Middle School

Developing and Testing a Learning Progression for Middle School Physical Science Incorporating Disciplinary Core Ideas, Science and Engineering Practices, and Crosscutting Concepts

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This project will develop and test a learning progression for middle school physical science that incorporates the three dimensions identified in Next Generation of Science Standards (NGSS). Bringing together all three NGSS dimensions is an innovation that allows for the project to explore the variety of learning pathways that students may follow as they apply scientific knowledge and practices to make sense of compelling phenomena or solve complex problems. This has the potential to help teachers, researchers, and curriculum developers improve how they support students.

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Developing an Online Game to Teach Middle School Students Science Research Practices in the Life Sciences (Collaborative Research: Gagnon)

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Wake is a new grade 6-9 educational video game designed to teach the scientific practices of experimentations, modeling and arguing from evidence in the context of life sciences content. The game has been deployed at scale and we are using data from tens-of-thousands of players to develop new learning progressions theory and new educational data mining methods.

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Developing a Suite of Standards-based Instructionally Supportive Tools for Middle School Computer Science

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The ASSIST-MSCS project strives to develop a set of educative resources, formative assessment tools and teacher professional development (PD) to support middle school teachers with their understanding of Computer Science (CS) standards and their ability to use formative assessment tools related to these standards.

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Developing a Place-based STEM Education Model for Cultural Connections to Alaska Science

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The project builds upon prior successful work using the Cultural Connections Process Model (CCPM) to co-produce engaging place-based STEM education resources working with rural Indigenous communities. The CCPM is now applied to develop 10 educational videos and corresponding hands-on high-school lessons with participants from four Alaska Native Tribes (Iñupiat, Gwich'in Athabascan, Tlingit/Tsimshian, and Alutiiq) to determine if the model is adaptable and if the resources are transferrable and sustainable to a variety of contexts.

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Developing a Modeling Orientation to Science: Teaching and Learning Variability and Change in Ecosystems (Collaborative Research: Peake)

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This collaboration between Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Bowdoin College, and Vanderbilt University engages middle-school students in building and revising models of variability and change in ecosystems and studies the learning and instruction in these classroom contexts. Students construct and critique models that they and peers invent and develop foundational knowledge about the roles of variability and change in ecosystem functioning, as well as the roles of models and argumentation in scientific practice.

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Developing a Modeling Orientation to Science: Teaching and Learning Variability and Change in Ecosystems (Collaborative Research: Miller)

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Developing, critiquing, and revising models is part of the core work of science, but this process is usually invisible to students who more often encounter “final” models of systems or phenomena rather than modeling for sensemaking. The DMOS project endeavors to understand how and to what extent development of teachers’ comfort and proficiency with the modeling practice in the context of community science changes students’ opportunities to participate in modeling within and beyond those investigations.

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Designing for Science Learning in Schools by Leveraging Participation and the Power of Place Through Community and Citizen Science (Collaborative Research)

Principal Investigator:

Our project is a four-year research-practice partnership which examines elementary students’ understanding of and agency with science content knowledge and practices during a community-engaged, place-based environmental science research and monitoring program. We investigate how research informed design features influence these learning outcomes. Our findings will inform replicable models for science standards-aligned school-based community and citizen science (CCS) for youth agency in and with science.

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Designing for Science Learning in Schools by Leveraging Participation and the Power of Place Through Community and Citizen Science (Collaborative Research)

Principal Investigator:

Our project is a four-year research-practice partnership which examines elementary students’ understanding of and agency with science content knowledge and practices during a community-engaged, place-based environmental science research and monitoring program. We investigate how research informed design features influence these learning outcomes. Our findings will inform replicable models for science standards-aligned school-based community and citizen science (CCS) for youth agency in and with science.

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Design and Development of a K-12 STEM Observation Protocol (Collaborative Research: Dare)

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This project uses over 2000 integrated STEM classroom videos to design and validate the STEM Observation Protocol (STEM-OP) for use in classrooms where integrated STEM is taking place. The STEM-OP is a valid and reliable instrument for use in a variety of educational contexts and research. The STEM-OP and associated training materials are available for use by stakeholders such as K-12 teachers, district administrators, teacher educators, and educational researchers through an online platform.

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DataX: Exploring Justice-Oriented Data Science with Secondary School Students

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The DataX project aims to develop an integrated, justice-oriented curriculum and a digital platform for teaching secondary students about data science. This project includes science and social studies teachers in the design of the resources and in testing them in classrooms. The DataX platform supports students to investigate authentic problems using real-world datasets. The project team will present a justice-oriented data science education framework, lesson plans co-designed with teachers, and preliminary findings from classroom pilots.

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