Biology

The Graphing Research on Inquiry with Data in Science (GRIDS) project is a four-year full design and development proposal, addressing the learning strand, submitted to the DR K-12 program at the NSF. GRIDS will investigate strategies to improve middle school students' science learning by focusing on student ability to interpret and use graphs. In middle school math, students typically graph only linear functions and rarely encounter features used in science, such as units, scientific notation, non-integer values, noise, cycles, and exponentials. Science teachers rarely teach about the graph features needed in science, so students are left to learn science without recourse to what is inarguably a key tool in learning and doing science. GRIDS will undertake a comprehensive program to address the need for improved graph comprehension. The project will create, study, and disseminate technology-based assessments, technologies that aid graph interpretation, instructional designs, professional development, and learning materials.

GRIDS will start by developing the GRIDS Graphing Inventory (GGI), an online, research-based measure of graphing skills that are relevant to middle school science. The project will address gaps revealed by the GGI by designing instructional activities that feature powerful digital technologies including automated guidance based on analysis of student generated graphs and student writing about graphs. These materials will be tested in classroom comparison studies using the GGI to assess both annual and longitudinal progress. Approximately 30 teachers selected from 10 public middle schools will participate in the project, along with approximately 4,000 students in their classrooms. A series of design studies will be conducted to create and test ten units of study and associated assessments, and a minimum of 30 comparison studies will be conducted to optimize instructional strategies. The comparison studies will include a minimum of 5 experiments per term, each with 6 teachers and their 600-800 students. The project will develop supports for teachers to guide students to use graphs and science knowledge to deepen understanding, and to develop agency and identity as science learners.

Citizen science refers to partnerships between volunteers and scientists that answer real world questions. The target audiences in this project are middle and high school teachers and their students in a broad range of settings: two urban districts, an inner-ring suburb, and three rural districts. The project utilizes existing citizen science programs as springboards for professional development for teachers during an intensive summer workshop. The project curriculum helps teachers use student participation in citizen science to engage them in the full complement of science practices; from asking questions, to conducting independent research, to sharing findings. Through district professional learning communities (PLCs), teachers work with district and project staff to support and demonstrate project implementation. As students and their teachers engage in project activities, the project team is addressing two key research questions: 1) What is the nature of instructional practices that promote student engagement in the process of science?, and 2) How does this engagement influence student learning, with special attention to the benefits of engaging in research presentations in public, high profile venues? Key contributions of the project are stronger connections between a) ecology-based citizen science programs, STEM curriculum, and students' lives and b) science learning and disciplinary literacy in reading, writing and math.

Research design and analysis are focused on understanding how professional development that involves citizen science and independent investigations influences teachers' classroom practices and student learning. The research utilizes existing instruments to investigate teachers' classroom practices, and student engagement and cognitive activity: the Collaboratives for Excellence in Teacher Preparation and Classroom Observation Protocol, and Inquiring into Science Instruction Observation Protocol. These instruments are used in classroom observations of a stratified sample of classes whose students represent the diversity of the participating districts. Curriculum resources for each citizen science topic, cross-referenced to disciplinary content and practices of the NGSS, include 1) a bibliography (books, web links, relevant research articles); 2) lesson plans and student science journals addressing relevant science content and background on the project; and 3) short videos that help teachers introduce the projects and anchor a digital library to facilitate dissemination. Impacts beyond both the timeframe of the project and the approximately 160 teachers who will participate are supported by curriculum units that address NGSS life science topics, and wide dissemination of these materials in a variety of venues. The evaluation focuses on outcomes of and satisfaction with the summer workshop, classroom incorporation, PLCs, and student learning. It provides formative and summative findings based on qualitative and quantitative instruments, which, like those used for the research, have well-documented reliability and validity. These include the Science Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument to assess teacher beliefs; the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol to assess teacher practices; the Standards Assessment Inventory to assess PLC quality; and the Scientific Attitude Inventory to assess student attitudes towards science. Project deliverables include 1) curriculum resources that will support engagement in five existing citizen science projects that incorporate standards-based science content; 2) venues for student research presentations that can be duplicated in other settings; and 3) a compilation of teacher-adapted primary scientific research articles that will provide a model for promoting disciplinary literacy. The project engages 40 teachers per year and their students.

