Science

Current knowledge assessment techniques, such as paper-and-pencil or performance assessments, can provide robust data about gross changes in the distribution of student knowledge over the course of instruction. However, we lack effective ways of coordinating student data collected across varied instruments, time points, and activity contexts to examine patterns of change and dynamics of growth across large numbers of students.

DR K–12 projects have been funded to conduct (1) activities and develop materials that are beneficial to the STEM education community (teachers and students) and (2) education research to ensure continuous improvement of these activities and materials.

Examples of research practices that limit the validity of research syntheses are not difficult to find. For example, Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), and Abt Associates reported in their Compendium of STEM Instruments that psychometric reporting practices in the STEM community tend to be insufficient, and this limited what they could learn from their synthesis.

The Next Generation Science Standards present important shifts for science teaching, assessment, and curriculum materials—focusing on core explanatory ideas, a central role for science and engineering practices, and coherence across time and science disciplines. These challenges for practice require new theoretical advances.

Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) and project partners are developing an online course for high school science teachers. The purpose of the course is to help teachers understand key energy concepts in alternative energy contexts. The course includes three interactive learning experiences (interactives) that use life cycle data from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL).

The goal of this session is to discuss possibilities, progress, and problems in using learning progression research to support improved assessment and instruction in middle school and high school classrooms.

In this session, several learning progression-related DR K–12 projects share findings and discuss questions around two issues:

Research has shown that curriculum-based professional development for teachers is a key component in the effective implementation of innovative, researched-based science curricula. Scaling up to a broad-based national market, however, is logistically constrained and limited by the traditional face-to-face professional development model. A key factor in a districts’ decision-making process affecting the adoption of a research-based curricula is their ability to provide the necessary on-going and timely professional development.

Digital, large-scale scientific data have become broadly available in recent decades, and analyzing data, identifying patterns, and extracting useful information have become gateway skills to full participation in the 21st century workforce. Yet, pre-college classrooms are falling short in preparing students for this world and are missing opportunities to harness the power of Big Data to engage students in scientific learning. To address this issue, scientists, educators, and researchers at Education Development Center, Inc.

The three panelists in this session are in the last one or two years of their game-based learning projects, and all have done extensive work in supporting use of their games in classroom learning. As their work has progressed, each has discovered valuable ways to support teachers as well as encountered surprises in what teachers wanted (and didn’t want), and now recognize things they wished they had learned in the beginning of their projects. Session participants leave with recommendations they can use in their current projects, including: