Technology educators from Black Hills State University and Purdue University partner with science educators from the University of Massachusetts at Boston and Stevens Institute of Technology to determine the viability of an engineering concept-based approach to teacher professional development for secondary school science teachers in life science and in physical science. The project refines the conceptual base for engineering at the secondary level learning (previously developed by the PIs) to increase the understanding of engineering concepts by the science teachers. In a pilot test of two weeks of professional development with ten teachers from each discipline, teachers become familiar with engineering concepts and study the process of infusing engineering concepts into science curricula so that they can develop modules in their discipline to be taught during the following in the school year. The following summer the teachers debrief the process and develop additional modules for their discipline. The process is revised and repeated with 22 teachers from each discipline. Teachers are explicitly provided strategies to help them meet the needs of diverse learners. The outputs of this project include: 1) a preliminary framework for secondary level engineering education to be published in both research and practitioner journals; 2) a pilot tested and validated Engineering Concept Assessment; 3) engineering-infused curriculum modules in life and physical science; and 4) a professional development model to prepare science teachers to infuse engineering in their teaching.

The project compares student learning when particular concepts in physics and biology are taught through engineering design with learning the same concepts taught an earlier group of students with present reform techniques used in the discipline. The hypothesis is that when teachers and students engage with engineering design activities their understanding of science concepts and inquiry are also enhanced. The research component of the project employs an iterative design with the design of activities followed by development and implementation. An engineering concept assessment is developed and tested to examine teacher learning and to determine how engineering concepts can be infused into the science curricula for life and physical science. Other quantitative and qualitative instruments are developed to assess the teachers? understandings of the engineering concepts and their pedagogical implications.

There is increasing emphasis on integrative STEM education. New national and international assessments are developing engineering strands and emphasizing non-routine problem solving. The framework for the Next Generation Science Standards includes engineering as one of four strands. Stand alone engineering course are not likely to be widely used. This project develops engineering infused science units and determines the professional development needed to use them effectively.

This project scales and further tests the Target Inquiry (TI) professional development model. The TI model involves teachers in three core experiences: 1) a research experience for teachers, 2) materials adaptation, and 3) an action research project. The original program was implemented with high school chemistry teachers at Grand Valley State University (GVSU), and was shown to result in significant increases, with large effect sizes, in teachers' understanding of science inquiry and quality of instruction, and in science achievement of those teachers' students. The scale-up and further testing would involve adding physics, biology and geology at Grand Valley State University, and implementing the program at Miami University (MU) with chemistry teachers. Three research questions will be studied:

1) How do the three TI core experiences influence in-service high school science teachers' (i) understanding of the nature of science; (ii) attitudes and beliefs about inquiry instruction; and (iii) classroom instructional methods in the derivatives of the TI model?

2) How does teacher participation in TI affect students' process skills (scientific reasoning and metacognition) and conceptual understanding of science in the derivatives of the TI model?

3) What are the challenges and solutions related to implementing TI in science disciplines beyond chemistry and in other regions?

The research design is quasi-experimental and longitudinal, incorporating implementation with research, and using quantitative and qualitative methods blended in a design research framework. A total of 54 middle and high school science teachers are being recruited for the study. The TI group is completing the TI program (N = 27; 15 at GVSU; 12 at MU) while the comparison group (same sizes and locations) is not. The comparison group is matched according to individual characteristics and school demographics. All teachers are being studied, along with their students, for 4 years (pre-program, post-RET, post-MA, post-AR/post-program). TI teachers are taking 15 credits of graduate level science courses over three years, including summers. Courses include a graduate seminar focused on preparing for the research experience, the research experience in a faculty member's science lab during the summer, application of research to teaching, action research project development, adaptation and evaluation of inquiry-focused curricula, and interpretation and analysis of classroom data from action research. Consistent feedback from professional development, teachers, and evaluation, including the previous implementation, contributes to a design-based approach. Teacher factors being studied include nature of science, inquiry teaching knowledge and beliefs, and quality of inquiry instruction. Student factors being studied include scientific reasoning; metacognition, self-efficacy, and learning processes in science; and content knowledge and conceptual understanding. Only established quantitative and qualitative instruments are being used. Quantitative analysis includes between-group comparisons by year on post-tests, with pre-tests as covariates, and multi-level models with students nested with teachers, and teachers within sites, with the teacher level as the primary unit of change. Trends over time between the treatment and comparison groups are being examined. The evaluation is using a combination of pre/post causal comparative quantitative measures and relevant qualitative data from project leaders and participants, as well as from the comparison group, to provide formative and summative evaluation input.

