Professional Development Supports for Teaching Bioinformatics through Mobile Learning

This project prepares rural secondary science teachers to design five-dimensional assessment tasks in which students use the three dimensions of the NGSS to make sense of phenomena that connect to their interests and identities. We created an online course to develop a 5D vision for science with teachers and support them in designing phenomenon-driven tasks. After ethnography and co-design work, we are conducting an experiment to research the effects of the course on teacher outcomes.

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.

With partners from Alaskan and Hawaiian Native communities, multiple universities, and the Concord Consortium, we are exploring approaches to designing, testing, and refining multi-perspective, middle school science instruction about coasts and coastal change. Key questions include: How can multiple perspectives be included in ways that demonstrate equity and respect rather than some perspectives being represented more deeply than others? And, what does learning look like when it authentically represents multiple perspectives?

How do we design small meaningful suggestions for instructional improvement that are easy to implement, rooted in teachers' existing practice, and have a high rate of uptake? That's the question we explore on this poster.

Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS) is a partnership between the University of Illinois Physics Department and 40 high school physics teachers representing 38 schools across Illinois. The holistic goal of the program is to develop a physics teaching Community of Practice that supports high school physics teachers from diverse school contexts in the design and implementation of high-quality, university-aligned instructional materials, such that their students experience fewer barriers in transitions to post-secondary STEM programs.

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.

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.

In MS-GGU, we attend to middle-school students’ understandings of coordinate systems and frames of reference prior to examining their graph construction and interpretation. The project goals are to advance knowledge of students’ developing understandings of graphs “from the ground up” with attention to underlying coordinate systems and frames of reference that comprise the coordinate systems and (b) design and empirically test tasks to support students’ learning of coordinate systems and graphs to enhance graph literacy.

This DRK-12 Impact Study project investigates the effectiveness of STEM-Innovation and Design (STEM-ID) curricula in approximately 29 middle schools, targeting 29 engineering teachers and approximately 5,000 students across middle grades in Georgia.