DRK-12 Research and Products
Publication | Our conceptual framework for justice-centered STEM education engages all students in multiple STEM subjects, including data science and computer science, to explain and design solutions to pressing societal challenges and their disproportionate…
Publication | This qualitative study examines how a group of undergraduate and graduate students in an upper-level ecosystem ecology course at a research university in the southeastern part of the United States engage in a task that requires constructing an…
Publication | Adopting a complexity perspective, we attempt to understand how teachers shift over time by examining their epistemic orientation to knowledge generation and their understanding of the nature of the epistemic tools of language, dialogue and…
Publication | In this study, 82 middle and high school teachers engaged with the InSTEP online professional
learning platform to develop their expertise in teaching data science and statistics. We
investigated teachers’ engagement within the platform,…
Legitimation Code Theory as an Analytical Framework for Integrated STEM Curriculum and Its Enactment
Publication | In this paper, we describe Legitimation Code Theory as an analytical framework and provide an analysis of semantic patterns of an integrated STEM unit (written discourse) and a middle school teacher’s enactment of that unit (oral…
Publication | This section presents an overview of critical developments in technology-driven, classroom-based innovative assessment practices. It uses a framework organized around cognitive constructs, assessment functionality, and automaticity to review the…
Publication | Science identity development begins in school-aged years, when multilingual students (MLs) are often marginalised in the classroom due to language challenges and low expectations placed on them. This descriptive multiple case study explores the…
Publication | In-service professional development is important for improving teaching. However, little research has examined how the roles, beliefs, and backgrounds of the individuals providing professional development can best be leveraged to create…
Publication | In this article, we describe our implementation of an innovative approximation of practice in teacher education: chat-based role-play. In so doing, we share our collective experiences as teacher educators about how the preservice teachers (PSTs…
The Crisis You Can’t Plan For: K-12 Leader Responses and Organisational Preparedness During COVID-19
Publication | Unlike many types of educational crises, the COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis leaders could not have prepared for. But research is only starting to examine how leaders’ responses and organisational context have played a role. This mixed-methods…
Publication | Science education literature has highlighted socio-scientific issues (SSI) as an effective pedagogy for teaching science in a social and political context. SSI links science education and real-world problems to engage students in real-world…
Publication | This study applied the many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM) to assess students’ knowledge-in-use in middle school physical science.
Publication | The dimensionality of the epistemic orientation survey (EOS) was examined across four occasions with item factor analysis (IFA). Because of an emphasis on the knowledge generation of epistemic orientation (EO), four factors were selected and…
Publication | We investigated how the level of variance in students’ prior knowledge may have influenced their collaborative interactions and science learning in small groups. We examined learning outcomes from 102 groups from seven science teachers’ classes…
Tool | This list includes STEM education-related conferences that may be of interest to DRK-12 grantees.
Publication | Collaboration between ecologists and learning scientists can give rise to powerful models for scientific outreach within ecology. This paper presents a process by which learning scientists and ecologists codesigned a science curriculum that…
Publication | Big ideas in science education are meant to be interpretive frameworks that empower student learning. Unfortunately, outside of the broad conception of scientific evaluation, there are few theoretical explanations of how this might happen.…
Publication | This article examines how federal/state-level policy guidance and local context have influenced district and school leader responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as how these external/internal factors might provide a window into K-12 crisis…
Publication | Global climate change (GCC) is one of the greatest challenges of our age and a highly significant socio-scientific issue (SSI). Developing secondary students’ understanding about the Earth’s climate and GCC is critical for empowering future…
Publication | Teacher–teacher feedback is an important feature of professional learning. However, deeply ingrained socio-pedagogical norms may affect both the nature and content of feedback, constraining its effectiveness. Prior studies have reported that…
Publication | This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of a professional development program rooted in knowledge generation theory. Specifically, it sought to examine the changes in teachers' three orientations following the completion of the…
Publication | Arts-integration is a promising approach to building students’ abilities to create and critique arguments with data, also known as informal inferential reasoning (IIR). However, differences in disciplinary practices and routines, as well as…
Publication | Practical research article from Science Scope.
Publication | Design-based research is uniquely positioned to adapt instructional resources quickly to meet the needs of teachers and students. This chapter explores how researchers adapted and improved two educative tools over the course of two academic…
Publication | Science learning is an important part of the K-12 educational experience, as well as in the lives of students. This study considered students’ science learning as they engaged in the instruction of scientific issues with social relevance. With…