Outcomes of the project include documentation and understanding of the impacts on science teachers' instruction and student outcomes of research experiences for teachers when they are supported by materials adaptation and action research, and an understanding of what it takes to scale the model to different science disciplines and a different site. The project is also producing a website of instructional materials for middle and secondary science.

This workshop developed a new, comprehensive, research-based framework for assessing environmental literacy. By bringing together, for the first time, experts in research, assessment, and evaluation from the fields of science education, environmental education, and related social science fields, this project accessed and built its work on the literature and the insights of many disciplines. The North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) worked with the leaders of the only two large-scale assessments of environmental literacy used in the U.S. to date (Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA] and the National Environmental Literacy Assessment [NELA]) to conduct the workshop. The project leaders analyzed PISA and NELA and used a multi-disciplinary search and review of the literature to prepare a draft framework. At the workshop and thereafter, a diverse array of invited experts critiqued that draft and provided suggestions for revision. Then, the leaders/organizers produced a final Environmental Literacy Framework and disseminated it both electronically and at a nationally advertised event to a wide audience of assessment specialists, funding and policy-making agencies, and organizations working to develop assessments and achieve environmental literacy. Many institutions and agencies have noted the need to create an environmentally literate population, and government and private entities are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in projects aimed at enhancing environmental literacy. Given the scope and scale of these investments and the interest in this arena on the part of federal agencies, professional organizations, and corporations, assessments for gauging our progress in transforming our preK-12 education system to achieve that end are needed. The new Framework for assessing environmental literacy provides a foundation for measuring the extent to which we are enabling all learners to acquire the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and behaviors vital for competently making decisions about local, regional, national and global issues.

The University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) will bring together an experienced group of evolution educators in order to inform the development and maintenance of an effective resource for improving evolution education at the college level. This effort falls under the umbrella of UCMP's highly successful Understanding Evolution (UE) project (http://evolution.berkeley.edu), which currently receives over one million page requests per month during the school year. UE was originally designed around the needs of the K-12 education community; however, increasingly, the site is being used by the undergraduate education community. UCMP intends to embark on an effort to enhance the utility of the UE site for that population, increase awareness of the site at the college level, and secure the project's future so that it can continue to serve K-16 teachers and students. To inform and guide these efforts, UCMP proposes to establish and convene a UE Advisory Board, which will be charged with helping to: (1) identify the characteristics and needs of college-level target learners and their instructors with respect to evolution, (2) articulate the recommended components for expanding the UE site to include an Undergraduate Lounge in which students and their instructors will be able to access a variety of resources for increasing understanding of evolution, (3) develop a strategic plan for increasing awareness of UE within the undergraduate education community, and (4) develop a strategic plan for maintenance and continued growth of the UE site.

The University of Arizona is partnering with the Tucson Unified School District to implement and study a professional community designed to alleviate the mismatch between the expectations of student teachers in mathematics and science and their mentor in-service teachers. This vexing problem often arises when student teachers expect to implement reform-based pedagogies while their mentor teachers insist on traditional approaches. The project is creating a "third space," a professional community that includes 40 pre-service and 50 in-service teachers, university scientists and mathematicians, science and mathematics education faculty, and school district administrators. The third space is providing a neutral forum for the exchange of perspectives on issues of pedagogy with the expectation that student teachers would implement inquiry-based science and problem-solving mathematics pedagogies with the knowledgeable support of their mentor teachers. The project is being implemented in two low-income, culturally and linguistically diverse elementary schools with a comparison school used as a control.

The evaluation/research component is a qualitative study led by Horizon Research, Inc. The fundamental research question is whether the third space model establishes interpretive systems that foster enactment of inquiry-based and problem-solving teaching practices. Data collection will include all participants in the third space forum, but focuses on the pre-service and in-service teachers through written products and discussions of lesson design activities, videotapes of teaching by pre-service and in-service teachers, and analysis of comments made in a web-based forum. Instruments to be used are the Reform Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP), the Experiences Patterns Explanations (EPE) framework, and the Inquiry-Application Instructional Model (I-AIM).

