Computer Science

Strengthening STEM Teaching in Native American Serving Schools through Long-Term, Culturally Responsive Professional Development

Principal Investigator:

This is a 4-year, level II Exploratory study within the teaching strand of DRK12. The research explores the functioning and impact of a nationally-developed STEM professional development model within the Navajo Nation. Teacher participants represent the entire K-12 grade range and multiple content areas, and they all participate in an innovative STEM-content, culturally responsive, 8-month professional development fellowship. We explore the extent to which culturally responsive principles are evident in their self-authored curriculum units.

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Discipline / Topic:

Broadening Participation

Curriculum

Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Professional Development

Target Audience:

Middle School

High School

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Extending and Investigating the Impact of the High School Model-based Educational Resource (Collaborative Research: Passmore and Wilson)

Principal Investigator:

Cynthia Passmore

Chris Wilson

We are collaborating on a project to examine the efficacy of high school biology instructional materials that support teachers' understanding and practice of model-based reasoning as an approach to support students in developing an integrated, multidimensional understanding of science. This poster summarizes our efforts to develop assessment tasks that measure students' ability to use model-based reasoning to make sense of biological phenomena and describes our use of crowdsourced adults to pilot test the tasks.

Co-PI(s): Molly Stuhlsatz, BSCS Science Learning

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Discipline / Topic:

Educational Technology

Professional Development

Target Audience:

Pre-Kindergarten

Elementary School

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Getting Unstuck: Designing and Evaluating Teacher Resources to Support Conceptual and Creative Fluency with Programming

Principal Investigator:

Karen Brennan

We are studying how an online professional learning experience for K-12 computer science teachers can be adapted for use in the classroom. Our goal is to increase teachers' conceptual and creative fluency with the Scratch programming environment. In collaboration with several teachers, we further refined our online professional learning experience for summer 2020. We have also been collaboratively developing and studying educative curriculum materials that promote both teacher and student learning and development.

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Discipline / Topic:

Computer Science

Curriculum

Disciplinary Content Knowledge

Professional Development

Target Audience:

Elementary School

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Teaching STEM with Robotics: Design, Development, and Testing of a Research-based Professional Development Program for Teachers

Principal Investigator:

Vikram Kapila

To lower the barriers in STEM disciplines for students, using evidence-based research, we designed and conducted a professional development program that built middle school teachers' capacity to use hands-on robotics and engineering design as the curriculum focus. Through summer workshops, teachers learned to: build and program LEGO robots; create and implement standards-aligned robotics-based STEM lessons; and develop, practice, and examine optimal pedagogical approaches for STEM learning using robotics.

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Discipline / Topic:

Disciplinary Content Knowledge

Educational Technology

Professional Development

Target Audience:

Middle School

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STEM Sea, Air, and Land Remotely Operated Vehicle Design Challenges for Rural, Middle School Youth

Principal Investigator:

Guenter Maresch

STEM SEALs builds collaborative partnerships between North Florida College and local middle schools to bolster STEM pathways for students in this region. It involves the development of inexpensive, rigorous, and versatile design challenges to expose rural middle school students to high quality STEM experiences. Researchers study the feasibility and efficacy of these experiences to promote greater awareness of STEM pathways, increase readiness for STEM study; and generate student identity as STEM-able, STEM-skilled, and STEM-belonging.

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Discipline / Topic:

Target Audience:

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From Access to Sustainability: Investigating Ways to Foster Sustainable Use of Computational Modeling in K-12 Science Classrooms

Principal Investigator:

Paulo Blikstein

Our vision is to make computational modeling a sustained practice in middle school science classrooms. We are working closely with teachers to design a tool and curricula that integrate computational modeling with data practices and enables students to move towards unpacking models and their underlying assumptions. Our research questions involve investigating 1. students modeling trajectories in this environment; 2. how classrooms norms develop over time; and, 3. the interplay between computational modeling and data practices.

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