Disciplinary Content Knowledge

While new standards call for elementary students to learn engineering, many teachers do not receive any training in engineering and feel underprepared to teach it. Ed+gineering partners preservice teachers with engineering undergraduate students at three points during their respective preparation programs to develop and teach engineering lessons to elementary students. These three collaborations help engineering students develop interdisciplinary collaboration skills while helping preservice teachers develop the competence and confidence to integrate engineering.

To lower the barriers in STEM disciplines for students, using evidence-based research, we designed and conducted a professional development program that built middle school teachers' capacity to use hands-on robotics and engineering design as the curriculum focus. Through summer workshops, teachers learned to: build and program LEGO robots; create and implement standards-aligned robotics-based STEM lessons; and develop, practice, and examine optimal pedagogical approaches for STEM learning using robotics.
 

Integrating Chemistry and Earth science (ICE) has developed innovative units bringing Earth science concepts and practices into the high school chemistry curriculum to address NGSS expectations in the absence of high school Earth science courses. ICE features 3D teaching about local phenomena with student-designed investigations in the schoolyard and labs, exploration of BES datasets and conceptual modeling. ICE built a community of practice with teachers, school leaders, education researchers and scientists supporting rigorous, responsive teaching.

This is an NSF-funded collaborative Early-Stage Design and Development project of the Educational Testing Service and Western Washington University. Our focus is on developing assessment measures and instructional materials related to content knowledge for teaching (CKT) about matter and its interactions. In this poster, we'll share development work on educative curriculum materials for teacher educators that have been designed to support the development of pre-service elementary teachers' CKT.

Co-PI(s): Emily Borda and Dan Hanley, Western Washington University