Science

This project is developing and testing a high school climate change unit and professional learning experience in which teachers localize part of the unit to make it relevant to their students and community context. The study is using a cohort-control quasi-experimental design to examine the impact of the unit and professional learning experience on dimensions of teacher practice and students' sense of agency with environmental science.

The goal of TL4CS is to explore how elementary school citizen science (CS) can support students’ engagement with science content and practices. The study addresses three research questions: (1) What kinds of supports foster teacher learning about effective school-based CS? (2) How do supports for teacher learning shape the way teachers enact school-based CS? and (3) What is the potential of school-based CS for positively influencing student learning and student attitudes toward nature and science?

Indigenous students experience persistent inequitable outcomes in schools, particularly in STEM. Since teacher quality is one of the most important school-based factors impacting K12 students’ learning and engagement in schools, our project provides long-term professional development to teachers in rural, Indigenous-serving schools to support teachers’ development of culturally responsive STEM curriculum units. We provide an overview of our professional development model, and share findings from our work with over 100 teachers during four program years.

The STEM SEALs program at North Florida College explores methods for improvement of teaching and learning STEM in rural areas. It consists of three disciplines, “Sea”, “Land”, and “Air”, and three phases, design, review and summer institute for each of the disciplines.
 

The poster will look at the impact of the annual STEM for All Video Showcases as well as the STEM for All Multiplex. It will discuss implications for knowledge sharing among grantees and dissemination efforts in the future.

Teacher portfolios have long been used to support professional reflection and learning. We developed a new type of e-portfolio tool enabling teachers to efficiently capture, annotate, and share multimedia evidence of student learning and instruction (documents, pictures, video) in mobile devices. This tool supported vertical professional learning communities with teachers in multiple grades, reflecting the spiraling structure of the Next Generation Science Standards, where concepts are covered multiple times in increasing depth and sophistication.

A partnership between the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the Exploratorium, the Spanning Boundaries project researches how science teacher leaders (STLs) can be supported and activated to bring educational improvements into their local contexts. We draw on a range of frameworks from organizational theory and social learning theory to examine how science teacher leaders, as Boundary Spanners who carry knowledge and innovation across professional settings enact their roles, and how their work is sustained and improved.

This project explores how supporting District Science Coordinators can impact the instruction of science teachers. In this project, we developed an online program for District Science Coordinators and tracked their and their science teachers professional learning. In this project, we will report on some of the initial results from the first and second cohort of teachers and District Science Coordinators.

A study of how organizational conditions influence elementary teachers' science learning.

This project studies and develops science and engineering education technology and pedagogy that supports project‐based learning of science, engineering, and computation concepts and skills underlying the strategically important "green" and "smart" aspects of the infrastructure, which is a national priority.