Science

This collaborative project uses co-design as a strategy to develop a professional learning approach to help middle school teachers support students' motivation and engagement in the context of NGSS instruction. The project brings together motivation experts, science education researchers, and middle school science teachers. The poster outlines the project goals, introduces five motivation design principles, and describes four tools that were co-developed to support teachers' professional learning and practice for supporting student motivation.

With the increasing use of online interactive environments for science and engineering education in grades K-12, there is a growing need for detailed automatic analysis of student explanations to provide targeted and individualized guidance. In this work we describe a process of human annotation of student ideas based on deconstructed holistic scoring rubrics for knowledge integration in science learning and develop new NLP methods for identifying diverse expressions of student ideas and reasoning.

Research shows a need for professional development (PD) that builds K-5 teachers' ability to incorporate the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) science practices into the classroom and supports their implementation of reform-minded science instruction. The Schoolyard SITES research study and PD program at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) partners elementary teachers with UNH Extension science volunteers to bring locally-relevant citizen science projects to elementary students and to increase teachers’ self-efficacy teaching science.