Reading List: Recent DRK-12 Project Publications

This is a technical report detailing the methods and findings for each of the research studies in the LLAMA project. 

Estimating and monitoring the construct-irrelevant variance (CIV) is of significant importance to validity, especially for constructed response assessments with rich contextualized information. To examine CIV in contextualized constructed response assessments, we developed a framework including a model accounting for CIV and a measurement that could differentiate the CIV.

In this article, the authors present evidence from teachers' reflections that this stability was supported by the teachers' intellectual and emotional experiences as learners. Specifically, they argue that engaging in extended scientific inquiry provided a basis for the teachers having epistemic empathy for their students—their tuning into and appreciating their students' intellectual and emotional experiences in science, which in turn supported teachers' responsiveness in the classroom.

In this paper we argue for the need to design and develop transformative learning ecologies that explicitly position the diverse voices of youth from nondominant communities as central to re-defining and re-envisioning relationally just, pluralistic, and sustainable futures. To this end, we seek to provide examples from participatory design-based learning ecologies to illustrate the centering of middle school youth voices and agencies from multilingual Black, Brown, and Latinx communities through critical response-ability.

This study explored the verb clauses and thematic development evident in curriculum materials and in transcripts of teachers planning lessons using the materials.

The Visual Access to Mathematics (VAM) project developed and studied teacher professional development (PD) focused on linguistically-responsive teaching to facilitate ELs’ mathematical problem solving and discourse. This study examines whether VAM PD has a positive impact on teachers’ self-efficacy in supporting ELs in mathematics and how components of the PD may have influenced teacher outcomes.

This study used an easy-to-implement prompting intervention in the context of collaborative (pair) programming with upper elementary students to demonstrate the potential of Epistemic Network Analysis to understand the impact of the intervention.

This exploratory study aimed to (1) identify the  barriers to moving STEM enrichment programming in a rural environment from in-person to virtual activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, (2) describe key decisions that were made in transitioning to the virtual format along with the rationale behind those decisions, and (3) disseminate best practices that emerged from the inaugural effort.

A teacher uses formative assessment interviews to uncover evidence of students’ understandings and to plan targeted instruction in a mathematics intervention class. Authors present an example of a student interview, a discussion of the benefits and challenges of conducting interviews, and actionable suggestions for implementing them.

This study explored the potential impact of teaching outside of one’s field of expertise. This longitudinal cross-case study examined the development of enacted pedagogical content knowledge (ePCK) among a group of in-field and out-of-field (OOF) physical science teachers during their first 3 years of teaching.

Teacher education programs have a critical role in supporting prospective teachers’ connections between theory and practice. In this study, authors examined three prospective secondary mathematics teachers’ discourses regarding collective argumentation during and after a unit of instruction addressing collective argumentation and ways they recontextualized their on-campus coursework (theory) into their student teaching (practice) as demonstrated by their support for students’ mathematical arguments during student teaching.

Argumentation enables students to engage in real world scientific practices by rationalizing claims grounded in supporting evidence. Student engagement in scientific argumentation activates the negotiation process by which students develop and defend evidence-based claims. Little is known, however, on the intricate process and potential patterns of negotiation between students during scientific argumentation. The present study seeks to fill this gap by exploring how a group of university science education students negotiated when evaluating the relationship between lines of evidence and alternative explanatory models of a phenomena (i.e., climate change).

This study explores design strategies used by experienced designers in Energy3D, a computer-aided design (CAD) simulation environment designed for learning settings, to provide insight into supporting students' use of CAD simulation environments in precollege settings.

This article presents lessons learned from an ongoing attempt to conceptualize, develop, and refine a way for teachers to gather formative assessment evidence about classroom argumentation as it happens.

In this article, it is argued that processes of co-production can support teachers and students in organizing resources for justice through science learning. Drawing upon a critical justice conceptual framework, critical ethnographic data from one urban middle school classroom during a unit focused on engineering for sustainable communities were analyzed.

