DRK-12 Research and Products
Publication | Science identity development begins in school-aged years, when multilingual students (MLs) are often marginalised in the classroom due to language challenges and low expectations placed on them. This descriptive multiple case study explores the…
Publication | Providing high-quality professional development for teachers with diverse backgrounds and classroom experience is a challenging task. In this work, we investigate the Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS) partnership program, which…
Publication | Nancy Butler Songer, from the University of Utah, makes a call for collective action to create a new curriculum focused on the design of solutions.
Publication | Our research study examines the community-based partnership PD model and its impact on school teachers’ self-efficacy and their success in engaging students in the NGSS science practices through citizen science projects.
Publication | Big ideas in science education are meant to be interpretive frameworks that empower student learning. Unfortunately, outside of the broad conception of scientific evaluation, there are few theoretical explanations of how this might happen.…
Publication | Science education literature has highlighted socio-scientific issues (SSI) as an effective pedagogy for teaching science in a social and political context. SSI links science education and real-world problems to engage students in real-world…
Publication | Significant science education resources, namely the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) framework, need an intentional aim of centering social justice for minoritized communities and youth as well as…
Publication | A School Science and Mathematics Journal editorial.
Publication | We investigated how the level of variance in students’ prior knowledge may have influenced their collaborative interactions and science learning in small groups. We examined learning outcomes from 102 groups from seven science teachers’ classes…
Publication | Engineering design systematically identifies needs, wants, and problems and then devises solutions to address them. A central component of our work is guiding students in the engineered design of solutions to local environmental problems.…
Publication | Teacher education has begun to embrace the use of 360 videos to improve preservice teachers' (PSTs) engagement and immersion. While recent research on such use is promising overall, there are specific questions that have been left unanswered…
Publication | Science learning is an important part of the K-12 educational experience, as well as in the lives of students. This study considered students’ science learning as they engaged in the instruction of scientific issues with social relevance. With…
Presentation | We consider how intentionally planned and facilitated whole-class conversations can “make space” for students’ sense-making about engineering problems and solutions and position them with epistemic authority to contribute to collective thinking…
Publication | Global climate change (GCC) is one of the greatest challenges of our age and a highly significant socio-scientific issue (SSI). Developing secondary students’ understanding about the Earth’s climate and GCC is critical for empowering future…
Publication | Abstract concepts, such as gravity, may provide the perfect opportunity to bring phenomena into the classroom. Using phenomena and summary writing together might help student learning since it requires making connections between their ideas and…
Publication | Women and many people of color continue to be minoritized in STEM and notably in physics. We conducted two studies demonstrating that exposure to counternarratives about who does physics and why one does physics significantly increases high…
Publication | Arts-integration is a promising approach to building students’ abilities to create and critique arguments with data, also known as informal inferential reasoning (IIR). However, differences in disciplinary practices and routines, as well as…
Publication | Limited research has explored elementary preservice teachers' responsiveness while navigating an argumentation-focused discussion, particularly in an online simulated teaching experience. The purpose of this study was to examine preservice…
Publication | Professional noticing involves attending to and interpreting children’s mathematical reasoning. In a similar manner, pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is defined as the knowledge teachers need to interpret and respond to children’s reasoning.…
Tool | The new DRK-12 solicitation (NSF 23-596) introduces several changes and updates compared to the previous solicitation (NSF 20-572). Proposal writers should take note of the differences outlined in this document.
Publication | Our conceptual framework for justice-centered STEM education engages all students in multiple STEM subjects, including data science and computer science, to explain and design solutions to pressing societal challenges and their disproportionate…
Publication | Educational policies exist as part of complex systems of many policies, all of which science teachers must make sense before using in practice. Using Actor-Network Theory to view policy translation in assemblages, we examine how networked actors…
Publication | With an ultimate goal of characterizing teachers' movement toward understanding the epistemic complexity of generative learning environments, this study refers to adaptive teaching expertise (AdTex) as a developmental teaching capacity…
Publication | We need STEM knowledge programs in formal and informal settings that guide learners in applying STEM learning to the creation of solutions.
Publication | The project research team developed two active learning lessons examining the diverse profiles of individuals who earned a bachelor’s degree in physics, and issues of marginalization of women in physics. After participating in the lessons,…