DRK-12 Research and Products

Product for Educators | The SchoolWide Lab middle school curriculum units are anchored in phenomena, aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards(NGSS) and purposefully integrate Computational Thinking (CT). To date, four units have been developed by a…
Product for Educators | This resource presents a curricular module for high school biology classes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The module is made up of 8 lessons that will likely take about 10-15 hours of instructional time. Major themes of the module…
Publication | 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…
Publication | Many of us have multiple stories that would be appropriate to tell given the theme of this Special Issue. I am compelled to tell a story about my work with teachers, teacher leaders, and other allies on the Navajo Nation. The Diné…
Publication | School science continues to alienate students identifying with nondominant, non-western cultures, and learners of color, and considers science as an enterprise where success necessitates divorcing the self and corporeal body from ideas and the…
Product for Educators | Fun and easy to use math games designed for children ages 3 to 6-years-old. Some games are quick and use everyday materials; others use a game board for more extended play. All of the games can be played multiple times and their…
Product for Educators | Data Nuggets are free classroom activities, co-designed by scientists and teachers, designed to bring contemporary research and authentic data into the classroom. Students are guided through the entire process of science, including…
Publication | With the spread of learning analytics (LA) dashboards in K-12 schools, educators are increasingly expected to make sense of data to inform instruction. However, numerous features of school settings, such as specialized vantage points of…
Presentation | NARST presentation on instructional decision making to improve argumentation in science.
Publication | 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.
Publication | Incorporating video case study of mathematics teaching into professional development (PD) can provide opportunities for teachers to develop new ways of seeing teaching and learning and inform efforts to enact new instructional practices. However…
Publication | This article explores how scholars have framed studies of preservice science teacher (PST) knowledge and learning over the past twelve years.
Publication | Teaching chemistry as a practice rather than as a mere collection of facts demands that teachers modify their practices, particularly their approach to formative assessment (FA). In this study, we investigated how teachers’ FA practices changed…
| Activating Math Talk is a resource for promoting high-quality math discourse in grades K-5. The content of the chapters and discussion questions within are meant to spark conversations among teachers, teacher leaders, administrators, and education faculty…
Publication | Efforts to promote reform-based instruction have overlooked the import of affect in teacher learning. Drawing on prior work, I argue that teachers’ affective experiences in the discipline are integral to their learning how to teach the…
Publication | This conceptual paper introduces the honeycomb of engineering framework, which offers an epistemologically justified theoretical position and a pedagogical lens that can be used to examine ways engineering concepts and practices are taught in…
Publication | 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.
Publication | 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…
Publication | In this chapter, we describe a three-part fully online model for the professional development of middle school mathematics teachers. This chapter contributes to understanding how online contexts provide opportunities to collect and analyze data…
Publication | Despite the ease of accessing a wide range of measures, little attention is given to validity arguments when considering whether to use the measure for a new purpose or in a different context. Making a validity argument has historically focused…
Publication | The construct of active learning permeates undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), but despite its prevalence, the construct means different things to different people, groups, and STEM domains. To…
Publication | Teaching about wave structure and function is a critical element of any physical science curriculum and supported by Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) PS4: Waves and Their Applications in Technologies for Information Transfer. Often,…
Publication | Using social learning theory with the central concept of a community of practice, we situate this work within a secondary mathematics methods course to unpack preservice secondary mathematics teachers (PSMTs) development through the use of video…
Publication | Chemical scientists and engineers are interested in controlling chemical processes to attain specific goals, from synthesizing a desired substance to hindering a particular transformation. Nevertheless, students typically have few opportunities…
Publication | In this article, we describe the case of “Keri,” a fifth-grade teacher who had completed an Elementary Mathematics Specialist (EMS) certification program. Drawn from a larger study investigating the knowledge, beliefs, and practices of EMSs,…