The study reported in this article examined the ways in which new mathematics learning influences students’ prior ways of reasoning. Authors conceptualize this kind of influence as a form of transfer of learning called backward transfer. The focus of the study was on students’ covariational reasoning about linear functions before and after they participated in a multi-lesson instructional unit on quadratic functions.

This study examines how sampled Chinese and U.S. third and fourth grade students (NChina=167,NUS=97) understand the commutative, associative, and distributive properties.

Drawing on rich classroom observations of educators teaching in China and the U.S., this book details an innovative and effective approach to teaching algebra at the elementary level, namely, "teaching through example-based problem solving" (TEPS).

This chapter offers lessons learned by teacher educators who guided preservice teachers in the modification of hands-on engineering lessons for virtual implementation during the spring 2020 semester as part of an NSF-funded project.

This peer-reviewed research journal publication addresses one of the grant goals with respect to how students performed on a set of proof tasks.

In this paper, authors network five frameworks (cognitive demand, lesson cohesion, cognitive engagement, collective argumentation, and student contribution) for an analytic approach that allows us to present a more holistic picture of classrooms which engage students in justifying.

Echoing calls to expand environmental education research through design, this study explores the role of design in garden-based education and illustrate its contributions towards practical impact and theoretical insight.

Selected response items and constructed response (CR) items are often found in the same test. Conventional psychometric models for these two types of items typically focus on using the scores for correctness of the responses. Recent research suggests, however, that more information may be available from the CR items than just scores for correctness. In this study, we describe an approach in which a statistical topic model along with a diagnostic classification model (DCM) was applied to a mixed item format formative test of English and Language Arts.

This study explores disciplinary literacy instruction integrated within an elementary engineering unit in an urban classroom.

In this paper, the relationship between high school chemistry teachers’ self-generated “best practices” for developing formative assessments and the assessments they implement in their courses are examined.

This study seeks to better understand what teachers notice when interpreting assessment results and how the design of the assessment may influence teachers’ patterns of noticing. The study described herein investigates high school chemistry teachers’ interpretations of student responses to formative assessment items by identifying patterns in what teachers notice.

Designing high school chemistry assessments is a complex and difficult task. Although prior studies about assessment have offered teachers guidelines and standards as support to generate quality assessment items, little is known about how teachers engage these supports or enact their own beliefs into practice while developing assessments. Presented in this paper are the results from analyzing discourse among five high school chemistry teachers during an assessment item generation activity, including assessment items produced throughout the activity

Introduction to special issue focusing on think alouds and response process evidence. This work cuts across STEM education scholarship and introduces readers to robust means to engage in think alouds.

This is a description of a new methodological tool to gather response process validity evidence. The context is scholarship within mathematics education contexts.

The Responsive Math Teaching (RMT) project’s 3-year model for professional development introduces teachers to a new instructional model through a full year of monthly Math Circles, where they experience problem solving and productive struggle from the student perspective while working through challenging open-ended tasks, engaging in mathematical discussions, and reflecting on the process. This paper examines teachers’ views of what they learned from this experience and how it affected both their instructional practices and their visions of mathematics teaching and learning.

Describes a scaffolded claims-evidence-reasoning (CER) argumentation framework that is embedded within a new eight-week, freely available curriculum unit developed by the Genetic Science Learning Center – Evolution: DNA and the Unity.

This article explores how scholars have framed studies of preservice science teacher (PST) knowledge and learning over the past twelve years.

This paper contributes to current discussions about supporting prospective teachers (PSTs) in developing skills of noticing students’ mathematical thinking. The results document that without providing any intentional support for PSTs’ noticing skills, PSTs are more deliberate to focus on mathematically significant aspects of student thinking while analyzing written artifacts of student work compared to video-records.

This study evaluated a portion of our learning trajectory, focusing on the instructional component. We found that the instruction was successful in promoting a progression from one level to the next for 40% of the children, with others developing positive new behaviors (but not sufficient to progress to a new level).

This study uses a meta-analytic approach to investigate the relationship between attending an inclusive STEM high school and a set of high school outcomes known to predict college entry and declaration of a STEM college major.

