Elementary School

Supporting Elementary Teacher Learning for Effective School-based Citizen Science (TL4CS)

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The goal of TL4CS is to explore how elementary school citizen science (CS) can support students’ engagement with science content and practices. The study addresses three research questions: (1) What kinds of supports foster teacher learning about effective school-based CS? (2) How do supports for teacher learning shape the way teachers enact school-based CS? and (3) What is the potential of school-based CS for positively influencing student learning and student attitudes toward nature and science?

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Strengthening STEM Teaching in Native American Serving Schools Through Long-Term, Culturally Responsive Professional Development

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Indigenous students experience persistent inequitable outcomes in schools, particularly in STEM. Since teacher quality is one of the most important school-based factors impacting K12 students’ learning and engagement in schools, our project provides long-term professional development to teachers in rural, Indigenous-serving schools to support teachers’ development of culturally responsive STEM curriculum units. We provide an overview of our professional development model, and share findings from our work with over 100 teachers during four program years.

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STEM for All Collaboratory: Accelerating Dissemination and Fostering Collaborations for STEM Educational Research and Development

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The poster will look at the impact of the annual STEM for All Video Showcases as well as the STEM for All Multiplex. It will discuss implications for knowledge sharing among grantees and dissemination efforts in the future.

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SPIRAL: Supporting Professional Inquiry and Re-Aligning Learning Through a Structured e-Portfolio System

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Teacher portfolios have long been used to support professional reflection and learning. We developed a new type of e-portfolio tool enabling teachers to efficiently capture, annotate, and share multimedia evidence of student learning and instruction (documents, pictures, video) in mobile devices. This tool supported vertical professional learning communities with teachers in multiple grades, reflecting the spiraling structure of the Next Generation Science Standards, where concepts are covered multiple times in increasing depth and sophistication.

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Spanning Boundaries: A Statewide Network to Support Science Teacher Leaders to Implement Science Standards

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A partnership between the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the Exploratorium, the Spanning Boundaries project researches how science teacher leaders (STLs) can be supported and activated to bring educational improvements into their local contexts. We draw on a range of frameworks from organizational theory and social learning theory to examine how science teacher leaders, as Boundary Spanners who carry knowledge and innovation across professional settings enact their roles, and how their work is sustained and improved.

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Science Coordinators Advancing a Framework For Outstanding Leadership Development

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This project explores how supporting District Science Coordinators can impact the instruction of science teachers. In this project, we developed an online program for District Science Coordinators and tracked their and their science teachers professional learning. In this project, we will report on some of the initial results from the first and second cohort of teachers and District Science Coordinators.

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Preparing Next Generation Scientists Through Teacher and Extension Science Partnerships and Schoolyard Citizen Science Investigations in Elementary Schools

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Schoolyard SITES is a community partnership STEM teacher professional development program and research study at University of New Hampshire. The program partners elementary teachers with UNH Extension science volunteers to bring locally-relevant citizen science projects to their students. Our research study examines the factors associated with a community-based partnership PD model that will improve elementary school teachers’ self-efficacy teaching science and their success in engaging students in citizen science projects and NGSS science practices.

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Online Practice Suite: Practice Spaces, Simulations and Virtual Reality Environments for Preservice Teachers to Learn to Facilitate Argumentation Discussions in Math and Science

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This project uses design-based research to develop, pilot, and refine a set of complementary online activities for preservice teachers to engage in approximations of practice to develop their ability to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions in mathematics and science. The effort has produced an integrated online practice suite (OPS) containing a coordinated and scaffolded collection of approximation of practice activities using game-based practice spaces, simulations, and virtual reality coupled with targeted feedback and support from teacher educators.

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Modeling Assessment to Enhance Teaching and Learning (Collaborative Research: Lehrer)

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This project modifies an assessment system to provide ongoing, instructionally productive evidence to teachers about student learning and to link student work products and formative assessments with summative assessments in models that generate useful estimates of student growth. In this iteration, the assessment system is refined as we with K-5 teachers in two schools to develop a learning progression that guides our collaborative work foster student thinking about spatial measurement in the elementary grades.

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