DRK-12 Research and Products

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 | The InSTEP professional learning platform aims to support grades 6-12 teachers’ professional learning in teaching statistics and data science through a personalized online learning platform. While statistics and data analysis are included in…
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 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).
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…
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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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…
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 | 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 | We explore the implementation of a co-designed data-dance unit in which middle school students created their own embodied metaphors to represent and communicate about graphs through dance. In analyzing dance artifacts and post-study interviews…
Publication | Why do some mathematics lessons captivate high school students and others not? This study explores this question by comparing how the content unfolds in the lessons that students rated highest with respect to their aesthetic affordances (e.g.,…
Publication | Through a composite counter-story from the perspective of fifth-grade Raza learners, the authors show how race and language play a role in the mathematics classroom.
Publication | The tasks described in this chapter are intended to build connections between these real-world dangers of viral spread and some relevant topics from the secondary mathematics curriculum. We also explore a link between mathematical reasoning and…
Publication | In this article we describe an Informal Science Institution (ISI)-based professional learning program for science teacher leaders (STLs) developed within the context of a research-practice partnership (RPP).
Publication | This study illustrates how two secondary mathematics teachers used students’ incorrect answers as they supported students’ engagement in collective argumentation.
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 | This study contributes to the growing body of research that highlights the usefulness of professional noticing of children’s mathematical thinking for understanding the complexity and variability in teaching expertise. We explored the noticing…
Publication | Examining teachers’ knowledge on a large scale involves addressing substantial measurement and logistical issues; thus, existing teacher knowledge assessments have mainly consisted of selected-response items because of their ease of scoring.…
Publication | The ReLaTe-SA project investigates the research question: what language do teachers use to describe and explain routines in algebra classes? The goal of this article is to inform readers about some ways we have learned to describe the discourse…