This article provides content maps for two widely used teacher assessment instruments in the USA relative to the widely adopted Common Core State Standards. This common reference enables comparisons of content alignment both between the instruments and between parallel forms within each instrument.

This paper describes a partnership between a university and an urban school district, formed with a goal of preparing mathematics teacher leaders to conduct professional development (PD) at their schools.

This article offers six suggestions for middle school principals to implement or strengthen mathematics intervention classes at their schools, based off the findings of the authors' NSF-funded research.

This article focuses on discussion and preliminary findings from classroom testing of the prototype learning module: Investigating Income Inequality in the U.S.

This paper focuses on three simulation-based scientific argumentation tasks called Trap, Aquifer, and Supply. These tasks were part of an online science curriculum module addressing groundwater systems for secondary school students.

This article elaborates a theoretical, methodological, and analytical approach intended to highlight the materiality and reciprocity of noticing in mathematics classrooms.

This article reports on the development of a novel, video-based measure of teachers’ moment-to-moment noticing as knowledge-filtered perception.

This resource contains advice from CAREER awardees in the DRK-12 portfolio about how to develop a competitive proposal and successfully manage a CAREER project based on their experience.

This comprehensive volume advances a vision of teacher preparation programs focused on core practices supporting ambitious science instruction. The book advocates for collaborative learning and building a community of teacher educators that can collectively share and refine strategies, tools, and practices. 

This book aims to advance ongoing debates in the field of mathematics and mathematics education regarding conceptions of argumentation, justification, and proof and the consequences for research and practice when applying particular conceptions of each construct. Through analyses of classroom practice across grade levels using different lenses - particular conceptions of argumentation, justification, and proof - researchers consider the implications of how each conception shapes empirical outcomes. In each section, organized by grade band, authors adopt particular conceptions of argumentation, justification, and proof, and they analyse one data set from each perspective. In addition, each section includes a synthesis chapter from an expert in the field to bring to the fore potential implications, as well as new questions, raised by the analyses. Finally, a culminating section considers the use of each conception across grade bands and data sets.

Several recent studies have focused on helping students understand the limitations of empirical arguments (e.g., Stylianides, G. J. & Stylianides, A. J., 2009, Brown, 2014). One view is that students use empirical argumentation because they hold empirical proof schemes—they are convinced a general claim is true by checking a few cases (Harel & Sowder, 1998). Some researchers have sought to unseat students’ empirical proof schemes by developing students’ skepticism, their uncertainty about the truth of a general claim in the face of confirming (but not exhaustive) evidence (e.g., Brown, 2014; Stylianides, G. J. & Stylianides, A. J., 2009). With sufficient skepticism, students would seek more secure, non-empirical arguments to convince themselves that a general claim is true. We take a different perspective, seeking to develop students’ awareness of domain appropriateness (DA), whether the argument type is appropriate to the domain of the claim. In particular, DA entails understanding that an empirical check of a proper subset of cases in a claim’s domain does not (i) guarantee the claim is true and does not (ii) provide an argument that is acceptable in the mathematical or classroom community, although checking all cases does both (i) and (ii). DA is distinct from skepticism; it is not concerned with students’ confidence about the truth of a general claim. We studied how ten 8th graders developed DA through classroom experiences that were part of a broader project focused on developing viable argumentation. 

Students’ difficulties with argumentation, proving, and the role of counterexamples in proving are well documented. Students in this study experienced an intervention for improving their argumentation and proving practices. The intervention included the eliminating counterexamples (ECE) framework as a means of constructing and critiquing viable arguments for a general claim. This framework involves constructing descriptions of all possible counterexamples to a conditional claim and determining whether or not a direct argument eliminates the possibility of counterexamples. This case study investigates U.S. eighth-grade (age 13) mathematics students’ conceptions about the validity of a direct argument after the students received instruction on the ECE framework. We describe student activities in response to the intervention, and we identify students’ conceptions that are inconsistent with canonical notions of mathematical proving and appear to be barriers to using the ECE framework.

