Science

In this article, we present a framework of culturally relevant science and mathematics pedagogy (CRSMP), which is grounded in the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy. It delineates practices ranging from the most accessible and easy-to-implement, to the most challenging and often contentious ways to teach mathematics and science. We provide examples of CRSMP that re-position marginalized learners in relation to science and mathematics.

Building on the literature, we designed a practical framework to support attention to equity and justice in science teacher education coursework. This framework presents four approaches for including justice moves in elementary science lessons, from increasing opportunity and access in science, to increasing identity and representation in science, to expanding what counts as science, to seeing science as a part of justice movements.

This study employs the Experiential Learning Theory framework to investigate students’ use of a wildfire simulation. We analyzed log files automatically generated by middle and high school students (n = 1515) as they used a wildfire simulation and answered associated prompts in three simulation-based tasks.

Elementary teachers require support through professional learning activities to enhance their climate change literacy and bolster their self-efficacy for teaching climate change. This study explores methods for supporting in-service elementary teachers’ self-efficacy in climate change teaching by examining the impact of professional learning activities that incorporate learning technologies on climate change literacy.

The changing landscape of geoscience learning has initiated growing interest in engaging science learners with climate data. One approach to teaching climate is the application of broadly accessible digital science curricula, which often include data tools such as visualizations, data representations, and simulations embedded within digital science curricula. We are specifically interested in how students and teachers grapple with scientific uncertainty in digital curricula.

We discuss transforming STEM education using three aspects: learning progressions (LPs), constructed response performance assessments, and artificial intelligence (AI). Using LPs to inform instruction, curriculum, and assessment design helps foster students’ ability to apply content and practices to explain phenomena, which reflects deeper science understanding. To measure the progress along these LPs, performance assessments combining elements of disciplinary ideas, crosscutting concepts and practices are needed.

In this study, we used Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) to represent data generated by Natural Language Processing (NLP) analytics during an activity based on the Knowledge Integration (KI) framework. The activity features a web-based adaptive dialog about energy transfer in photosynthesis and cellular respiration. Students write an initial explanation, respond to two adaptive prompts in the dialog, and write a revised explanation. The NLP models score the KI level of the initial and revised explanations. They also detect the ideas in the explanations and the dialog responses.

In this article, we describe how we use classroom phenomena to help fifth grade students develop testable questions and productive investigations. Engaging students in observing and seeking to explain a classroom decomposition chamber has helped them to engage more successfully in the science and engineering practices (SEPs) of asking questions, planning and carrying out investigations, and constructing explanations.

In the decade following the release of the Next-Generation Science Standards in the United States, many efforts have occurred to reform K-12 science teaching. While not all states have adopted NGSS, 48 of 50 have adopted standards that are consistent with the underlying philosophy and research base of NGSS: three-dimensional (3D) science. This scoping review explores the research activity on classroom implementation of 3D Science in secondary schools in the US.

This paper describes how plate tectonics and rock genesis, two topics that are typically addressed separately in secondary Earth science classes, can be taught together as an integrated system. We define the TecRocks Reasoning Framework, developed to support student reasoning about rock formation situated in the context of plate tectonics. We also explain how we leveraged the framework in the designs of a new curriculum, interactive computer simulation, and assessment instrument. We show how the instrument was used to evaluate the curriculum, which included the computer simulation.