DRK-12 Research and Products

Publication | Rachel Folger laughs when she recounts the time one of the students in her eighth grade social studies class exclaimed, “Whoa, Ms. Folger! Did you know that this is just what we’re doing in math?” Rachel is thrilled that her students—who…
Publication | Knowing how science teachers develop their professional knowledge has been a challenge. One potential way to determine the professional knowledge of teachers is through videos. In the study described here, the authors recruited 60 elementary and…
Publication | Providing high-quality professional development for teachers with diverse backgrounds and classroom experience is a challenging task. In this work, we investigate the Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS) partnership program, which…
Publication | Nancy Butler Songer, from the University of Utah, makes a call for collective action to create a new curriculum focused on the design of solutions.
Publication | Our research study examines the community-based partnership PD model and its impact on school teachers’ self-efficacy and their success in engaging students in the NGSS science practices through citizen science projects.
Publication | Digital game-based math learning environments (math DGBLE) are promising platforms that provide students with opportunities to master conceptual understanding and cultivate mathematical thinking, on which the contemporary mathematics education…
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,…
Publication | The Socioscientific Issues Teaching and Learning (SSI-TL) framework is a guide for developing an instructional approach to learning experiences focused on socioscientific issues (SSI). Despite the potential benefits of SSI learning, teachers…
Publication | Artificial Intelligence (AI) is prevalent in nearly every aspect of our lives. However, recent studies have found a significant amount of confusion and misunderstanding surrounding AI. To develop effective educational programs in the field of AI…
Publication | This study concerns the cognitive process of mathematical problem posing, conceptualized in three stages: understanding the task, constructing the problem, and expressing the problem. We used the eye tracker and think-aloud methods to deeply…
Publication | A School Science and Mathematics Journal editorial.
Publication | The Delphi method has been adapted to inform item refinements in educational and psychological assessment development. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design using Delphi is a common approach to gain experts' insight into why items might…
Publication | Engineering design systematically identifies needs, wants, and problems and then devises solutions to address them. A central component of our work is guiding students in the engineered design of solutions to local environmental problems.…
Publication | Teacher education has begun to embrace the use of 360 videos to improve preservice teachers' (PSTs) engagement and immersion. While recent research on such use is promising overall, there are specific questions that have been left unanswered…
Publication | It is essential for items in assessments of mathematics’ teacher knowledge to evoke the desired response processes – to be interpreted and responded to by teachers as intended by item developers. In this study, we sought to unpack evidence that…
Publication | Questions regarding the construction of mathematical authority have implications for learning, specifically for students’ views of themselves as mathematics learners and doers with valuable contributions. We consider the ideas proposed by eight…
Publication | Significant science education resources, namely the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) framework, need an intentional aim of centering social justice for minoritized communities and youth as well as…
Publication | Despite years of research and practice inspired by chemistry education research, a recent report shows that US secondary instruction is not aligned with current national reform-based efforts. One means to mitigate this discrepancy is focusing on…
Publication | Professional development providers often struggle with how some teachers take up and internalise new instructional practices while others have difficulty implementing new ideas and strategies. Teacher personal characteristics account for only…
Publication | Women and many people of color continue to be minoritized in STEM and notably in physics. We conducted two studies demonstrating that exposure to counternarratives about who does physics and why one does physics significantly increases high…
Publication | Limited research has explored elementary preservice teachers' responsiveness while navigating an argumentation-focused discussion, particularly in an online simulated teaching experience. The purpose of this study was to examine preservice…
Publication | Professional noticing involves attending to and interpreting children’s mathematical reasoning. In a similar manner, pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is defined as the knowledge teachers need to interpret and respond to children’s reasoning.…
Presentation | We consider how intentionally planned and facilitated whole-class conversations can “make space” for students’ sense-making about engineering problems and solutions and position them with epistemic authority to contribute to collective thinking…
Publication | Research on geometric transformations suggests that early learners possess intuitive understandings grounded in motion metaphors, transitioning to mappings. The processes through which students transition between these two conceptions are not…
Publication | This report takes stock of what we currently know as well as what we need to know to make classroom assessment maximally beneficial for the teaching and learning of STEM subject matter in K–12 classrooms.