DRK-12 Research and Products

Publication | This article reports on the first three years of a teacher-led professional development program on the Navajo Nation. We draw on both quantitative and qualitative data from our end-of-year surveys to highlight some of the early lessons we have…
Publication | In this article, we—a team of science teachers and a university researcher—present the processes of adapting existing curricular resources to promote equitable learning experiences for diverse learners. Using a middle school ecology unit as an…
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Publication | To address the lack of a classroom observation protocol aligned with integrated STEM, the author team developed one to measure the degree of integrated STEM instruction implemented in K-12 science and engineering classrooms. This study…
Publication | This article describes a free online plate tectonics curriculum module (PT module), which offers a unique approach with two innovative tools that allow students to make connections between real-world data and plate tectonics models.
Publication | To build a sustainable future, science and engineering education programmes should emphasise scientific investigation, collaboration across traditional science topics and disciplines, and engineering design, including design and evaluation of…
Publication | This study examines technology-enhanced teacher responses and students’ written mathematical explanations to understand how to support effective teacher responding and the centering of students’ mathematical ideas. Although prior research has…
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 | This article describes resources that are freely available to help teachers navigate the peer review and publication processes and guide their students through the successful completion of submission and publication of their research papers.…
Publication | These narratives explore what it might entail to begin school–university partnerships towards the goal of transformative social changes through the voices of two women scholars of color. Using two school–university partnerships as focal cases,…
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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | This article focused on expansive, meaningful, and equitable modeling practice.
Publication | As the discipline of statistics education broadens to data science education, there is a need to examine how practices in data science can inform work in K-12. We synthesize literature about statistics investigation processes, data science as a…
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…
Publication | This article focused on creating virtual research experiences using digitized museum specimens.
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…
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…