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What investigations can help students best understand conservation of matter? The Investigating Matter tasks are intended to elicit preservice teachers’ CKT related to the conservation of matter.
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What is a scientific explanation and how can we support students in explaining changes in matter? The Fizzy Antacid task is intended to elicit and develop preservice teachers’ CKT related to students’ scientific…
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What does it mean to help students develop a small particle model of matter? The Mystery Bubble task is intended to elicit preservice teachers’ CKT related to students’ ideas about the small particle model (SPM) for matter…
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What ideas do students have about small particles of matter? The Two Cups of Liquid task is intended to elicit preservice teachers’ CKT related to students’ ideas about the small particle model (SPM) for matter…
How Science Teachers DiALoG Classrooms: Towards a Practical and Responsive Formative Assessment of Oral Argumentation
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This article presents lessons learned from an ongoing attempt to conceptualize, develop, and refine a way for teachers to gather formative assessment evidence about classroom argumentation as it happens…
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Nine units for high school-level Marine Science classes: (1) Ocean Exploration, (2) Marine Geology, (3) Marine Chemistry, (4) Estuaries, (5) Marine Physics, (6) Populations: Producers, (7) Populations: Invertebrates, (8)…
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Connected Biology provides a sequence of lessons for high school biology that fosters integrated learning of genetics and evolution. This novel curriculum is aligned with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)…
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A set of NGSS-aligned investigations for each discipline (physics, chemistry, biology) designed to introduce and scaffold engagement in science practices and build an understanding of the interplay between experimental…
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Sensing Science has created several free educational apps for iPads to build conceptual understanding of matter and its changes in kindergarten students. Related resources and support materials are available…
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The Journey to El Yunque curriculum introduces students to disturbance ecology, with a focus on both ecosystem resilience and ecosystem change. Each page is beautifully illustrated by Puerto Rican artist Robert Casilla to…
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School, home, and neighborhoods make large amounts of garbage every day. In answering the driving question of the unit, “What happens to our garbage?”, students investigate a series of subquestions (e.g., “What is that…
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Three short (4-5 session) curriculum units and an engineering design challenge include firsthand, guided explorations of energy in everyday phenomena. Beginning with easily observable phenomena, such as ball collisions,…
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Third-grade students’ use model-based reasoning about geospheric components of the hydrologic cycle (i.e., groundwater) and how elementary teachers scaffold students’ model-based reasoning. Instructional resources…
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The Deep Structure Modeling (DSM) project addresses the pressing need to more effectively organize science teaching and learning around “big ideas” that run through disciplines. Big ideas are important tools for learning…
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This NGSS aligned curriculum is designed to support high school physical science students in developing an understanding of the forces and energy involved in atomic and molecular interactions. The year-long Interactions…
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Instructional modules that bring sustainability topics into classrooms in a way that emphasizes the methods and tools of mathematics and computing and illustrates their role in planning for sustainability. Through the…
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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…
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This high school curriculum offers over 61 data-intensive Earth Science investigations, all set in real-world contexts and includes a variety of other activities, including topical fiction and non-fiction readings and…
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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).…
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We explored the COVID-19 pandemic as a context for learning about the role of science in a global health crisis. In spring 2020, at the beginning of the first pandemic-related lockdown, we worked with a high school teacher…
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School-based science inquiry tends to focus on already answered questions. We describe how we used the COVID-19 pandemic in a high school citizen science unit for students to witness and engage in real-time science. High…
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We describe an online citizen science platform for human brain and behavior research that uses a participatory science learning approach to engage learners in the full spectrum of scientific inquiry.
