Curriculum

Build a classroom community by building representations and visualizations of data related to students’ names.

Thanheiser, E., Koestler, C., Sugimoto, A. T., & Felton-Koestler, M. D. (2023). Construct it! What’s in a name? Collecting, organizing, and representing data. Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching PK-12, 116(10), 746-752.

Build a classroom community by building representations and visualizations of data related to students’ names.

Thanheiser, E., Koestler, C., Sugimoto, A. T., & Felton-Koestler, M. D. (2023). Construct it! What’s in a name? Collecting, organizing, and representing data. Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching PK-12, 116(10), 746-752.

Considered a core component of children’s foundational cognitive development, early mathematics experiences can support children’s long-term academic success. Teachers and families alike share the common goal of wanting children to succeed developmentally, socially, and academically. Given the importance of early mathematics to academic success in all subjects, children need and deserve to build a robust knowledge of early math concepts in their earliest years.

With an ultimate goal of characterizing teachers' movement toward understanding the epistemic complexity of generative learning environments, this study refers to adaptive teaching expertise (AdTex) as a developmental teaching capacity observable through a teacher's ability to utilize various resources to address the epistemic complexity of knowledge generation practices. The analysis and discussions centered on how teachers develop and utilize epistemic orientation and understandings of epistemic tools for adaptive teaching, making this study distinct from previous research on AdTex.

Rachel Folger laughs when she recounts the time one of the students in her eighth grade social studies class exclaimed, “Whoa, Ms. Folger! Did you know that this is just what we’re doing in math?” Rachel is thrilled that her students—who typically “walk through their day in these very isolated subject areas”—are making connections across the curriculum.

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. In the DataPBL version of the interdisciplinary project-based module, students analyze and visualize data in CODAP. Project research is studying how students tell stories with data and how this data storytelling contributes to students’ data agency and identity.

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.

Roderick, S. (July 6, 2023). A search for data offers a new friendship and answers to 8th graders’ questions. The Concord Consortium.

This poster presents findings on middle school students’ understanding of core computer science (CS) concepts, such as variables and control structures, using cognitive think-aloud interviews with eight students. Each student worked on 16-22 formative assessment tasks designed to assess understanding on the ‘Algorithms and Programming’ middle school CS standards. Our study describes students’ interpretations of the CS concepts and discusses potential factors influencing student interpretations. Significance and next steps are described.

When pressing societal challenges (e.g., COVID-19, access to clean water) are sidelined in science classrooms, science education fails to leverage the knowledge and experiences of minoritized students in school, thus reproducing injustices in society. Our conceptual framework for justice-centered STEM education engages all students in multiple STEM subjects, including data science and computer science, to explain and design solutions to pressing societal challenges and their disproportionate impact on minoritized groups.

This chapter describes our middle school energy literacy project to develop, implement, and test curriculum materials for a unit titled Energy and Your Environment (EYE). EYE fosters place-based education by using the school building to enhance systems thinking about energy consumption and flow between the building and surrounding environment. Within the curriculum unit, students first consider the carbon footprint of buildings.