Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and organized by CADRE, this event will focus on standards-based instructional materials.
Crissman, S., Lacy, S., Nordine, J., and Tobin, R. (2015). Looking Through the Energy Lens. Science and Children, 52(6), 26-31.
A strategy that helps students develop a fuller view of energy's role in a variety of phenomena.
The STEM School Study (S3) team sat down with inclusive STEM school leaders from over 25 inclusive STEM schools and asked them to describe the parts of their schools that are essential to their school models. We found that while STEM schools vary in many ways, there are eight major Elements common to them all. Each Element is comprised of a number of components and together, they illustrate what STEM schools are and lay the groundwork for understanding how STEM schools work to achieve their goals.
Automated assessment of student learning has become the subject of increasing attention. Students’ textual responses to short answer questions offer a rich source of data for assessment. However, automatically analyzing textual constructed responses poses significant computational challenges, exacerbated by the disfluencies that occur prominently in elementary students’ writing. With robust text analytics, there is the potential to analyze a student’s text responses and accurately predict his or her future success.
This paper presents a novel application of the soft cardinality text analytics method to support assessment of text.
Real-time formative assessment of student learning has become the subject of increasing attention. Students’ textual responses to short answer questions offer a rich source of data for formative assessment. However, automatically analyzing textual constructed responses poses significant computational challenges, and the difficulty of generating accurate assessments is exacerbated by the disfluencies that occur prominently in elementary students’ writing. With robust text analytics, there is the potential to accurately analyze students’ text responses and predict students’ future success.
This paper presents WriteEval, a hybrid text analytics method for analyzing student-constructed responses.
Mining learner generated sketches holds significant potential for acquiring deep insight into learners’ mental models. Drawing has been shown to benefit both learning outcomes and engagement, and learners’ sketches offer a rich source of diagnostic information. Unfortunately, interpreting learners’ sketches—even sketches comprised of semantically grounded symbols—poses significant computational challenges.
This paper introduces SketchMiner, which uses drawing topologies to automatically interpret learner-generated sketches.
A common way for students to develop scientific argumentation abilities is through argumentation about socioscientific issues, defined as scientific problems with social, ethical, and moral aspects. Computer-based scaffolding can support students in this process. In this mixed method study, we examined the use and impact of computer based scaffolding to support middle school students’ creation of evidence-based arguments during a 3-week problem-based learning unit focused on the water quality of a local river.
In this mixed method study, we examined the use and impact of computer based scaffolding to support middle school students’ creation of evidence-based arguments during a 3-week problem-based learning unit focused on the water quality of a local river. We found a significant and substantial impact on the argument evaluation ability of lower-achieving students, and preliminary evidence of an impact on argument evaluation ability among low-SES students. We also found that students used the various available support—computer-based scaffolding, teacher scaffolding, and groupmate support—in different ways to counter differing challenges. We then formulated changes to the scaffolds on the basis of research results.
This paper employs meta-analysis to determine the influence of computer-based scaffolding characteristics and study and test scorequality on cognitive outcomes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education at the secondary, college, graduate, and adult levels.
Argumentation is central to instruction centered on socio-scientific issues (Sadler & Donnelly in International Journal of Science Education, 28(12), 1463–1488, 2006. doi:10.1080/09500690600708717). Teachers can play a big role in helping students engage in argumentation and solve authentic scientific problems. To do so, they need to learn one-to-one scaffolding—dynamic support to help students accomplish tasks that they could not complete unaided.
Recent reform efforts and the next generation science standards emphasize the importance of incorporating authentic scientific practices into science instruction. Modeling can be a particularly challenging practice to address because modeling occurs within a socially structured system of representation that is specific to a domain. Further, in the process of modeling, experts interact deeply with domain-specific content knowledge and integrate modeling with other scientific practices in service of a larger investigation.