Today's citizens face profound questions in science. Preparing future generations of scientists is crucial if the United States is to remain competitive in a technology-focused economy. The biological sciences are of particular importance for addressing some of today's complex problems, such as sustainability and food production, biofuels, and carbon dioxide and its effect on our environment. Although knowledge in the life sciences is of critical importance, this is an area in which there are significantly fewer studies examining students' conceptions than in physics and chemistry. The goal of this project is to help middle school students, particularly in rural and underserved areas, develop deep scientific knowledge and knowledge of the practices and routines of science. A major strength of Bio-Sphere is the inclusion of hands-on design and engineering in biology, a field in which there are fewer instances of curricula that integrate engineering design at the middle school level. The units will enable an in-depth, cohesive understanding of science content, and Bio-Sphere will be disseminated nationally and internationally through proactive outreach to teachers as well as scholarly publications.

This project addresses the need to inculcate deep learning of complex science by bringing complex socio-scientific issues into middle school classrooms, and providing students with instructional materials that allow them to practice science as scientists do. Research teams will develop, iteratively refine and evaluate an innovative learning environment called Bio-Sphere. Bio-Sphere combines the strengths of hands-on design and engineering, engages students in the practices of science, and fosters learning of complex science issues, especially among underserved populations. Each Bio-Sphere unit presents a complex science issue in the form of a design challenge that students solve by conducting experiments, using visualizations in an electronic textbook, and connecting with the community. The units, aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards, provide greater coherence, continuity, and sustained instruction focused on uncovering and integrating key ideas over long periods of time. The project will follow a design-based research methodology. In Phase 1, the Bio-Sphere materials will be developed. Phase 2 will consist of studies in Wisconsin schools to generate existence proofs, i.e., examining enactments with respect to the designed objectives to understand how a design works. Phase 3 studies will focus on practical implementation: how to bring this innovative design to life in very different classroom contexts and without the everyday support of the design team, and will be conducted in rural schools in Alabama and North Carolina.

This project aims to engage students in meaningful scientific data collection, analysis, visualization, modeling, and interpretation. It targets grades 9-12 science instruction. The proposed research poses the question "How do learners conceive of and interact with empirical data, particularly when it has a hierarchical structure in which parameters and results are at one level and raw data at another?" As working with data becomes an integral part of students' learning across STEM curricula, understanding how students conceive of data grows ever more important. This is particularly timely as science becomes more and more data driven.

The team will develop and test a Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP). STEM curriculum development has moved online, but development of tools for students to engage in data analysis has yet to follow suit. As a result, online curriculum development projects are often forced to develop their own data analysis tools, settle for desktop tools, or do without. In a collaboration with NSF-funded projects at the Concord Consortium, Educational Development Center, and University of Minnesota, the project team is developing an online, open source data analysis platform that can be used not only by these three projects, but subsequently by others.

The proposed research breaks new ground both in questions to be investigated and in methodology. The investigations build on prior research on students' understanding of data representation, measures of center and spread, and data modeling to look more closely at students' understanding of data structures especially as they appear in real scientific situations. Collaborative design based on three disparate STEM projects will yield a flexible data analysis environment that can be adopted by additional projects in subsequent years. Such a design process increases the likelihood that CODAP will be more than a stand-alone tool, and can be meaningfully integrated into online curricula. CODAP's overarching goal is to improve the preparation of students to fully participate in an increasingly data-driven society. It proposes to do so by improving a critical piece of infrastructure: namely, access to classroom-friendly data analysis tools by curriculum developers who wish to integrate student engagement with data into content learning.

This project is asociated with award number 1316728 with the same title.