Building Theory While Supporting Implementation of the NGSS

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Tues

Implementing the NGSS requires changes in teaching, assessments, and curriculum materials. In this session, participants explore theoretical questions for DR K12 research that are raised by these NGSS implementation challenges.

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2014 Session Types
Mini-plenary Presentation

The Next Generation Science Standards present important shifts for science teaching, assessment, and curriculum materials—focusing on core explanatory ideas, a central role for science and engineering practices, and coherence across time and science disciplines. These challenges for practice require new theoretical advances.

Using Life Cycle Data to Help Teachers Understand Key Energy Concepts

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Participants engage in and provide feedback on digital interactive learning experiences that use National Renewable Energy Laboratory life cycle data and help teachers understand key energy concepts. Please bring your laptop.

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2014 Session Types
Feedback Session (Work in Development)
Session Materials

Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) and project partners are developing an online course for high school science teachers. The purpose of the course is to help teachers understand key energy concepts in alternative energy contexts. The course includes three interactive learning experiences (interactives) that use life cycle data from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL).

Using Learning Progressions for Classroom Assessment and Teaching

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Join a discussion addressing how learning progression-based frameworks, assessments, and instruction can support teachers and students in developing increasingly sophisticated scientific knowledge and practice.

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2014 Session Types
Collaborative Panel Session

The goal of this session is to discuss possibilities, progress, and problems in using learning progression research to support improved assessment and instruction in middle school and high school classrooms.

In this session, several learning progression-related DR K–12 projects share findings and discuss questions around two issues:

Professional Development Materials: Supporting Facilitators at Different Levels

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Participants provide feedback on materials from a professional development program developed to help elementary teachers promote mathematics discourse, with attention to the design of facilitation support.

Date/Time
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2014 Session Types
Feedback Session (Work in Development)
Presenters
Session Materials

The main goal of this session is to share and get feedback on materials from a 40-hour professional development program for elementary mathematics, focusing in particular on the organization of facilitation supports included in these materials. The PD was designed to help teachers promote discourse in elementary mathematics classrooms. In particular, it defines and helps teachers implement “responsive” discourse in the classroom, that is, discourse in which all students are responsible for learning and engaged in probing each other’s mathematical ideas.

Overcoming Obstacles of Affordability, Flexibility, and Effectiveness to Scaling-Up with a Cyberlearning Professional-Development Model

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Participants engage in and provide feedback on a CyberPD environment that overcomes the obstacles related to bringing curriculum-based professional development to scale.

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2014 Session Types
Feedback Session (Work in Development)

Research has shown that curriculum-based professional development for teachers is a key component in the effective implementation of innovative, researched-based science curricula. Scaling up to a broad-based national market, however, is logistically constrained and limited by the traditional face-to-face professional development model. A key factor in a districts’ decision-making process affecting the adoption of a research-based curricula is their ability to provide the necessary on-going and timely professional development.

Ocean Tracks: Bringing Large-Scale Marine Science Data to and Beyond the Classroom

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Participants engage in marine data investigations using the Ocean Tracks Web interface and analysis tools, offer feedback, and discuss possible synergies with other DR K12 programs.

Date/Time
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2014 Session Types
Feedback Session (Work in Post-development)

Digital, large-scale scientific data have become broadly available in recent decades, and analyzing data, identifying patterns, and extracting useful information have become gateway skills to full participation in the 21st century workforce. Yet, pre-college classrooms are falling short in preparing students for this world and are missing opportunities to harness the power of Big Data to engage students in scientific learning. To address this issue, scientists, educators, and researchers at Education Development Center, Inc.

NSF Funding Programs

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Tues

Facilitator: NSF Program Officers
In a roundtable session, NSF program officers discuss Directorate for Education & Human Resources (EHR) programs and related funding opportunities. The session presentation and discussion will last one hour. Participants are welcome to stay longer for additional informal discussion.

Date/Time
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2014 Session Types
NSF-led Session
Presenters

The following EHR programs and funding opportunities will be discussed:

Meaningful Support for Teachers: Specific Ways to Encourage Game-Based Learning in the Classroom

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Panelists from three projects share lessons learned in guiding game use in classroom learning, highlighting specific examples of effective resources.

Date/Time
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2014 Session Types
Collaborative Panel Session

The three panelists in this session are in the last one or two years of their game-based learning projects, and all have done extensive work in supporting use of their games in classroom learning. As their work has progressed, each has discovered valuable ways to support teachers as well as encountered surprises in what teachers wanted (and didn’t want), and now recognize things they wished they had learned in the beginning of their projects. Session participants leave with recommendations they can use in their current projects, including:

Innovations in Early Childhood STEM Curricula and Professional Development

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This poster symposium features six preschool projects across STEM domains that have developed curricula and provided teachers with supports for motivating all children’s engagement with STEM.

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2014 Session Types
Structured Poster Session

The collective work represented in this session responds to reports that the United States’ competitive advantage lies in its role as a technological innovation leader and to proposals that individual interest in innovation should be fostered early to avoid stereotypes and other impediments to entering the innovation pipeline.

Equitable Teaching Practices in Math

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Tues

Presenters seek feedback on an observational instrument designed to identify preservice teachers’ abilities to identify equitable teaching practices.

Date/Time
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2014 Session Types
Feedback Session (Work in Development)

The original version of the Mathematical Quality and Equity (MQE) video codes (Goffney, 2010; LMT, 2010) were developed as a section of the Mathematical Quality and Instruction observational instrument developed by the Learning Mathematics for Teaching Project at the University of Michigan.