DRK-12 Research and Products
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 | This study investigated how newcomer emergent bilinguals made meaning in two 9th-grade biology classrooms. Methods relevant to naturalistic inquiry were used to collect and analyze data. Findings indicate that newcomers bridged aspects of…
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 | 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 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…
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…
Theoretical Diversity and Inclusivity in Science and Environmental Education Research: A Way Forward
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,…
| We argue that progress in the area of research on mathematics teacher responses to student thinking could be enhanced were the field to attend more explicitly to important facets of those responses, as well as to related units of analysis. We describe the…
Publication | Integrated STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education is becoming increasingly common in K–12 classrooms. However, various definitions of STEM education exist that make it challenging for teachers to know what to…
Publication | This article reports on the development of a novel, video-based measure of teachers’ moment-to-moment noticing as knowledge-filtered perception.
Publication | This is a technical report detailing the methods and findings for each of the research studies in the LLAMA project.
Publication | This study explored an innovative coaching model termed video-based online video coaching. As part of an NSF-funded project, we studied nine mathematics coaches over four years as they engaged in video-based coaching with teachers from…
Publication | This paper introduces an approach for designing NGSS-aligned assessments that measure young learners’ science progress while also attending to the scientific language and literacy practices that are integral parts of the NGSS Performance…
Publication | We investigate the algebraic discourse of secondary mathematics teachers with respect to the topic of equation solving by analyzing five teachers’ responses to open-ended items on a questionnaire that asks respondents to analyze hypothetical…
Product for Educators | This online collection of transformative geoscience resources includes Earth system models, data visualization tools, and curriculum modules. Each module is designed for middle and high school students and is aligned with the…
Publication | The work presented here describes in detail the development of an integrated STEM observation instrument - the STEM Observation Protocol (STEM-OP) - that can be used for both research and practice. Over a period of approximately 18-months, a…