Developing Teachers' Epistemic Cognition and Teaching Practices for Supporting Students' Epistemic Practices with Scientific Systems.

Developing Science Assessments for Language Diversity in Early Elementary Classrooms (SALDEE) is developing Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) aligned formative assessments for first grade. The assessments will be small group checks and individual checks to explore types of design features, implementation practices, and affordances of each assessment format for first grade learners. SALDEE will generate new assessments that reliably measure young learners’ NGSS three-dimensional science proficiency and provide teachers with resources for implementation and scoring.

Most STEM education reforms aim to prepare learners to use science in their post-school daily lives. This goal is not about content – reproducing correct science facts is not sufficient to solve practical problems of real people. However, even in classes structured by reformed curricula, students are often permitted to construct knowledge only insofar as it aligns with canon. Here, we argue that the tension between reproducing “correct” ideas and constructing one’s own ideas is exacerbated by - and partially arises from - our approach to designing and refining curricula.

The goals of the project include foundational research and development work related to the assessment of content knowledge for teaching (CKT) about matter and its interactions, as well as supporting the development of this CKT in teacher education settings. The project has four major goals including:

CKT for Matter: The project designed and developed assessment tools and instructional materials for use in teacher education programs, and is supporting a professional learning community as part of an implementation study of the impacts of the materials on preservice teacher and teacher educator learning.

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.

Our project has two main components. First, we are creating instructional videos that feature the unscripted dialogue of pairs of students as they engage with mathematically rich problems over time, thereby providing a model of how authentic student voices and conceptions can be included in videos. Second, we are conducting studies that investigate students’ learning processes as they engage with our videos and explore how our videos might be used in classroom instruction.

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.

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.

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.