DRK-12 Research and Products

Publication | 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.
Publication | This week is Global Goals week — an annual week of action, awareness, and accountability for the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which are aimed at addressing global challenges like poverty and hunger. In North Carolina, two…
Publication | In this work, we extend variational auto encoders (VAE) to estimate item parameters and correlated latent abilities, and directly compare the ML2P-VAE method to more traditional parameter estimation methods, such as Monte Carlo expectation-…
Publication | 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…
Publication | This department explores the concept of disciplinary literacy—the conceptual understandings and ways of reading, thinking, and writing involved in critiquing and constructing knowledge in a discipline—and its intersections with aspects of…
Product for Educators | The Fraction Activities and Assessments for Conceptual Teaching (FAACT) instructional program is designed to support teachers’ insights into students’ conceptual understandings of fractions. The overall program goal is to…
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…
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 | 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 | 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…
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…
Publication | 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…
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 | 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 | 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.
Publication | This study explored the verb clauses and thematic development evident in curriculum materials and in transcripts of teachers planning lessons using the materials.
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 | 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 paper puts forth a detailed conceptual framework for K-12 integrated STEM education that can be used by researchers, educators, and curriculum developers as a common vision
Presentation | AERA presentation on elementary teachers’ perceptions and facilitation of argumentation in the context of professional learning.
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…