DRK-12 Research and Products

Publication | 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…
Publication | 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…
Publication | Socially relevant and controversial topics, such as the climate crisis, are subject to differences in the explanations that scientists and the public find plausible. Scaffolds can help students be evaluative of the validity of explanations based…
Publication | The goal of our National Science Foundation-funded Geological Models for Exploration of Dynamic Earth (GEODE) project is to help students use plate tectonics as an explanation for the landforms and geological phenomena observed on Earth’s…
Publication | 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…
Publication | Museums are local-to-global organizations operating in a digitized, distributed, and diverse 21st century world. Museums leaders face significant challenges in achieving broader relevance, meaningful engagement, and equitable outreach. This…
Publication | In a project designed to help create the next generation of problem-solvers, North Carolina State University researchers challenged a group of 11th graders to investigate and find solutions to a global problem: that billions of people lack…
Product for Educators | The CKT packets contain tasks, suggested lesson plans, readings, and resources to support teacher educators’ efforts to help elementary teachers develop CKT– specialized knowledge at the intersection of specific content ideas and…
Publication | The process of modeling a complex phenomenon often requires working across representational systems of differing scales, modalities, and purposes. When put into contact, entities across multiple representational systems can become related or “…
Presentation | AERA symposium presentation on accessible distance learning in science during COVID.
Publication | 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…
Publication | 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.
Publication | 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,…
Publication | Productive use of student mathematical thinking is a critical yet incompletely understood dimension of effective teaching practice. We have previously conceptualized the teaching practice of building on student mathematical thinking and the four…
Publication | The resources that multilingual students bring to school mathematics are often ignored. During a teacher-researcher collaborative project focused on creating more equitable learning environments in high school math classrooms, we noted an…
Presentation | On July 7, 2021, National Science Foundation's (NSF) DRK-12 Program Lead, Dr. Mike Steele, gave an overview and answered questions about the Discovery Research PreK-12 Program's solicitation (20-572). Learn more about this STEM education…
Publication | Science involves changing the scale of objects—particularly scales of size, time, and intensity—from what is experienced in the world. Similar to investigations conducted in science laboratories, classroom investigations involve re-representing…
Publication | Diagnostic classification models (DCMs) are restricted latent class models with a set of cross-class equality constraints and additional monotonicity constraints on their item parameters, both of which are needed to ensure the meaning of classes…
Publication | This is a description of a new methodological tool to gather response process validity evidence. The context is scholarship within mathematics education contexts.
Product for Educators | A set of NGSS-aligned investigations for each discipline (physics, chemistry, biology) designed to introduce and scaffold engagement in science practices and build an understanding of the interplay between experimental design, data…
Publication | This chapter discusses the capabilities of extended reality technology in informal learning environments, such as museums and cultural heritage sites. The chapter critically appraises several affordances of extended reality technologies while…
Publication | 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…
Product for Educators | Getting Unstuck is a 10-module intermediate Scratch curriculum to help your students develop greater creative and conceptual fluency with code. The curriculum reimagines the classroom as a design studio: a culture of learning in which…
Presentation | AERA presentation on elementary teachers’ perceptions and facilitation of argumentation in the context of professional learning.
Publication | 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.