DRK-12 Research and Products

Publication | Computer-aided design (CAD) programs are essential to engineering as they allow for better designs through low-cost iterations. While CAD programs are typically taught to undergraduate students as a job skill, such software can also help…
Publication | This study explores how the interplay between data and model design shifts 6th graders’ students' ideas about diffusion as they build a range of models (“paper and pencil” and computational models). We present a new web-based environment and…
Publication | We explore the implementation of a co-designed data-dance unit in which middle school students created their own embodied metaphors to represent and communicate about graphs through dance. In analyzing dance artifacts and post-study interviews…
Publication | The ReLaTe-SA project investigates the research question: what language do teachers use to describe and explain routines in algebra classes? The goal of this article is to inform readers about some ways we have learned to describe the discourse…
Publication | The research contained in this article used qualitative methods to articulate and test the design underlying our professional learning cycle by advancing conjecture mapping, a device by which the embodiments of the design are made transparent to…
Publication | This review synthesized insights from 25 NSF DRK-12 projects that studied prekindergarten (PreK) and elementary science teaching. This review covered 25 of the 27 projects funded between 2011 and 2015. We synthesized the empirical findings from…
Publication | The give-n task is widely used in developmental psychology to indicate young children’s knowledge or use of the cardinality principle (CP): the last number word used in the counting process indicates the total number of items in a collection.…
Publication | Black and Brown girls are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Although studies have examined the reasons for this by exploring Black and Brown girls' experiences based on culture, gender, and race, there…
Publication | TU professor studies avatar-based classroom simulations in three-year, $3 million NSF grant.
Presentation | Recent circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions on entering public schools have created barriers for prospective teachers (PT) to gain valuable exposure to real classrooms. As a result, we have transitioned some teacher…
Publication | In this chapter, we argue that the learning sciences and science education have coevolved, a co-evolution that began with the emergence of the learning sciences in the 1990s and that continues today.
Publication | In the United States, national and state standardized assessments have become a metric for measuring student learning and high-quality learning environments. As the COVID-19 pandemic offered a multitude of learning modalities (e.g., hybrid,…
Publication | Women and ethnic minoritized individuals are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domains in postsecondary education and in the workforce. The aim of the current study was to examine whether adolescents'…
Publication | A common approach to scaling up a professional development program is for the researchers who designed the program to prepare teacher leaders to facilitate it at their schools. When researchers eventually leave, however, teacher leaders may…
Publication | The InSTEP professional learning platform aims to support grades 6-12 teachers’ professional learning in teaching statistics and data science through a personalized online learning platform. While statistics and data analysis are included in…
Publication | The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have been imperative for informing many facets of the chemistry education research field, one of which includes the professional development (PD) of high school teachers. While many researchers and…
Publication | Professional noticing is an essential skill for teachers that is enacted by teachers via their embodied senses (sight, sound, etc.). To better understand the nature of teacher noticing, 44 preservice teachers (PSTs) viewed a 360 video of an…
Publication | We describe an online citizen science platform for human brain and behavior research that uses a participatory science learning approach to engage learners in the full spectrum of scientific inquiry.
Publication | In this study, we present a conceptual tool for guiding teachers’ principled pedagogical actions toward equitable instruction, referred to as the Transforming Science Learning (TSL) framework. The TSL framework was developed to address the…
Publication | Although prior research has highlighted the significance of representations for mathematical learning, there is still a lack of research on how students use multimodal external representations (MERs) to solve mathematical tasks in digital game-…
Publication | Researchers have typically identified and characterized teachers’ knowledge bases (e.g., pedagogical content knowledge and subject matter knowledge) in an effort to improve enacted instructional strategies. As shown by the Refined Consensus…
Tool | STEM education-related publications that may be of interest to DR K-12 grantees.
Publication | MindHive is an online, open science, citizen science platform co-designed by a team of educational researchers, teachers, cognitive and social scientists, UX researchers, community organizers, and software developers to support real-world brain…
Publication | This position paper advocates supporting computer science (CS) teacher professional learning by supplementing existing curriculum-specific teacher professional development (PD) with standards-aligned PD that focuses on teachers' conceptual…
Publication | This book is about scientific inquiry. Designed for early and mid-career researchers, it is a practical manual for conducting and communicating high-quality research in (mathematics) education. Based on the authors’ extensive experience as…