Undergraduate

This series of short videos by CADRE share STEM education research takeaways for practice.

This video podcast features CADRE co-PIs Ilana Horn and Terrell Morton offer insights into aspects of NSF's DRK-12 project and proposal development, proposal review, and project management: Post Panel Pop-off (2022), Responding to Rejection (2022), If I Knew Then, What I Know Now (2023), Managing Your NSF Budget (2024), and

In this Perspective, I consider how our field can take principled actions to align our ways of designing and refining courses with our oft-stated goal for chemistry learning to be useful in daily life. To do so, I make three interrelated arguments. First, I argue achieving this goal will require a particular focus on epistemologies: “[people’s] systems of beliefs [tacit or explicit] about (1) the nature of knowledge and (2) the processes of knowing” [ Educ. Psychol. 2011, 46 (3), 141].

This study was designed to examine how three undergraduate students enrolled in a developmental mathematics course interpreted and engaged with problem-posing tasks, the problems they posed and the knowledge the posed problems could invoke. All three students commented on the value of problem posing, as problem posing invited them to see the entirety of the problem situation and understand it.

Fostering student engagement with mathematical reasoning and proving requires a special kind of teacher knowledge – Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching Proof (MKT-P). One important component of MKT-P is Knowledge of Content and Teaching specific to Proof (KCT-P), which is knowledge of pedagogical practices for supporting student learning of proof. Providing effective feedback on students' mathematical arguments is one of the key aspects of KCT-P.

Critical elements of the expertise of mathematics teacher educators (MTE) can be identified in the artifacts they design for working with prospective teachers (PT), specifically for engaging PT in the double role of practitioners and students of practice. While MTE are increasingly utilizing designed multimodal representations of practice (such as storyboards), theoretical frameworks and methods for analyzing these pedagogical artifacts and the meanings they support are still in early development.

The literature on scientific modelling practices in science education has provided a fruitful discussion on how learners tend to view models vs. how and what they should think about them. One approach is to teach students that models are abstractions so that they do not view them as a copy of phenomena they represent. Although teaching students that models are abstractions is a successful strategy in modelling instruction, we still do not know how students engage in and work towards the process of abstraction while they develop a model to understand scientific ideas.

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. Using an instrument that measures instructors’ recognition of four hypothesized professional obligations, we surveyed 471 US high school mathematics teachers and 239 university mathematics instructors to measure the extent to which they recognized professional obligations when evaluating the appropriateness of certain instructional actions.

Ed+gineering, an NSF-funded program, adapted hands-on robotics instruction for online delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This qualitative multiple case study shares the experiences of participating education students in spring 2021 as they collaborated virtually with engineering students and fifth graders to engineer bioinspired robots in an afterschool technology club adapted to be virtual.