Students’ difficulties with contrapositive reasoning are well documented. Lack of intuition about contrapositive reasoning and lack of a meta-argument for the logical equivalence between a conditional claim and its contrapositive may contribute to students’ struggles. This case study investigated the effectiveness of the eliminating counterexamples intervention in improving students’ ability to construct, critique, and validate contrapositive arguments in a U.S. eighth-grade mathematics classroom. The intervention involved constructing descriptions of all possible counterexamples to a conditional claim and its contrapositive, comparing the two descriptions, noting that the descriptions are the same barring the order of phrases, and finding a counterexample to show the claim is false or viably arguing that no counterexample exists.

In this paper, authors analyze a PD design, examining its activities and the sequencing of professional learning tasks.

In this chapter, authors use the Framework for Teaching Practice (Grossman, et al., 2009) as a conceptual tool for analzying the design of professional development.

Science teachers must sometimes teach outside of their expertise, and this type of teaching assignment is referred to as being out-of-field. Among newly hired teachers, this type of assignment may have a detrimental impact in the development of their instruction. This study explored the classroom instruction of 17 newly hired teachers who were teaching both in-field and out-of-field in the physical sciences during their first three years.

Special issue of the Journal of Science Teacher Education focused on out-of-field teaching in science.

This study examines how three cognitive instructional principles including worked examples, representations, and deep questions are used in eight experienced elementary teachers’ early algebra lessons in the U.S.

An NSF-funded program partnering preservice teachers and undergraduate engineering students to teach robotics to fifth graders was adapted to a virtual format via Zoom. A case study intimately explored one team’s experience as they engineered bio-inspired robots over five weekly sessions.

The Mathematics Immersion for Secondary Teachers at Scale program engages sets of teachers in local school sites, connected synchronously and asynchronously to colleagues in other sites, in doing mathematics designed to promote experiences of mathematical immersion, community, and connection to the work of teaching. This study of two groups of sites over one year examines fidelity to the program as a model for systematically providing these opportunities, and the extent to which teacher participants experienced immersion, community, and connection in their collaborative work with the course facilitator and their local and distant colleagues.

This paper examines the use of Imaginative Education (IE) to create an NGSS-aligned middle school engineering curriculum that supports transfer and the development of STEM identity.

This qualitative study examines the processes by which science faculty reshape their pedagogical practices through facilitating professional development for K–12 teachers, and how individual characteristics, social interactions, and organizational contexts influence their choices.

Providing science instruction is an ongoing priority and challenge in elementary grades, especially in high-need rural schools. Nonetheless, few studies have investigated the factors that facilitate or limit teachers’ science instruction in these settings, particularly since the introduction of the Next Generation Science Standards. In this study we investigated affordances and constraints to elementary science instruction in high-need rural schools.

This study investigated teachers’ responses to a common set of instances of student mathematical thinking (SMT) with varied potential to support students’ mathematical learning, as well as the productivity of such responses.

Ambiguity is a natural part of communication in a mathematics classroom. In this paper, a particular subset of ambiguity is characterized as clarifiable. Clarifiable ambiguity in classroom mathematics discourse is common, frequently goes unaddressed, and unnecessarily hinders in-the-moment communication because it likely could be made more clear in a relatively straightforward way if it were attended to. We argue for deliberate attention to clarifiable ambiguity as a critical aspect of attending to meaning and as a necessary precursor to productive use of student mathematical thinking.

We draw on our experiences researching teachers’ use of student thinking to theoretically unpack the work of attending to student contributions in order to articulate the student mathematics (SM) of those contribution.

The article describes our project that was designed to provide experiences to support paraeducators' professional growth in a large urban district by building their mathematical knowledge for teaching and leadership. Providing paras with professional learning opportunities can open pathways to teaching positions, giving them the potential to diversify the teaching pool and address teacher shortages.

Research has provided evidence of the value of producing multiple representationsof content for learners (e.g., verbal, visual, etc.). However, much of the research has acknowledged changes in visual technologies while not recognizing or utilizing related audio innovations. The purpose of this study was to respond to this gap by comparing the outcomes of watching 360 video with either monophonic or ambisonic audio.

