DRK-12 Research and Products
Publication | Research on socio-scientific issues (SSI) has revealed that it is critical for learners to develop a systematic understanding of the underlying issue. In this paper, we explore how modeling can facilitate students’ systems thinking in the…
Publication | Practical research article from Science Scope.
Publication | In this study, 82 middle and high school teachers engaged with the InSTEP online professional
learning platform to develop their expertise in teaching data science and statistics. We
investigated teachers’ engagement within the platform,…
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,…
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 | A School Science and Mathematics Journal editorial.
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 | This descriptive case study examines the process of productively navigating socio-emotional risks and interpersonal tensions encountered by a veteran and pre-service physics teacher during one episode of discussing physics content.
Publication | Open innovation challenge to mitigate global warming.
Presentation | The Innovate to Mitigate (I2M) project poses challenges for secondary-school students to design feasible, innovative strategies that mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. Design is informed by research on problem-based learning,…
Publication | In this article we introduce a National Science Foundation-funded research project called TecRocks that has developed new interactive simulations and an innovative online curriculum module that weaves rock formation and plate tectonics together…
Publication | This article uses cause and effect as a lens and thinking tool to observe and make sense of phenomena in elementary science.
Presentation | Paper set on designing, supporting, and enacting elementary science units for teacher phenomenon adaptation from 2023 NARST conference.
Publication | In this article, we describe a professional learning community (PLC) for science teacher educators that supported changes in pedagogy through educative curriculum materials and vignette writing.
Publication | Teacher–teacher feedback is an important feature of professional learning. However, deeply ingrained socio-pedagogical norms may affect both the nature and content of feedback, constraining its effectiveness. Prior studies have reported that…
Publication | This study applied the many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM) to assess students’ knowledge-in-use in middle school physical science.
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 | 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 | Our research explores possibilities for cultivating new spaces for preservice secondary science teachers to engage in science. In a content-focused education course, we designed for and studied preservice teachers' engagement in expansive and…
Publication | We developed an analytic framework related to the suggestions coaches provided to mathematics teachers as they engaged in content-focused coaching cycles. We analyzed 712 suggestions from nine coaches and 58 coaching conversations. Analysis…
Why Does Teacher Learning Vary in Professional Development? Accounting for Organisational Conditions
Publication | Professional development providers often struggle with how some teachers take up and internalise new instructional practices while others have difficulty implementing new ideas and strategies. Teacher personal characteristics account for only…
Publication | This study concerns the cognitive process of mathematical problem posing, conceptualized in three stages: understanding the task, constructing the problem, and expressing the problem. We used the eye tracker and think-aloud methods to deeply…
Publication | Knowing how science teachers develop their professional knowledge has been a challenge. One potential way to determine the professional knowledge of teachers is through videos. In the study described here, the authors recruited 60 elementary and…
Publication | In rural, geographically dispersed school districts, access to high-quality face-to-face professional development (PD) is challenging. Our study developed and compared the effectiveness of an online PD for middle-school science teachers working…
Publication | Despite an increasing focus on integrating engineering design in K-12 settings, relatively few studies have investigated how to support students to engage in systematic processes to optimize the designs of their solutions. This study explored…