DRK-12 Research and Products
Tool | Framework to organize foothold practices for centering justice in science education.
Publication | Students need “critical data literacy” skills to help make sense of the multitude of information available to them, especially as it relates to high-stakes issues of social justice. The authors describe two curriculum modules they developed—one…
Publication | In this article we introduce a National Science Foundation-funded research project called TecRocks that has developed new interactive simulations and an innovative online curriculum module that weaves rock formation and plate tectonics together…
Publication | In many schools across the world, students experience mathematical concepts as ideas empty of wisdom and possibility. In this paper the authors analyze a philosophical conversation in which fifth-grade students were caught up in the animacy of…
Product for Educators | A 10-week, energy literacy curriculum unit for 6th grade students. Students will study energy use and transfer in their own school buildings. They will explore how Earth systems supply renewable and nonrenewable energy, and how these…
Publication | The early development of spatial reasoning skills has been linked to future success in mathematics, but research to date has mainly focused on the development of these skills within classroom settings rather than at home. The purpose of the…
Publication | We developed an analytic framework related to the suggestions coaches provided to mathematics teachers as they engaged in content-focused coaching cycles. We analyzed 712 suggestions from nine coaches and 58 coaching conversations. Analysis…
Publication | Civic Statistics by its nature is highly interdisciplinary. From a cross-curricular perspective, teaching and learning Civic Statistics faces specific challenges related to the preparation of teachers and the design of instruction. This chapter…
Tool | This list includes STEM education-related conferences that may be of interest to DRK-12 grantees.
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 | This paper investigates how mathematics instructors' recognition of the professional obligations of mathematics teaching varies based on their institutional environment, specifically whether they teach high school or college mathematics.
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 | Our research explores possibilities for cultivating new spaces for preservice secondary science teachers to engage in science. In a content-focused education course, we designed for and studied preservice teachers' engagement in expansive and…
Publication | Urban school leaders can support mathematics instruction that acknowledges and sustains students’ racialized and cultured ways of knowing and being. Yet, leadership for racial justice is often discussed separately from instructional improvement…
Publication | Open innovation challenge to mitigate global warming.
Publication | Teachers must know how to use language to support students in knowledge generation environments that align to the Next Generation Science Standards. To measure this knowledge, this study refines a survey on teachers’ knowledge of language as an…
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.
Legitimation Code Theory as an Analytical Framework for Integrated STEM Curriculum and Its Enactment
Publication | In this paper, we describe Legitimation Code Theory as an analytical framework and provide an analysis of semantic patterns of an integrated STEM unit (written discourse) and a middle school teacher’s enactment of that unit (oral…
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 qualitative study examines how a group of undergraduate and graduate students in an upper-level ecosystem ecology course at a research university in the southeastern part of the United States engage in a task that requires constructing an…
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 | 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 | Science identity development begins in school-aged years, when multilingual students (MLs) are often marginalised in the classroom due to language challenges and low expectations placed on them. This descriptive multiple case study explores the…