This theoretical paper summarizes of technology initiatives across science and STEM education from the past 30 years to present perspectives on the role of technology in science-focused STEM education.

This paper explores the theoretical connection between STEM and emergent technologies, with a focus on learner behaviors and the potential of technology-mediated experiences with computational participation (CP) in shaping STEM learning.

Learning goals differ from performance goals. This article elaborates on their function and importance as the guiding force behind maintaining cognitive rigor during mathematics learning.

One of the most relentless areas of difficulty in mathematics for children with learning disabilities (LDs) and difficulties is fractions. This article reports the development and initial testing of an intervention designed to increase access to and advancement in conceptual understanding.

Designed to be integrated with any curriculum, each grade level includes 18-20 one-hour lessons to be conducted throughout the school year. Each LEAP lesson lasts about an hour is designed to fit within a typical daily math instructional period.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine elementary teachers' pedagogical reasoning in an online graduate program. Authors asked: What stances do teachers take toward learning and teaching engineering design? How do these stances shift over the course of the program?

The authors studied how the distal policy mechanisms of curricular aims and objectives articulated in official curriculum documents influenced classroom instruction, and the factors that were associated with the enactment of those curricular aims and objectives.

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a self‐assessment using critical components of successful inclusive STEM high schools for school personnel and educational researchers who wish to better understand their STEM programs and identify areas of strength.

This study compared prospective mathematics teachers' (PMTs) noticing while teaching a lesson during their student teaching internship of PMTs who participated in a noticing intervention to those who did not participate in the intervention to determine whether the two groups of PMTs noticed different aspects of instruction.

The purpose of this study was to better understand the process by which a community emerges in such a PD setting by examining how the cohesiveness of 21 mathematics teachers’ social network evolves and associated shifts in the quality of mathematics teachers’ mathematical discourse.

This exploratory study investigated 32 teachers’ use of knowledge resources in two mathematically similar tasks (one a paper and pencil task, the other a dynamic task) around proportional reasoning.

This study explores how a design combining social capital mechanisms with essential teacher learning and PD characteristics supported teachers’ abilities to participate in the online course and collaboratively build knowledge.

This article describes the general and engineering mindsets of students in fifth‐grade U.S. classrooms (ages 10 and 11) who received engineering instruction. It explores how general mindsets may predict engineering learning outcomes and how engineering mindsets may be predicted by general mindset and other variables.

The purpose of this study is to develop a statistical framework and tools for the effective and efficient design of multisite randomized trials (MRTs) probing moderated treatment effects.

This article examines the teacher learning that results from participating in a two-year professional development intervention that combined lesson study, video clubs, and animation discussions.

This Research in Science Education article focuses on characterizing classroom discourse in science.

This research focuses on ways in which balance scales mediate students’ relational understandings of the equal sign.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how teachers understand one specific aspect of proportional reasoning - the extent to which practicing teachers were able to make sense of reasoning that involved the fixed number of variable-sized parts perspective.

This article describes one effort to strengthen early childhood teaching in schools on the Navajo Nation that centers the work of two teachers within a program attempting to support teachers in the development of academically rigorous, culturally responsive curriculum across the Navajo Nation.

This study explores the pathways to K–12 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics instruction among Black/African American males in the Discovery Research Education for African American Men in STEM to Teach (DREAMS to Teach) program at Morehouse College

In this study, authors examine the consequences of within-school churn for the pedagogical content knowledge of elementary teacher participants in an NSF-funded science PD program.

In this article, we describe an example of differentiating instruction (DI) involving middle school students from a five-year project funded by the National Science Foundation.

In this paper, using written responses of 37 PSTs preparing to teach grades 1-8 mathematics, authors examined explanations they constructed to support their problem solutions and explanations they provided in support of their critiques of student-generated explanations.

In the article, the authors locate how mathematics instruction may actively respond to the influence of the discipline of mathematics and exemplify how obligations to other stakeholders may participate in the practical rationality of mathematics teaching as those influences are incorporated into instruction.

