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.

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.

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.

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.

This project is a Research and Practice Partnership between two universities and the DC school district to address two problems of practice at the high school level. First, students will engage in computational modeling in science classes to provide all students opportunities to learn computational thinking. Second, teachers will have the opportunity to learn more about the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and develop curriculum to support the standards. The project will create units for four science subjects and investigate the design and implementation of those units.

In this project, we engaged elementary (grades K-5) pre-service teachers (PSTs) as facilitators in a family technology program called Family Creative Learning, embedded in the Denver Public Library makerspace network. We studied PSTs’ computational thinking and facilitation practices and its impact on children's learning across informal and classroom settings where pre-service teachers concurrently conduct their field work. The project team will develop research-based resources, tools, and activities that help to cultivate these key facilitation practices.

The Design Talk project aims to to enact and characterize multiple types of whole-class engineering design conversations in first-grade through sixth-grade classrooms. The Design Talk resource library will enable educators and curriculum developers to see distinctly different kinds of classroom conversations that make engineering an activity in which all students engage in productive sense-making and ethical decision-making. This approach to classroom discourse foregrounds a perspective of care as central to engineering design work.

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.

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.

There are long-standing calls to make mathematics more meaningful, relevant, and applicable both inside and outside of the K-12 classroom. In particular, there is a growing recognition that mathematics is a valuable tool for helping students understand important real-world issues that affect their lives and society. Further, mathematics can support students in becoming mathematically literate and engaged democratic citizens. Despite the increased interest in connecting mathematics to real-world issues in the classroom, many teachers feel unprepared to do so.