Biology

This graphic is designed to support students, teachers, and families in thinking across timescales to understand socio-ecological relationships to place across time.

This resource serves as a guide for how to use Histories of Place in planning and instruction.

This tool, Rhizome, contains three foundational pillars: complex socio-ecological systems, nature-culture relations, and field-based science learning, with student learning and sense making made central. The Seasonal Storyline engages learners and their families in field-based science that connects family knowledge and place-based, student-led investigations.

Inquiry instruction often neglects graphing. It gives students few opportunities to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to take advantage of graphs, and which are called for by current science education standards. Yet, it is not well known how to support graphing skills, particularly within middle school science inquiry contexts. Using qualitative graphs is a promising, but underexplored approach.

The success of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and similar reforms is contingent upon the quality of teaching, yet the shifts in teaching practice required are substantial. In this study, we propose and validate a model of adaptive expertise needed for teachers to successfully deliver NGSS-informed computer-supported complex systems curricula in high school science classrooms.

Implementation of reform curricula requires teachers to adopt new approaches to teaching. Research has provided promising results about the influence of educative curriculum on teachers’ learning and instruction. However, this approach generally focuses on teachers as isolated learners. Using a design-based research approach, the authors developed a web-based tool, iPlan, which provides access to educative curriculum materials in an online interactive learning platform.

The present study examined changes in high school biology and technology education pedagogy during the first year of a three-year professional development (PD) program using the INSPIRES educative curriculum. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) calls for the integration of science and engineering through inquiry-based pedagogy that shifts the burden of thinking from the teacher to the student. This call is especially challenging for teachers untrained in inquiry teaching and engineering or science concepts.