DRK-12 Research and Products

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…
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…
Publication | As distinct communities of practice (COP), science education research (SER) and environmental education research (EER) have both matured a great deal in recent decades, coming to include a greater diversity of theoretical perspectives,…
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 | This experience report describes lessons learned from a remote after-school camp with 24 elementary school students who participated in a series of individual and paired learning activities over three weeks. The report contributes to the…
Publication | In the United States, national and state standardized assessments have become a metric for measuring student learning and high-quality learning environments. As the COVID-19 pandemic offered a multitude of learning modalities (e.g., hybrid,…
Publication | This review synthesizes findings from 18 NSF-funded projects, totaling nearly $22 million, that studied scientific modeling in science education from prekindergarten to Grade 12. The projects typically used descriptive designs to understand…
Publication | A common approach to scaling up a professional development program is for the researchers who designed the program to prepare teacher leaders to facilitate it at their schools. When researchers eventually leave, however, teacher leaders may…
Tool | Planning to submit an NSF proposal this year? This toolkit is a compilation of helpful resources.
Publication | This report describes initial findings from a study of middle school science curriculum materials that were designed to promote learning as called for by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).
Presentation | Recent circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions on entering public schools have created barriers for prospective teachers (PT) to gain valuable exposure to real classrooms. As a result, we have transitioned some teacher…
Publication | This study explores two teachers participating in professional development workshops implementing SocioScientific Issues (SSI) into STEM classrooms. Two research questions were investigated: (a) To what extent did teachers implement SSI into…
Tool | Find education research tips, resources and tools.
Publication | Students’ self-efficacy toward computing affect their participation in related tasks and courses. Self-efficacy is likely influenced by students’ initial experiences and exposure to computer science (CS) activities. Moreover, student interest…
Publication | This review synthesized insights from 27 NSF-funded projects, totaling $62 million, that studied pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in STEM education from prekindergarten (PreK) to Grade 12, split roughly equally across mathematics and science…
Publication | In this study, we present a conceptual tool for guiding teachers’ principled pedagogical actions toward equitable instruction, referred to as the Transforming Science Learning (TSL) framework. The TSL framework was developed to address the…
Publication | Although prior research has highlighted the significance of representations for mathematical learning, there is still a lack of research on how students use multimodal external representations (MERs) to solve mathematical tasks in digital game-…
Publication | This study explores how 79 elementary preservice teachers perceive the relevance and importance of assessment task scenarios designed to elicit information about content knowledge for teaching (CKT) about matter and its interactions—a…
Publication | Effective data literacy instruction requires that learners move beyond understanding statistics to being able to humanize data through a contextual understanding of argumentation and reasoning in the real-world. In this paper, we explore the…
Publication | MindHive is an online, open science, citizen science platform co-designed by a team of educational researchers, teachers, cognitive and social scientists, UX researchers, community organizers, and software developers to support real-world brain…
Publication | This study illustrates how two secondary mathematics teachers used students’ incorrect answers as they supported students’ engagement in collective argumentation.
Publication | This book is about scientific inquiry. Designed for early and mid-career researchers, it is a practical manual for conducting and communicating high-quality research in (mathematics) education. Based on the authors’ extensive experience as…
Publication | Computer-aided design (CAD) programs are essential to engineering as they allow for better designs through low-cost iterations. While CAD programs are typically taught to undergraduate students as a job skill, such software can also help…
Publication | Diagnostic classification models (DCMs) are psychometric models for evaluating a student’s mastery of the essential skills in a content domain based upon their responses to a set of test items. Currently, diagnostic model and/or Q-matrix…