DRK-12 Research and Products
Publication | This article introduces a new framework for articulating how educational assessments can be related to teacher uses in the classroom. It articulates three levels of assessment: macro (use of standardized tests), meso (externally developed items…
Publication | When integrated into online curriculum modules for students, educative curriculum materials (ECMs) can enhance teachers’ enactment of these modules. This study investigated (1) the use of digitally enhanced ECMs built into an online plate…
Publication | Drawing on Gee's notion of discourses, we examine how teachers incorporate language legitimizing socially and culturally constructed values and beliefs. In particular, we focus on the discourse of ability hierarchy—reflecting dominant values of…
Scaling STEM-ID—Research Strategies to Inform Initial Scaling of Middle School Engineering Curricula
Presentation | This work-in-progress paper discusses a three-year middle school Engineering and Technology course sequence that integrates foundational mathematics and science in an engineering context through challenges that introduce students to advanced…
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 | The DataPBL project enlisted a team of teachers, data science educators, and researchers to co-design data experiences for the eighth grade Japanese American Internment curriculum module developed by EL Education.
Publication | In this paper we describe a technical infrastructure, entitled Open Game Data, for conducting educational game research using open science, educational data mining and learning engineering approaches.
Publication | Science teacher leaders have been identified as an important lever for the implementation of science education reform. However, science reform implementation is locally controlled and not uniform across districts; therefore, the work of STLs…
Publication | Nancy Butler Songer, Associate Provost of STEM Education at the University of Utah, discusses the importance of supporting and including young people as part of environmental decision-making teams and key problem-solvers of our futures.
Publication | This article pilots ChatGPT in tackling the most challenging part of science learning and found it successful in automation of assessment development, grading, learning guidance, and recommendation of learning materials.
Publication | Teachers can play critical roles in challenging or reinscribing dominant narratives about what counts as STEM, who is seen within STEM disciplines, and how these disciplines should be taught. However, teachers have often experienced STEM in…
Publication | This chapter describes our middle school energy literacy project to develop, implement, and test curriculum materials for a unit titled Energy and Your Environment (EYE). EYE fosters place-based education by using the school building to enhance…
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 | To best support students in developing competence, assessments that allow students to use knowledge to solve challenging problems and make sense of phenomena are needed. These assessments need to be designed and tested to validly locate students…
Publication | Rachel Folger laughs when she recounts the time one of the students in her eighth grade social studies class exclaimed, “Whoa, Ms. Folger! Did you know that this is just what we’re doing in math?” Rachel is thrilled that her students—who…
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 | Adopting a pretest–posttest experimental design with repeated measures, this study examined the effects of three types of game-based learning supports in the form of modeling on knowledge development that contributed to successful math problem…
Publication | The real-time detection of when a player is struggling presents an opportunity for game designers to design timely and meaningful interventions, as well as to provide targeted support that improves student learning and engagement. In this paper…
Publication | In various formats, students at the secondary and postsecondary levels participate in multiweek authentic science research projects. There have been many papers explaining the operations of such programs, but few have provided explicit…
Publication | The authors designed a science and engineering curricular program that includes design features that promote student interest and motivation and examined teachers' and students' views on meaningfulness, motivation and interest.
Publication | Explaining phenomena associated with a system involves describing a system’s structure and articulating the process through which the system’s structure changes over time. This paper defines geo-sequential reasoning in the context of plate…
Publication | Measuring and Visualizing Space in Elementary Mathematics Learning explores the development of elementary students’ understanding of the mathematics of measure, and demonstrates how measurement can serve as an anchor for supporting a deeper…
Publication | We examined secondary (6-12) mathematics teachers’ participation in a professional development (PD) model where they collectively investigated video cases of students engaging with ambitious instructional materials. We leveraged frame analysis,…
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 | 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…