DRK-12 Research and Products

Publication | Extended reality (XR) is increasingly used to support preservice and inservice teacher training. Its use in teacher education has shown promise in improving future educators’ engagement, self-confidence, and noticing skills. Despite this…
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 | 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 | 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…
Product for Educators | Apps for examining proportional relationships of various kinds.
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 | 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.…
Presentation | Teachers are increasingly participating in RPPs with the goal of improving their schools and districts. However, we know little about what teachers learn from their involvement in RPPs. This study explores teacher learning over the course of…
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 | 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 | 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…
Publication | Practical research article from Science Scope.
Product for Educators | Repository of project simulation tasks and data.
Publication | In this report section, we discuss the importance of aligning classroom assessments with learning goals and instructional practices to both shape and evaluate students’ learning opportunities.
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…
Presentation | 'Algorithms’ is a core CS concept included in the K-12 CS learning standards, yet student challenges with understanding and using algorithms are still not well documented. This paper describes an approach to decompose the broad middle-school ‘…
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…
Tool | This list includes STEM education-related conferences that may be of interest to DRK-12 grantees.
Publication | In this article, we describe a professional learning community (PLC) for science teacher educators that supported changes in pedagogy through educative curriculum materials and vignette writing.
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 | Research on socio-scientific issues (SSI) has revealed that it is critical for learners to develop a systematic understanding of the underlying issue. In this paper, we explore how modeling can facilitate students’ systems thinking in the…
Product for Educators | Online plotter for historical data and student data collected using the Emery Method for beach profiling.
Tool | The new DRK-12 solicitation (NSF 23-596) introduces several changes and updates compared to the previous solicitation (NSF 20-572). Proposal writers should take note of the differences outlined in this document.