DRK-12 Research and Products
Publication | Eliciting and interpreting students’ ideas are essential skills in teaching, yet pre-service teachers (PSTs) rarely have adequate opportunities to develop these skills. In this study, we examine PSTs’ patterns of discourse and perceived learning…
Publication | Globally relevant, action-oriented learning, like Project-Based Inquiry (PBI) Global, is a powerful tool to increase classroom engagement and help students understand the world in which they live. Today, Person Early College for Innovation and…
Publication | This article focused on expansive, meaningful, and equitable modeling practice.
Publication | In this article, authors described the six-phase data investigation process for analyzing large-scale quantitative and categorical data.
“Should We Build This?”: Student Reasoning in Intentionally Facilitated Socio-technical Design Talks
Presentation | We are developing case studies of specific types of teacher-supported conversation in which students are asked to consider design decision-making not just as a technical task, but as a complex socio-technical activity with ethical, economic,…
Publication | One challenge facing the fields of mathematics education and special education is how to design instruction on fraction concepts that can meet the needs of diverse learners. An innovation that shows promise is to base instructional design upon…
Publication | This study explored the use of a three-part suite of practice-based activities -- one- and two-player online simulations, an avatar-based simulation, and a virtual teaching simulator—for supporting preservice teachers in learning how to…
Publication | This article focused on creating virtual research experiences using digitized museum specimens.
Publication | The purpose of this study was to investigate fourth-grade students’ sensemaking of a word problem. Sensemaking occurs when students connect their understanding of situations with existing knowledge. We investigated students’ sensemaking through…
Publication | Mastery goal structures, which communicate value for developing deeper understanding, are an important classroom support for student motivation and engagement, especially in the context of science learning aligned with the Next Generation…
Publication | An ability to engage in system thinking is necessary to understand complex problems. While many pre-college students use system modeling tools, there is limited evidence of student reasoning about causal relationships that interact in diverging…
Publication | Climate change, and the rise of the natural hazards that climate change brings, has been at the top of news feeds every week over the past year. Extreme events such as floods, droughts, and wildfires are expected to increase in the future. What…
Publication | Coordinating modeling and real-world data is central to building scientific theories. This paper examines how a complementary focus on modeling and data contributed to 8th grade students’ learning of mechanisms underlying wildfire smoke spread…
Publication | Young researchers are often excluded from the scholarly processes of peer-review and publication, which are cornerstones of scholarly work. The Journal of Emerging Investigators is an open access journal dedicated to publishing the research of…
Publication | Involving students in scientific modeling practice is one of the most effective approaches to achieving the next generation science education learning goals. Given the complexity and multirepresentational features of scientific models, scoring…
Product for Educators | The CS-STEM Network offers research-based curricula created by Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy that focus on teaching big ideas with robotics. Over 20 curriculum options provide support for LEGO, VEX, Arduino, and Virtual robot…
Publication | To promote understanding of and interest in working with data among diverse student populations, we developed and studied a high school mathematics curriculum module that examines income inequality in the United States.
Publication | This study explores how the interplay between data and model design shifts 6th graders’ students' ideas about diffusion as they build a range of models (“paper and pencil” and computational models). We present a new web-based environment and…
Tool | STEM education-related publications that may be of interest to DR K-12 grantees.
Publication | The lack of formal training in peer review can be detrimental to the publishing activities of early career researchers, including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Lack of recognition of the work of early career researchers (ECRs) in…
Tool | Find education research tips, resources and tools.
Publication | This review synthesizes insights from 23 NSF-funded projects, totaling $40 million, that studied mathematical and scientific argumentation in STEM education from prekindergarten (PreK) to Grade 12. The projects reported on both studies of…
Publication | Black and Brown girls are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Although studies have examined the reasons for this by exploring Black and Brown girls' experiences based on culture, gender, and race, there…
Tool | Planning to submit an NSF proposal this year? This toolkit is a compilation of helpful resources.
Publication | The research contained in this article used qualitative methods to articulate and test the design underlying our professional learning cycle by advancing conjecture mapping, a device by which the embodiments of the design are made transparent to…