DRK-12 Research and Products
Product for Educators | A 10-week, energy literacy curriculum unit for 6th grade students. Students will study energy use and transfer in their own school buildings. They will explore how Earth systems supply renewable and nonrenewable energy, and how these…
Presentation | This brief research report describes the refinement and testing of an observational rubric designed to identify and assess elements of classroom mathematics instruction that research has found to support multilingual student learning.
Publication | We developed an analytic framework related to the suggestions coaches provided to mathematics teachers as they engaged in content-focused coaching cycles. We analyzed 712 suggestions from nine coaches and 58 coaching conversations. Analysis…
Publication | 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.
Publication | Civic Statistics by its nature is highly interdisciplinary. From a cross-curricular perspective, teaching and learning Civic Statistics faces specific challenges related to the preparation of teachers and the design of instruction. This chapter…
Publication | In this paper we describe a technical infrastructure, entitled Open Game Data, for conducting educational game research using open science, educational data mining and learning engineering approaches.
Publication | Nancy Butler Songer, Associate Provost of STEM Education at the University of Utah, discusses the importance of supporting and including young people as part of environmental decision-making teams and key problem-solvers of our futures.
Publication | Teachers can play critical roles in challenging or reinscribing dominant narratives about what counts as STEM, who is seen within STEM disciplines, and how these disciplines should be taught. However, teachers have often experienced STEM in…
Publication | This paper investigates how mathematics instructors' recognition of the professional obligations of mathematics teaching varies based on their institutional environment, specifically whether they teach high school or college mathematics.
Scaling STEM-ID—Research Strategies to Inform Initial Scaling of Middle School Engineering Curricula
Presentation | This work-in-progress paper discusses a three-year middle school Engineering and Technology course sequence that integrates foundational mathematics and science in an engineering context through challenges that introduce students to advanced…
Publication | Our research explores possibilities for cultivating new spaces for preservice secondary science teachers to engage in science. In a content-focused education course, we designed for and studied preservice teachers' engagement in expansive and…
Publication | 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.
Publication | Urban school leaders can support mathematics instruction that acknowledges and sustains students’ racialized and cultured ways of knowing and being. Yet, leadership for racial justice is often discussed separately from instructional improvement…
Publication | This descriptive case study examines the process of productively navigating socio-emotional risks and interpersonal tensions encountered by a veteran and pre-service physics teacher during one episode of discussing physics content.
Publication | The real-time detection of when a player is struggling presents an opportunity for game designers to design timely and meaningful interventions, as well as to provide targeted support that improves student learning and engagement. In this paper…
Publication | The authors designed a science and engineering curricular program that includes design features that promote student interest and motivation and examined teachers' and students' views on meaningfulness, motivation and interest.
Publication | Measuring and Visualizing Space in Elementary Mathematics Learning explores the development of elementary students’ understanding of the mathematics of measure, and demonstrates how measurement can serve as an anchor for supporting a deeper…
Publication | Teachers must know how to use language to support students in knowledge generation environments that align to the Next Generation Science Standards. To measure this knowledge, this study refines a survey on teachers’ knowledge of language as an…
Publication | 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…
Publication | 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…
Publication | Providing high-quality professional development for teachers with diverse backgrounds and classroom experience is a challenging task. In this work, we investigate the Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS) partnership program, which…
Legitimation Code Theory as an Analytical Framework for Integrated STEM Curriculum and Its Enactment
Publication | In this paper, we describe Legitimation Code Theory as an analytical framework and provide an analysis of semantic patterns of an integrated STEM unit (written discourse) and a middle school teacher’s enactment of that unit (oral…
Publication | Nancy Butler Songer, from the University of Utah, makes a call for collective action to create a new curriculum focused on the design of solutions.
Publication | Our research study examines the community-based partnership PD model and its impact on school teachers’ self-efficacy and their success in engaging students in the NGSS science practices through citizen science projects.
Publication | This qualitative study examines how a group of undergraduate and graduate students in an upper-level ecosystem ecology course at a research university in the southeastern part of the United States engage in a task that requires constructing an…