The main product of this project is the third space model and the research that supports its success. The model will be disseminated broadly and if replicated widely, it would represent a major improvement in the professional development of teachers in the areas of inquiry-based science and problem-solving mathematics.

This proposal explores the potential of "Agent-Based Models" to assist learners to acquire environmental science concepts targeted in forthcoming Advanced Placement test standards. It will also help learners acquire a better understanding of complex systems and to shift their attitudes towards the use of scientific models. The investigators frame the research in a simulated scenario where "green" infrastructure is integrated into urban environments, and they propose how to use a new user interface strategy ("Paper-to-Parameters") that promises unique approaches for understanding the spatial and scalar relationships between simulation elements. The project will develop an assessment tool to obtain a picture of prior understandings and attitudes held by learners in different populations (high school, undergraduate, and graduate students and experts); it will conduct an exploratory trial of the Agent-Based learning intervention to investigate the impacts on cognition and attitudes of undergraduate students; and will investigate how selected user interface features facilitate specific spatial and scalar understandings.

The assessment will allow the investigators to describe understanding and attitudes across populations with differing levels of expertise and will provide a baseline for measuring the real impact of the intervention and informing the design of future interventions. The exploratory lesson and targeted experiments will explore the connection between specific features of the computer-based tool and changes in learner understanding of selected AP Environmental Science and complex system concepts, and in learner attitudes towards models.

In this DRK12 project, the PhET Interactive Simulations group at the University of Colorado and the AAALab at Stanford University are working together to produce and study learning from interactive simulations designed for middle school science classrooms. We are developing a suite of 35 high-quality, interactive simulations covering physical science topics. These simulations include innovative technologies that provide teachers with real-time, formative feedback on how their students are using the simulations.  The research investigates how various characteristics of the simulation design influence student engagement and learning, and how this response varies across grade-level and diverse populations. The research also includes an investigation of different ways of using simulations in class, and how these approaches affect student preparation for future learning when they are no longer using a given simulation.

      The original PhET simulations were designed for college use, but overtime, they have migrated to lower grades.  The current suite of free research-based, interactive PhET science simulations are used over 10 million times per year.  To optimize their utility for middle school science, we are conducting interviews with diverse 4-8^th graders using 25 existing PhET simulations to help identify successful design alternatives where needed, and to formulate generalized design guidelines. In parallel, pull-out and classroom-based studies are investigating a variety of lesson plans to identify the most promising approach. These studies include controlled comparisons that collect both qualitative and quantitative data.

      On the basis of our emerging design principles, we are developing 10 new simulations in consultation with teachers, who are helping to identify high need areas for simulations. These new simulations also include a back-end data collection capability that can collect, aggregate, and display student patterns of simulation use for teachers and researchers. The design of the data collection and presentation formats depends on an iterative process done in collaboration with teachers to identify the most useful information and display formats. A final evaluation compares student learning with and without this back-end formative assessment technology.   

This project is working to transform the way science is taught and learned in Grades 4-8 so that it is more effective at promoting scientific thinking and content learning, while also being engaging to diverse populations. The project is expected to impact many, many thousands of teachers and students through its production of a suite of 35 free, interactive science simulations optimized for Grades 4-8 along with “activity templates”, guidance, and real time feedback to teachers to support pedagogically effective integration into classrooms. Finally, the intellectual merit of the project is its significant contributions to understanding when, how, and why interactive simulations can be effective learning and research tools.

This four-year Full Research and Development project develops and assesses the effectiveness of integrating three computation-based technologies into curricular modules: agent-based modeling (ABM), real-world sensing, and collaborative classroom networks. The team brings together researchers from Northwestern, Vanderbilt and Stanford universities in collaboration with a commercial partner, Inquire Learning. The STEM disciplines addressed are life sciences and physical sciences at middle and high school levels, specifically Evolution, Population Biology/Ecology, Kinetic Molecular Theory, and Electromagnetism.

The project proceeds in two phases: The first phase is a design experiment for the iterative creation of ABM-only and enhanced-ABM modules field tested with fourteen teachers drawn from seven schools. In the second phase, an experiment is conducted that aims at providing quantitative data to help characterize the different effects of various components of the intervention and to prepare the way for future efficacy and scaling research. Between 40 and 80 teachers participate in the experiment and are assigned to immediate or lagged treatments. The four topic areas were selected because they are scientifically important; they are difficult for students, provoking significant misconceptions; they are amenable to a complex-systems and modeling approach; and prior work has prepared the PIs to develop high-quality curricular materials on these topics. The evaluation is led by a member of the advisory board which is constituted to provide guidance on the project evaluation.

