DRK-12 Research and Products

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 | 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 | 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 | 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…
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 | 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 | NARST presentation on instructional decision making to improve argumentation in science.
Publication | 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…
Publication | 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…
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…
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 | 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…
Publication | 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.
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 | 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…
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 | 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…
Publication | This article explores how scholars have framed studies of preservice science teacher (PST) knowledge and learning over the past twelve years.
Publication | 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…
Publication | This article presents a tool and discusses the rationale for the authors’ development of a tool designed to assess the alignment of culturally responsive schooling principles within schools serving predominantly U.S. Indigenous…