Curriculum

Innovative science curricula aim to transform classroom instruction by emphasizing socio-scientific issues (SSI), student-centered inquiry, and culturally relevant pedagogy. Engaging with new and innovative curricula has the potential to stretch teachers’ instructional practices when they fully commit to implementation, challenging them to navigate tensions between their existing approaches and reform-oriented teaching methods. The Expectancy-Value Theory (EVT) and the Interconnected Model of Professional Growth (IMPG) provide a lens for understanding the motivations behind teacher decisions when implementing such curricula and whether these decisions lead to professional learning. This study applies these frameworks to examine how two middle school science teachers, Andrew and Abby, navigated the implementation of the Grand Challenges (GC) curriculum, balancing the perceived costs, values, and challenges of integrating SSI into their instruction.

Since the release of A Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), there has been an urgent need for teacher professional development (PD) programs that support the implementation of NGSS-aligned curriculum materials and address the unique strengths and needs of diverse student groups, including multilingual learners (MLs). The purpose of this study is to describe how teacher feedback guided the design and refinement of our curriculum-based PD program integrating science and language with MLs through a 2-year field trial.

Engineering design has been widely implemented in K-12 curricula to cultivate future workforce. In this study, seventh-grade students participated in the Solarizing Your School curriculum, an action-oriented program where they engaged in engineering design processes to tackle a real-world problem related to renewable energy adoption. The study sought to explore how students balanced constraints and criteria in engineering design.

Engineering design has been widely implemented in K-12 curricula to cultivate future workforce. In this study, seventh-grade students participated in the Solarizing Your School curriculum, an action-oriented program where they engaged in engineering design processes to tackle a real-world problem related to renewable energy adoption. The study sought to explore how students balanced constraints and criteria in engineering design.

Teacher preparation programs need to consider how to support elementary science teachers in developing their knowledge related to environmental and climate justice. Working with children to determine steps they can take together with their community to address and mitigate local environmental justice issues can seem daunting, especially if teachers have not had opportunities to plan and adapt lessons with these goals in mind. We describe a series of lessons for preservice teachers on environmental justice, including climate justice, and climate change.

Over the last decade, reform in science education has placed an emphasis on the science practices as a way to engage students in the process of science and improve scientific literacy. A critical component of developing scientific literacy is learning to apply quantitative reasoning to authentic scientific phenomena and problems. Students need practice moving fluidly (or fluently) between math and science to develop a habit of mind that encourages the application of quantitative reasoning to real-world scenarios. Here we present a student-facing model that challenges students to think across these two fields.

This article explores how multicultural children’s literature for elementary classrooms can be leveraged to develop students’ mathematical understanding and foster positive math identities, particularly for multilingual learners. By integrating diverse stories into mathematics instruction, teachers can create culturally relevant contexts that invite meaningful problem-solving in tandem with rich mathematical discourse.

This paper argues for addressing histories of scientific institutions and their entanglements with Euro-American imperialism, racial capitalism, and environmental injustice in secondary science education. Our argument is grounded in the history of a multinational chemical corporation that operates a chemical plant in a neighborhood where one author lives and the other teaches. We illustrate how analysis of the plant inspired youth participatory science projects by describing how considerations about the plant were connected to chemistry curricula.

This article describes a middle school energy literacy unit that uses green building science to uncover the important ways in which energy flows between natural and built environments. The place-based unit employs the student’s own school building as a learning tool to examine how light energy and thermal energy relate to the use of electrical energy—and ultimately impact global carbon emissions that result from using buildings every day.

Students benefit from having opportunities to explore extensive, complex datasets using technology tools that are intuitive and accessible. Likewise, middle school teachers require convenient access to captivating datasets, supportive resources, and classroom-appropriate software. We developed two CODAP (Common Online Data Analysis Platform) plugins that allow students to engage with data about their daily lives, build their data fluency, and answer questions about Earth’s systems. These plugins support the three-dimensional learning approach central to the NGSS.