Curriculum

Science and engineering offer ways to maintain the thermal comfort of our homes while minimizing impacts on the environment. This article introduces the Energy-Plus House Design Project, an NGSS-aligned curriculum unit developed to inspire and prepare high school students for tackling this challenge. In this project, students learn and practice science and engineering by designing a house that generates more renewable energy than it consumes over the course of a year (hence known as an energy-plus house).

Science and engineering offer ways to maintain the thermal comfort of our homes while minimizing impacts on the environment. This article introduces the Energy-Plus House Design Project, an NGSS-aligned curriculum unit developed to inspire and prepare high school students for tackling this challenge. In this project, students learn and practice science and engineering by designing a house that generates more renewable energy than it consumes over the course of a year (hence known as an energy-plus house).

A teacher’s working context is an important factor in how they make sense of and enact curriculum. Understanding how external factors (e.g. state and/or district policies, school cultural norms) interplay with teachers’ personal resources (e.g. self-understanding, rules of thumb for decision-making) can help identify supports for implementation of increasingly available standard aligned curriculum materials. However, in science education, limited research has explored how curriculum enactments are influenced by this complex interplay. In this qualitative embedded case study, we investigated how four middle school science teachers within the same school district used their internal resources to make sense of external factors when enacting new NGSS-aligned place-based curriculum materials.

Learning science in the context of local phenomena and problems can be powerful for young people. Yet, designing place-based instructional materials is resource intensive, limiting broad access. This study investigates how instructional materials designed for widespread use can support teacher localization through phenomenon adaptation, whereby teachers add or swap phenomena relevant to students' interests, identities, and community.

In response to the growing emphasis on addressing global socio-scientific issues like climate change and viral pandemics in K-12 education, we designed three socio-scientific units for middle school science. We call this curriculum Grand Challenges (GC). The GC curriculum shifts from traditional methods to a focus on socio-scientific issues that resonate locally and globally and prepare students for future complexities. This study explores the implementation of the GC curriculum by two teachers, highlighting their choices and the impact on instruction.

Controversial topics that arise in science classrooms, especially those of social relevance (e.g., the climate crisis), provide opportunities to help students learn about and discuss contradictory ideas they may encounter in their everyday experiences. Such topics may also be challenging to teach, but scaffolding may facilitate effective instruction. We describe one type of instructional scaffolding, the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) activity, that supports students’ reasoning when evaluating connections between lines of evidence and competing explanations about phenomena.

Controversial topics that arise in science classrooms, especially those of social relevance (e.g., the climate crisis), provide opportunities to help students learn about and discuss contradictory ideas they may encounter in their everyday experiences. Such topics may also be challenging to teach, but scaffolding may facilitate effective instruction. We describe one type of instructional scaffolding, the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) activity, that supports students’ reasoning when evaluating connections between lines of evidence and competing explanations about phenomena.

Controversial topics that arise in science classrooms, especially those of social relevance (e.g., the climate crisis), provide opportunities to help students learn about and discuss contradictory ideas they may encounter in their everyday experiences. Such topics may also be challenging to teach, but scaffolding may facilitate effective instruction. We describe one type of instructional scaffolding, the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) activity, that supports students’ reasoning when evaluating connections between lines of evidence and competing explanations about phenomena.

Controversial topics that arise in science classrooms, especially those of social relevance (e.g., the climate crisis), provide opportunities to help students learn about and discuss contradictory ideas they may encounter in their everyday experiences. Such topics may also be challenging to teach, but scaffolding may facilitate effective instruction. We describe one type of instructional scaffolding, the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) activity, that supports students’ reasoning when evaluating connections between lines of evidence and competing explanations about phenomena.

Controversial topics that arise in science classrooms, especially those of social relevance (e.g., the climate crisis), provide opportunities to help students learn about and discuss contradictory ideas they may encounter in their everyday experiences. Such topics may also be challenging to teach, but scaffolding may facilitate effective instruction. We describe one type of instructional scaffolding, the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) activity, that supports students’ reasoning when evaluating connections between lines of evidence and competing explanations about phenomena.