Presenters in this session discuss the ways user input can improve the development of STEM education materials. They discuss their purposes and strategies for engaging the end users of materials in the development process. Discussion touches on recruiting user partners, establishing a relationship and role, communicating, and gathering data. The session is informed by, and will inform, a draft brief on the topic.

Learn how to create free, online interactive lessons of your own design to help students understand graphs and the STEM concepts represented in graphs. SmartGraphs permits non-programmers to create new multi-page, interactive activities. Teachers and students may also freely use and share existing activities, which are released under a Creative Commons license (see http://www.concord.org/projects/smartgraphs#curriculum). SmartGraphs activities run in a Web browser; there is no software to download or install.

This session provides an opportunity for participants to discuss findings from a systematic review of instrumentation that the DR K–12 community proposed to use in their projects. The conversation will include a presentation of the most commonly named instruments being used to assess teachers’ content knowledge, classroom practices, and pedagogical content knowledge. Presenters discuss with participants the state of measurement tools for teachers and the implications for accumulating knowledge across projects.

Having students enter high school “unready” for algebra is not a new or rare problem. The challenges, frankly, are vast. Students identified as “unready” are extremely varied, as are the reasons they are included in specialized classes. Some, for example, are mathematically competent, but included “for English language support.” More, of course, have some difficulty specific to mathematics. Of those, many are weak in arithmetic.

This session presents the work from three projects that are addressing the challenges of using secondary data sets in the classroom to teach ecology. Presenters from each project provide a brief overview of their development and research work followed by a question and answer period. A panel discussion with participants focuses on the following three questions: What are the challenges and benefits of bringing “real” data to the classroom? How do you make complex data accessible to middle and high school students?

This session focuses on a particular role that engineering lessons and curricula can play, placing them as tools for engagement in and expansion of mathematics and science learning in which engineering is used primarily as a means to help promote learning in these content areas. This role may not be what all engineering education specialists strive for; many of us may well value engineering education for its own sake and its role supporting technological literacy.