DRK-12 Research and Products
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 | 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 | 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 | 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 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 | 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 | 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…
Publication | We examined secondary (6-12) mathematics teachers’ participation in a professional development (PD) model where they collectively investigated video cases of students engaging with ambitious instructional materials. We leveraged frame analysis,…
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.
Tool | This list includes STEM education-related conferences that may be of interest to DRK-12 grantees.
Publication | Science identity development begins in school-aged years, when multilingual students (MLs) are often marginalised in the classroom due to language challenges and low expectations placed on them. This descriptive multiple case study explores the…
Publication | Significant science education resources, namely the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) framework, need an intentional aim of centering social justice for minoritized communities and youth as well as…
Publication | A School Science and Mathematics Journal editorial.
Publication | Engineering design systematically identifies needs, wants, and problems and then devises solutions to address them. A central component of our work is guiding students in the engineered design of solutions to local environmental problems.…
Publication | This position paper advocates supporting CS teacher professional learning by supplementing existing curriculum-specific teacher PD with standards-aligned PD that focuses on teachers' conceptual understanding of CS standards and ability to adapt…
Publication | Teachers experience challenges in effectively using formative assessment practices in their classrooms. In the US, only 28% of elementary teachers report using formative assessment. This study highlights the need to design resources to meet…
Publication | This study investigated how newcomer emergent bilinguals made meaning in two 9th-grade biology classrooms. Methods relevant to naturalistic inquiry were used to collect and analyze data. Findings indicate that newcomers bridged aspects of…
Publication | The ReLaTe-SA project investigates the research question: what language do teachers use to describe and explain routines in algebra classes? The goal of this article is to inform readers about some ways we have learned to describe the discourse…
Publication | Narrative as a game design feature constantly yields mixed results for learning in the literature. The purpose of this exploratory mixed-methods case study was to examine design heuristics and implications governing the role of narratives in a…
Publication | This study explores undergraduate engineering and education students’ perspectives on their interdisciplinary teams throughout the rapid transition to online learning and instruction from a face-to-face to a virtual format.