High School

Strengthening STEM Teaching in Native American Serving Schools Through Long-Term, Culturally Responsive Professional Development

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Indigenous students experience persistent inequitable outcomes in schools, particularly in STEM. Since teacher quality is one of the most important school-based factors impacting K12 students’ learning and engagement in schools, our project provides long-term professional development to teachers in rural, Indigenous-serving schools to support teachers’ development of culturally responsive STEM curriculum units. We provide an overview of our professional development model, and share findings from our work with over 100 teachers during four program years.

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Strengthening Data Literacy Across the Curriculum

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This project has developed and studied multi-week curriculum modules for high school non-AP mathematics classes to promote interest and skills in statistics and data analysis among diverse student populations. Using large-scale data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the online platform CODAP, students gain experience with multivariable thinking as they investigate questions focused on social justice issues in U.S. society. This poster shares strengths and challenges in students’ abilities to reason with multivariable data.

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STEM for All Collaboratory: Accelerating Dissemination and Fostering Collaborations for STEM Educational Research and Development

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The poster will look at the impact of the annual STEM for All Video Showcases as well as the STEM for All Multiplex. It will discuss implications for knowledge sharing among grantees and dissemination efforts in the future.

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Spanning Boundaries: A Statewide Network to Support Science Teacher Leaders to Implement Science Standards

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A partnership between the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the Exploratorium, the Spanning Boundaries project researches how science teacher leaders (STLs) can be supported and activated to bring educational improvements into their local contexts. We draw on a range of frameworks from organizational theory and social learning theory to examine how science teacher leaders, as Boundary Spanners who carry knowledge and innovation across professional settings enact their roles, and how their work is sustained and improved.

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Science Coordinators Advancing a Framework For Outstanding Leadership Development

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This project explores how supporting District Science Coordinators can impact the instruction of science teachers. In this project, we developed an online program for District Science Coordinators and tracked their and their science teachers professional learning. In this project, we will report on some of the initial results from the first and second cohort of teachers and District Science Coordinators.

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Science and Engineering Education for Infrastructure Transformation

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This project studies and develops science and engineering education technology and pedagogy that supports project‐based learning of science, engineering, and computation concepts and skills underlying the strategically important "green" and "smart" aspects of the infrastructure, which is a national priority.

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Reducing Racially Biased Beliefs by Fostering a Complex Understanding of Human Genetics Research in High-School Biology Students (Collaborative Research: Golan Duncan)

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We are developing a politically-oriented genetics unit for high school. Drawing on the Rightful Presence (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2020) and Critical Science Agency (Basu et al., 2009) theoretical frameworks, the unit will explore the ways in which representations of genetic differences within and between groups and construals of gene-environment interactions are historically informed, politicized, and non-neutral. Such construals reify social categories and hierarchies as natural/ideal, and thus contribute to oppressive views and policies.

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Reasoning Language for Teaching Secondary Algebra

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We investigate teacher beliefs about discourses employed with equation solving and the challenges these beliefs might pose for the implementation of instructional practices that promote deductive reasoning in algebra. To reveal these beliefs, we recorded three explanations of solving a linear equation that each had distinct discursive characteristics, and then analyzed teachers’ small-group critical discussions of these explanations.

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Preparing Teachers to Design Tasks to Support, Engage, and Assess Science Learning in Rural Schools

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This project prepares rural secondary science teachers to design five-dimensional assessment tasks in which students use the three dimensions of the NGSS to make sense of phenomena that connect to their interests and identities. We created an online course to develop a 5D vision for science with teachers and support them in designing phenomenon-driven tasks. After ethnography and co-design work, we are conducting an experiment to research the effects of the course on teacher outcomes.

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