Resources included in these libraries were submitted by ITEST projects or STELAR and are relevant to the work of the NSF ITEST Program. PDFs and/or URLs to the original resource are included in the resource description whenever possible. In some cases, full text publications are located behind publishers’ paywalls and a fee or membership to the third party site may be required for access. Permission for use must be requested through the publisher or author listed in each entry.
Revisiting the STEM Workforce: A Companion to Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 (NSB-2015-10)
PublicationThe National Science Board (NSB, Board) examined recent STEM workforce studies and debates, consulted numerous experts, and explored data in our 2014 Science and Engineering Indicators report to develop insights that could facilitate more constructive discussions about the STEM workforce and inform decision makers.
Examining the Quality of Technology Implementation in STEM Classrooms: Demonstration of an Evaluative Framework
PublicationTechnology applications aligned with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workplace practices can engage students in real-world pursuits but also present dramatic challenges for classroom implementation. We examined the impact of teacher professional development focused on incorporating these workplace technologies in the classroom. Because existing measures primarily use only presence or type of technology as proxies for implementation quality, we developed an expanded framework that incorporated (a) the type of technology used; (b) the degree of alignment to STEM practices; (c)
Building Capacity to Integrate Science into Afterschool, Home, and Community: A Work in Progress
PublicationThe STEM 3D approach draws on evidence-based research demonstrating the proven ability of informal environments to act as an entry point to STEM and 21st Century skills for elementary-aged youth, as well as the value of involving significant adults and local communities when providing STEM learning opportunities for minority youth.
Checklists for the Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development
PublicationThis document includes six checklists created by the Evaluation Resource Center for Advanced Technological Education (EvaluATE). These checklists may be used by researchers and evaluators to check for adherence to the National Science Foundation's Common Guidelines.
What is Cyberlearning? Explaining cyberlearning to unfamiliar audiences
PublicationThis document created by the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL) provides background information on cyberlearning, answering what, why, and how.
Learning Sciences
PublicationThis document created by the Center for Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL) synthesizes the field of learning sciences and how it intersects with cyberlearning.
Making Educational Games That Work in The Classroom
PublicationThe development of analytical skills is a central goal of the Next Generation Science Standards and foundational to subject mastery in STEM fields. Yet, significant barriers exist to students gaining such skills. Here we describe a new “gentleslope” cyberlearning strategy that gradually introduces students to the authoring of scientific simulations via a Web-based modding approach called CyberMOD. Modding involves adding agents with predefined functionality to a simulation world to produce a unique combination whose behavior can then be visualized by running the simulation. This permits low
Conversational Programming: Exploring Interactive Program Analysis
PublicationOur powerful computers help very little in debugging the program we have so we can change it into the program we want. We introduce Conversational Programming as a way to harness our computing power to inspect program meaning through a combination of partial program execution and semantic program annotation. A programmer in our approach interactively selects highly autonomous “agents” in a program world as conversation topics and then changes the world to explore the potential behaviors of a selected agent in different scenarios. In this way, the programmer proactively knows how their code
Scalable Game Design: Broadening Participation by Integrating Game Design and Science Simulation Building into Middle School Curricula
PublicationIn this paper we lay out our strategy of our Scalable Game Design curriculum, which has been funded through a series of NSF (ITEST Strategy, CE21 Type II, and ITEST Scale Up) grants as well as the Google CS4HS program, and list some research questions relevant to bringing Computer Science education to middle schools.
Beyond Minecraft: Facilitating Computational Thinking through Modeling and Programming in 3D
PublicationVisual programming in 3D sounds much more appealing than programming in 2D, but what are its benefits? Here, University of Colorado Boulder educators discuss the differences between 2D and 3D regarding three concepts connecting computer graphics to computer science education: ownership, spatial thinking, and syntonicity.