DRK-12 Research and Products
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…
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 | There is strong empirical evidence in support of learning from comparisons in mathematics education research. The Animated Contrasting Cases in Geometry project seeks to extend this research and transform the learning of geometry for middle…
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 | Describes a scaffolded claims-evidence-reasoning (CER) argumentation framework that is embedded within a new eight-week, freely available curriculum unit developed by the Genetic Science Learning Center – Evolution: DNA and the Unity.
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 | 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 | 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 study seeks to better understand what teachers notice when interpreting assessment results and how the design of the assessment may influence teachers’ patterns of noticing. The study described herein investigates high school chemistry…
Product for Educators | Energy3D is a simulation-based engineering tool for designing green buildings and power stations that harness renewable energy to achieve sustainable development. Users can quickly sketch up a realistic-looking structure or import one…
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 | 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…
Presentation | On May 12, 2021, representatives from NSF's Division of Information Systems presented an overview of the Research.gov Proposal Submission System and the latest enhancements, including a demo site to explore the system before working on…
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…
Presentation | AERA presentation on elementary teachers’ perceptions and facilitation of argumentation in the context of professional learning.
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 | In this paper, the relationship between high school chemistry teachers’ self-generated “best practices” for developing formative assessments and the assessments they implement in their courses are examined.
Tool | The Responsive Math Teaching (RMT) Instructional Model breaks high-quality math teaching down into seven core components: plan, launch, facilitate productive struggle, make student thinking visible, connect to the mathematics, build and expand, and…
Tool | The Responsive Math Teaching Project's (RMT) Planning and Coaching Protocol is an 18-page booklet that includes the RMT Instructional Model as well as a planning and coaching guide for each phase of the RTM instructional cycle.
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 | Drawing on rich classroom observations of educators teaching in China and the U.S., this book details an innovative and effective approach to teaching algebra at the elementary level, namely, "teaching through example-based problem solving" (…
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…