We…
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This article describes a free online plate tectonics curriculum module (PT module), which offers a unique approach with two innovative tools that allow students to make connections between real-world data and plate…
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The goal of our National Science Foundation-funded Geological Models for Exploration of Dynamic Earth (GEODE) project is to help students use plate tectonics as an explanation for the landforms and geological phenomena…
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This article introduces a new online curriculum module called “What will Earth look like in 500 million years?” Using two web-based tools, middle and high school students develop understandings of (1) how collective…
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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…
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Today’s students are exposed to news about wildfires on an all-too-regular basis. An increasingly larger portion of those students live in areas where wildfire risks are high or where smoke has reduced the air quality. The…
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Humankind faces unprecedented environmental, social, and economic challenges. There is a critical need for STEM education to foster both science learning and the application of learning to problem solving. At the…
Eco-Solutioning: The Design and Evaluation of a Curricular Unit to Foster Students’ Creation of Solutions to Address Local Socio-Scientific Issues
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The global pandemic and climate change have led to unprecedented environmental, social, and economic challenges with interdisciplinary STEM foundations. Even as STEM learning has never been more important, very few pre-…
Understanding Students' Sense-Making Processes When Faced with Unexpected Data: A Case Study in High School Biology
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Examining a lesson in a high school biology unit that utilized noisy sensor data, we sought to understand the ways students engaged in active reasoning about the data and the factors that influenced this process. Video…
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The University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Development Team is working with the Northwest Arctic Borough School District to develop STEM lessons utilizing Iñupiaq knowledge systems and university research for middle school-…
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In this article, we—a team of science teachers and a university researcher—present the processes of adapting existing curricular resources to promote equitable learning experiences for diverse learners. Using a middle…
Students Do Not Always Mean What We Think They Mean: A Questioning Strategy to Elicit the Reasoning Behind Unexpected Causal Patterns in Student System Models
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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…
Legitimation Code Theory as an Analytical Framework for Integrated STEM Curriculum and Its Enactment
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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 …
Engagement and Science Achievement in the Context of Integrated STEM Education: A Longitudinal Study
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A growing number of studies have shown the benefits of K-12 integrated science and engineering education. With this study, we add to the literature by documenting the relationship between STEM learning and engagement, and…
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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.…
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Concord Consortium’s new Earth Rocks Map displays a generalized representation of Earth’s geology, focused primarily on the distribution of the three major rock types (igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary). What makes…
Professional Development for STEM Integration Analyzing Bioinformatics Teaching by Examining Teachers' Qualities of Adaptive Expertise
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Bioinformatics—a rapidly developing discipline that integrates mathematical and computational techniques with biological knowledge for applications in medicine, the environment, and other important aspects of life—is an…
How Do Interdisciplinary Teams Co-construct Instructional Materials Emphasising Both Science and Engineering Practices?
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To build a sustainable future, science and engineering education programmes should emphasise scientific investigation, collaboration across traditional science topics and disciplines, and engineering design, including…
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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…
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To best support students in developing competence, assessments that allow students to use knowledge to solve challenging problems and make sense of phenomena are needed. These assessments need to be designed and tested to…
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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…
A Remote View into the Classroom: Analyzing Teacher Use of Digitally Enhanced Educative Curriculum Materials in Support of Student Learning
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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…
Student Outcomes of Teaching About Socio-scientific Issues in Secondary Science Classrooms: Applications of EzGCM
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Science education literature has highlighted socio-scientific issues (SSI) as an effective pedagogy for teaching science in a social and political context. SSI links science education and real-world problems to engage…
Supporting Secondary Students’ Understanding of Earth’s Climate System and Global Climate Change Using EzGCM: A Cross-Sectional Study
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Global climate change (GCC) is one of the greatest challenges of our age and a highly significant socio-scientific issue (SSI). Developing secondary students’ understanding about the Earth’s climate and GCC is critical for…
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Foregrounding climate education in formal science learning environments provides students with opportunities to develop critical climate-related knowledge and skills. However, research has shown many challenges to teaching…
Reasoning About Data in Elementary School: Student Strategies and Strengths when Reasoning with Multiple Variables
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The need for data literacy is an increasingly pressing priority in society, but most of the work in data-centred education has focused on developing skills at the middle school, secondary, and post-secondary levels, with…
Elementary Science Teacher Educators Learning Together: Catalyzing Change With Educative Curriculum Materials and Vignette Writing
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In this article, we describe a professional learning community (PLC) for science teacher educators that supported changes in pedagogy through educative curriculum materials and vignette writing.
In this…
Related Paper Set: Designing, Supporting, and Enacting Elementary Science Units for Teacher Phenomenon Adaptation
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Paper set on designing, supporting, and enacting elementary science units for teacher phenomenon adaptation from 2023 NARST conference.
Cook Whitt, K., Harris, E., Kenyon, L., Kenyon, F. L., Hanson, A…
Designing Educative Curriculum Materials for Teacher Educators: Supporting Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Content Knowledge for Teaching About Matter and Its Interactions
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Research on teacher educators’ professional learning has gained increasing interest within science education. Curriculum materials have been suggested as a means of supporting teacher learning for several decades but have…