DRK-12 Research and Products
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…
Product for Educators | EDC's Young Mathematicians kits provide teachers and parents with games that are fun, spark conversations about math and provide rich learning opportunities.
Mathematics and Science Teacher Educators' Use of Representations of Practice: A Mixed Methods Study
Publication | This study sought to explore math and science teacher educators' use of various media to represent practice within methods courses. There is little understanding of why certain media is used over other representations and the rationale for these…
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…
Presentation | Resources from the NSF-led webinars on the new DRK-12 Solicitation 23-596.
Publication | Review of the recent literature on integrated STEM curriculum development and implementation. Included are frameworks for integrated STEM curriculum development and research assessments to evaluate curriculum quality. Details and examples from a…
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 | This case study examines how material resistance (limitations posed by the physical world) and graph interpretation intersected during a high school biology investigation using digital sensors.
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 | Build a classroom community by building representations and visualizations of data related to students’ names.
Publication | This article introduces a new framework for articulating how educational assessments can be related to teacher uses in the classroom. It articulates three levels of assessment: macro (use of standardized tests), meso (externally developed items…
Publication | When integrated into online curriculum modules for students, educative curriculum materials (ECMs) can enhance teachers’ enactment of these modules. This study investigated (1) the use of digitally enhanced ECMs built into an online plate…
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.
Publication | Despite an increasing focus on integrating engineering design in K-12 settings, relatively few studies have investigated how to support students to engage in systematic processes to optimize the designs of their solutions. This study explored…
Publication | A curriculum developer on the DataPBL project details his journey searching for data about the Japanese American internment for 8th grade students to explore with CODAP.
Publication | Open innovation challenge to mitigate global warming.
Publication | Science teacher leaders have been identified as an important lever for the implementation of science education reform. However, science reform implementation is locally controlled and not uniform across districts; therefore, the work of STLs…
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 article pilots ChatGPT in tackling the most challenging part of science learning and found it successful in automation of assessment development, grading, learning guidance, and recommendation of learning materials.
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 | In rural, geographically dispersed school districts, access to high-quality face-to-face professional development (PD) is challenging. Our study developed and compared the effectiveness of an online PD for middle-school science teachers working…
Publication | The DataPBL project enlisted a team of teachers, data science educators, and researchers to co-design data experiences for the eighth grade Japanese American Internment curriculum module developed by EL Education.
Publication | In various formats, students at the secondary and postsecondary levels participate in multiweek authentic science research projects. There have been many papers explaining the operations of such programs, but few have provided explicit…
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 | Explaining phenomena associated with a system involves describing a system’s structure and articulating the process through which the system’s structure changes over time. This paper defines geo-sequential reasoning in the context of plate…