Curriculum

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.

Songer, N. B. (2023). Youth as essential problem-solvers of our futures. Open Access Government October 2023, pp. 312-313. https://doi.org/10.56367/OAG-040-10836

Educating students about real-world, issues such as local invasive species aims to encourage wider engagement with STEM.

Calabrese, J. E. & Songer, N. B. (2024). Youths’ solutions to local invasive species. Open Access Government January 2024.

Research on teacher educators’ professional learning has gained increasing interest within science education. Curriculum materials have been suggested as a means of supporting teacher learning for several decades but have not yet been examined as a potential tool for supporting the learning of teacher educators. In this paper, we conceptualize a set of design heuristics to guide the development of educative curriculum materials for teacher educators.

Research on teacher educators’ professional learning has gained increasing interest within science education. Curriculum materials have been suggested as a means of supporting teacher learning for several decades but have not yet been examined as a potential tool for supporting the learning of teacher educators. In this paper, we conceptualize a set of design heuristics to guide the development of educative curriculum materials for teacher educators.

In this article we introduce a National Science Foundation-funded research project called TecRocks that has developed new interactive simulations and an innovative online curriculum module that weaves rock formation and plate tectonics together such that secondary teachers and students can approach these two topics as integrated systems. In the 2022-23 school year, the curriculum was implemented in middle and high school classrooms across the United States.

Cook Whitt, K., Harris, E., Kenyon, L., Kenyon, F. L., Hanson, A., Tate, R., Mohan, L., & Guy-Gatan, C. (2023a, April). Related Paper Set: Designing, supporting, and enacting elementary science units for teacher phenomenon adaptation. Related paper set presented at the National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Conference, Chicago, IL.

In this article, we describe a professional learning community (PLC) for science teacher educators that supported changes in pedagogy through educative curriculum materials and vignette writing. The PLC was convened as part of a grant-supported project to build preservice elementary teachers’ content knowledge for matter using educative curriculum materials. PLC members collaborated with one another over an academic year to learn about and discuss implementing curricular materials in their respective science teacher education courses.

The need for data literacy is an increasingly pressing priority in society, but most of the work in data-centred education has focused on developing skills at the middle school, secondary, and post-secondary levels, with little attention on the potential for engaging elementary-aged students in reasoning with and about data. This paper reports findings from a foundational study to explore the natural strengths, skills, and strategies that upper elementary students bring to reasoning about data-centred problems.

The need for data literacy is an increasingly pressing priority in society, but most of the work in data-centred education has focused on developing skills at the middle school, secondary, and post-secondary levels, with little attention on the potential for engaging elementary-aged students in reasoning with and about data. This paper reports findings from a foundational study to explore the natural strengths, skills, and strategies that upper elementary students bring to reasoning about data-centred problems.

Teacher-facilitated whole-class conversations can help elementary students apply the full power of the NGSS science and engineering practices to an engineering design process. In this article we describe and provide examples for five kinds of Design Talks. Each type of Design Talk centers on a different framing question and is facilitated by specific prompts that help students voice their ideas and make connections to others' ideas.