and teaching, is underexplored. To clarify this gap, we use the Mangle of Practice framework to unpack the clash between symbolic vs.

Author/Presenter

Meng-Yang M. Wu

Ellen J. Yezierski

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2023
Short Description

Specific to the topic of oxidation–reduction (redox), teachers are obligated by the discipline to prioritise symbolic traditions such as writing equations, documenting oxidation states, and describing changes (e.g., what undergoes oxidation/reduction). Although the chemistry education research community endorses connecting the vertices of Johnstone's triangle, how symbolic traditions undermine chemistry concept development, especially during lesson planning and teaching, is underexplored. To clarify this gap, we use the Mangle of Practice framework to unpack the clash between symbolic vs. particulate-focused instruction.

The Untapped Potential of Early Career Researchers in Academic Publishing: Lessons Learned from the Journal of Emerging Investigators Model

Key points:

Author/Presenter

Claire E. Otero

Victoria Osinski

Kari A. Mattison

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2022
Short Description

The lack of formal training in peer review can be detrimental to the publishing activities of early career researchers, including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Lack of recognition of the work of early career researchers (ECRs) in review means that journals cannot easily identify them as potential reviewers in the future. Participation as peer-reviewers increases understanding in early career researchers of their own writing and review process. ECRs can be highly motivated to volunteer for journal editorial work—Journal of Emerging Investigators encourages this by offering many different roles. Publishers that utilize and train early career researchers as peer-reviewers can prevent poor reviewer practices.

Qualifying Domains of Student Struggle in Undergraduate General Chemistry Laboratory

Learning and learning goals in undergraduate chemistry laboratory have been a popular research topic for the past three decades due to calls for curriculum reform, cost justification, and overall efficacy of necessary skill development. While much work has been done to assess curricular interventions on students’ learning and attitudes towards lab, few have discussed the increased difficulties of these non-traditional laboratory activities or the obstacles students must overcome in the laboratory setting.

Author/Presenter

Clarissa Keen

Hannah Sevian

Year
2021
Short Description

The work presented here focuses on student struggles in undergraduate general chemistry laboratory activities, the source of these struggles, and the actions students take to overcome them. Using an activity theoretical lens and multiple domains (cognitive, epistemological, socioemotional, and psychomotor), we developed a domains-of-struggle framework which encompasses how struggles emerge through contradictions within the laboratory activity system.

Exploring the Viral Spread of Disease and Disinformation

The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of mathematical models in predicting the spread of the coronavirus (Srinivas 2020; Stevens & Muyskens 2020) and assessing the effectiveness of various safety measures in reducing that spread (Li et al 2020). These models can be extremely sophisticated, drawing on the expertise of applied mathematicians, epidemiologists, public health experts, and others, but at its core, there is a notion of exponential growth that is relevant for the secondary mathematics curriculum.

Author/Presenter

Samuel Otten

Julia Bemke

Jerred Webb

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2022
Short Description

The tasks described in this chapter are intended to build connections between these real-world dangers of viral spread and some relevant topics from the secondary mathematics curriculum. We also explore a link between mathematical reasoning and media literacy—the ability to discern the commercial, ideological, or political motivations of media and the recognition that receivers negotiate the meaning of messages (Aufderheide, 1993)—so that, just as we know to take safety precautions with regard to an airborne coronavirus, we can also help our students learn to take precautions against the spread of misinformation on social media.

Classroom Orchestration of Computer Simulations for Science and Engineering Learning: A Multiple-Case Study Approach

This multiple case study focused on the implementation of a computer-aided design (CAD) simulation to help students engage in engineering design to learn science concepts. Our findings describe three case studies that adopted the same learning design and adapted it to three different populations, settings, and classroom contexts: at the middle-school, high-school, and pre-service teaching levels.

Author/Presenter

Jennifer Chiu

Ying Ying Seah

James P. Bywater

Corey Schimpf

Tugba Karabiyik

Sanjay Rebello

Charles Xie

Short Description

This multiple case study focused on the implementation of a computer-aided design (CAD) simulation to help students engage in engineering design to learn science concepts. Our findings describe three case studies that adopted the same learning design and adapted it to three different populations, settings, and classroom contexts: at the middle-school, high-school, and pre-service teaching levels.