Middle School

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.

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.

Grand Challenges (GCs) are multi-faceted issues that are shaping the world such as climate change and pandemics. Evidence suggests that students are interested in GCs and motivated to contribute solutions; this project creates opportunities situate GCs in middle school science. Project goals include: 1) Develop four GC units. 2) Collaborate with science teachers to enact and study GC units. 3) Conduct research on student outcomes and factors affecting feasibility and quality of GC-oriented learning.

We are developing a politically-oriented genetics unit for high school. Drawing on the Rightful Presence (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2020) and Critical Science Agency (Basu et al., 2009) theoretical frameworks, the unit will explore the ways in which representations of genetic differences within and between groups and construals of gene-environment interactions are historically informed, politicized, and non-neutral. Such construals reify social categories and hierarchies as natural/ideal, and thus contribute to oppressive views and policies.

We investigate teacher beliefs about discourses employed with equation solving and the challenges these beliefs might pose for the implementation of instructional practices that promote deductive reasoning in algebra. To reveal these beliefs, we recorded three explanations of solving a linear equation that each had distinct discursive characteristics, and then analyzed teachers’ small-group critical discussions of these explanations.

This project prepares rural secondary science teachers to design five-dimensional assessment tasks in which students use the three dimensions of the NGSS to make sense of phenomena that connect to their interests and identities. We created an online course to develop a 5D vision for science with teachers and support them in designing phenomenon-driven tasks. After ethnography and co-design work, we are conducting an experiment to research the effects of the course on teacher outcomes.