DRK-12 Research and Products

Presentation | Collaborative partnerships between families and teachers have the potential to support and transform students’ mathematics learning experiences. This study focused on interactions among mothers and teachers of multilingual elementary grade…
Publication | Science education literature has highlighted socio-scientific issues (SSI) as an effective pedagogy for teaching science in a social and political context. SSI links science education and real-world problems to engage students in real-world…
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…
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 | There is strong agreement in science teacher education of the importance of teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT), which includes their subject matter knowledge and their pedagogical content knowledge. However, there are limited…
Publication | Science learning is an important part of the K-12 educational experience, as well as in the lives of students. This study considered students’ science learning as they engaged in the instruction of scientific issues with social relevance. With…
Presentation | This brief research report describes the refinement and testing of an observational rubric designed to identify and assess elements of classroom mathematics instruction that research has found to support multilingual student learning.
Publication | Global climate change (GCC) is one of the greatest challenges of our age and a highly significant socio-scientific issue (SSI). Developing secondary students’ understanding about the Earth’s climate and GCC is critical for empowering future…
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 | Open innovation challenge to mitigate global warming.
Tool | The new DRK-12 solicitation (NSF 23-596) introduces several changes and updates compared to the previous solicitation (NSF 20-572). Proposal writers should take note of the differences outlined in this document.
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 | Educational policies exist as part of complex systems of many policies, all of which science teachers must make sense before using in practice. Using Actor-Network Theory to view policy translation in assemblages, we examine how networked actors…
Publication | We need STEM knowledge programs in formal and informal settings that guide learners in applying STEM learning to the creation of solutions.
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 | Determining the most appropriate method of scoring an assessment is based on multiple factors, including the intended use of results, the assessment's purpose, and time constraints. Both the dichotomous and partial credit models have their…
Presentation | This webinar provided early career data science education researchers with information on the state of the field; tools, curricula, and other resources for researchers; and insight into funding opportunities and proposal development.…
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 | Effective K-12 integrated STEM education should reflect an intentional effort to adequately represent and facilitate each of its component disciplines in a meaningful way. However, most research in this space has been conducted within the…
Publication | Teacher noticing scholars are just beginning to explore how to support noticing that is responsive to students' cultural resources. The theoretical basis of the teacher noticing literature affords scholars a range of paths for understanding…
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 | 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 | This study sought to explore math and science teacher educators' use of various media to represent practice within methods courses. There is little understanding of why certain media is used over other representations and the rationale for these…
Presentation | Resources from the NSF-led webinars on the new DRK-12 Solicitation 23-596.
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,…