In this paper we describe a qualitative study in which we examine individual student engagement during implementation of an instructional scaffold for critical evaluation of scientific models during Earth and space science lessons. We coded dialogic interactions of one student group in a sixth grade science classroom across three observations, wherein we analyzed the trajectory of engagement for a single student - Ray (a pseudonym), within the co-constructed learning of the group. The first of these observations involved implementation of a preconstructed scaffold, called the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) diagram, on the topic of hydraulic fracturing (fracking). With the MEL, students use evidence to compare a scientific model to an alternative model. In the second two observations, students used a more agentic variation of the activity called the build-a-MEL, to study the topics of fossils and freshwater resources respectively. After three observations, we transcribed and coded each interaction of students in the group. We then categorized and identified emerging patterns of Ray’s discourse and interactions with group members by using both a priori engagement codes and open coding. This paper was prepared for the 2020 AERA Annual Meeting. 

Strategies and strategic processing within science education are designed to help students learn not only what scientists have come to understand about the world but also how they learn it. Although many domain-general strategies can be implemented in science classrooms, some strategies are either specific to science or are encouraged within science. Historically, concept development and conceptual change approaches and empirical investigations dominated science’s strategies and strategic processing. More recently, argumentation, science as modeling, and the incorporation of socio-scientific topics dominate the strategies and strategic processing within science teaching and learning. Challenges to more widespread use of these approaches include lack of teacher experience and pedagogical knowledge around the strategies, as well as time and curricular limitations. Teacher education and professional development programs should seek to explicitly implement contemporary science strategy interventions to improve upon their use in K-12 classrooms and other learning environments. Doing so effectively will require well-researched and validated instructional scaffolds to facilitate the teaching and use of contemporary science learning strategies. This paper was prepared for the 2020 AERA Annual Meeting.

This study compares web usage data with interviews from 41 participants, who are members of an online professional development site called the Everyday Mathematics Virtual Learning Community (VLC), to explore how elementary school teachers learn from classroom video.

In this article, authors propose a framework that centers the investigation as a key locus for constructing alignments among phenomena, data, and explanatory models and makes visible the work that scientists engage in as they develop and stabilize alignments.

This article investigates whether teachers’ subject matter knowledge (SMK) and knowledge of students’ misconceptions (KOSM) in high school life science are associated with students’ posttest performance on multiple-choice test items designed to reveal student misconceptions.

In this paper, authors offer a framework for teacher monitoring routines—a consequential yet understudied aspect of instruction when teachers oversee students’ working together.

This study is a case of using second-order models of students’ mathematical thinking to differentiate instruction, and it reveals that inquiring into research-based knowledge and inquiring responsively into students’ thinking are at the heart of differentiating mathematics instruction.

Using findings from a 4‐year research and development effort, we propose an updated model of sheltered instruction for science classrooms that leverages the opportunities provided by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to better support multilingual learners in middle and high school science.

Drawing upon a social practice theory analytical lens with a focus on power and using critical participatory ethnography methods, this study investigated the ways middle school students restructured power hierarchies as they worked to complete the design challenge of making their classroom community more sustainable, and how power hierarchy restructuring impacted students' opportunities to enact critical science agency (CSA).

In this chapter, the authors present the design rationale for and empirical results from a predominantly synchronous three-part online model for the professional development of mathematics teachers in rural contexts.

In this article, authors use meta-analysis to analyze 42 design and comparison studies involving data from 7699 students spanning over 35 years.

In this editorial, authors discuss the first of the five overarching problems: defining and measuring learning opportunities precisely enough to study how to maximize the quality of the opportunities experienced by every student.

Authors discuss the possibilities of retaining and sharing professional knowledge as a way of addressing the problem of always starting over.

Presented in this paper are the results from analyzing a discussion between five high school chemistry teachers as they generated a set of best practices for inquiry assessments.

In this study, authors examined middle-school students’ naturally occurring design conversations in small design teams and their learning of science as a result of engaging in an engineering and science unit.