The products are research findings on the achievement, engagement and attitudes of students as a result of the deep use of computational modeling technologies in science. In addition, four fully developed classroom-ready modules with teacher support materials are deployed and disseminated through a broad network of educational communities.

This project is a collaborative effort involving scientists, science educators, and teachers from TERC, Clark University, Tufts University,and urban Massachusetts schools that aims to develop a grade 3-5 Learning Progression that will provide a coherent approach to teaching energy in elementary school and lay a strong foundation for further learning in middle school. The work draws on and complements the learning progression and curriculum for matter developed and tested in the Inquiry Project (NSF award 0628245). The project will identify a network of core concepts and principles about energy that are fundamental and general enough to be compatible with scientific ideas about energy, yet within reach of 5th graders.

This project explores the hypothesis that, while the scientific concept of energy is too abstract and difficult to understand in early grades, useful foundations can be established early on by elaborating a learning progression for energy. Clinical interviews will be administered to 24 pairs of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders recruited from urban after-school programs, to identify precursors to the core ideas as well obstacles to learning them. This research will help the investigators design key learning experiences that could allow students to progress from initial ideas toward a scientific understanding of energy. Those learning designs will then be tested in teaching interviews with 3 small groups of students in the same settings.

The result of the project will be an outline for a grade 3-5 learning progression for energy taking into account the project research findings as well as relevant standards, curricula, and science education literature.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the understanding of how high school physics can have a maximum positive impact on students' self-perceptions, thus noticeably impacting their outcomes in this subject matter. Its focus is on the development of a positive physics identity (students' perceptions of themselves in relation to this field in terms of competence, performance, persistence, interest, and recognition by others) among high school students, particularly females, as a means to increase their academic performance.

Preliminary data analysis from an ongoing NSF-funded project (GSE/RES 0624444) suggests a strong correlation between the physics identity construct (e.g., Do you see yourself as a physics person?) and the study's proposed physics identity measures (i.e., performance, competence, recognition, and interest). Although most students, especially females, conveyed depressed attitudes toward themselves as physics learners, as well as toward the discipline, those who expressed favorable perceptions toward physics learning identified a set of activities that appear to affect the development of a positive physics identity: (a) focus on conceptual understanding, (b) frequency of laboratory activities that address their beliefs, (c) frequency of opportunities to share and interact, (d) teacher encouragement, and (e) holding discussions on current relevant science topics.

The PI hypothesizes that students in general, and females in particular, develop depressed attitudes toward physics, and negative perceptions of themselves as physics learners due to the lack of personally meaningful learning experiences. Thus, she submits the following research questions: (1) What high school physics teaching practices predict physics identity development?; (2) How do these strategies influence physics identity development, especially mediated by perceptions of their performance, competence, recognition, and interest?; (3) What is the long-term impact of these experiences on physics identity as students traverse their undergraduate careers?; and (4) What is the most appropriate pedagogical plan for high school physics teachers to ensure adequate development of positive physics identity?

The study's proposed methods consist of case studies, a longitudinal study, development of a pedagogical plan, and the implementation of this plan. Classroom case studies of successful teachers draw on the previously referred survey of which 348 (90 females) finished high school physics with a self-rating as a physics person (5 on a 0-5 scale), including positive perceptions of instructional and leaning experiences. The longitudinal study aims at understanding the long-term impact of specific pedagogical practices on students' physics identity,including 15 students (8 females) who will be tracked over 3 to 4 years through surveys and interviews at the end of each academic year. Development of the pedagogical plan will include 15 sample lesson plans with detailed activities that connect physics content to real-world contexts, counter stereotypes about physics, analysis of underrepresentation in physics, and physics identity formative assessments. The plan will be tested through a quasi-experimental study with four teachers using the same physics course with at least two groups. Each teacher will implement the plan in one of the groups; the other group will be used as control. Of the 180 physics classes, approximately 15 (one every two weeks) will use the education plan. A physics identity scale will be administered at the beginning and end of each course. Classroom observations will be conducted while the plan is implemented.