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.
The Better Buildings Workforce Accelerator K-12 Resource Fact Sheet
PublicationsResearch on Continuous Improvement: Exploring the Complexities of Managing Educational Change
PublicationsAs a result of the frustration with the dominant “What Works” paradigm of large-scale research-based improvement, practitioners, researchers, foundations, and policymakers are increasingly embracing a set of ideas and practices that can be collectively labeled continuous improvement (CI) methods. This chapter provides a comparative review of these methods, paying particular attention to CI methods’ intellectual influences, theories of action, and affordances and challenges in practice. We first map out and explore the shared intellectual forebears that CI methods draw on. We then discuss three
Assessing Research-Practice Partnerships: Five Dimensions of Effectiveness
PublicationsWhile research-practice partnerships have emerged as a promising means of creating and applying relevant research evidence in settings where young people grow and learn, we’ve lacked definition in terms of what constitutes an effective partnership and how RPPs, funders, and other stakeholders might gauge and demonstrate such effectiveness. Offering a clear picture of the common goals that cut across diverse types of partnerships, Assessing Research-Practice Partnerships: Five Dimensions of Effectiveness outlines the elements that members of existing RPPs have reported are essential to their
The landscape of Block-based programming: Characteristics of block-based environments and how they support the transition to text-based programming
PublicationsBlock-based programming (BBP) environments have become increasingly commonplace computer science education. Despite a rapidly expanding ecosystem of BBP environments, text-based languages remain the dominant programming paradigm, motivating the transition from BBP to text-based programming (TBP). Support students in transitioning from BBP to TBP is an important and open design question. This work identifies 101 unique BBP environments, analyzes the 46 of them and identifies different design approaches used to support the transition to TBP. The contribution of this work is to provide a snapshot
To block or not to block, that is the question: students' perceptions of blocks-based programming
PublicationsBlocks-based programming tools are becoming increasingly common in high-school introductory computer science classes. Such contexts are quite different than the younger audience and informal settings where these tools are more often used. This paper reports findings from a study looking at how high school students view blocks-based programming tools, what they identify as contributing to the perceived ease-of-use of such tools, and what they see as the most salient differences between blocks-based and text-based programming. Students report that numerous factors contribute to making blocks
Latent value in humiliation: A design thinking tool to enhance empathy in creative ideation
PublicationsDesign thinking emphasizes that in addition to being creative, design solutions should be empathetic. Yet, research suggests there may be a tension between these goals, where focusing on empathy comes at a cost to creativity, sometimes by inducing fixation. We investigated this phenomenon through a quasi-experimental design with novice designers, contrasting two structured ideation techniques in which participants (N = 47) generated bad ideas prior to proposing beneficial ideas. Specifically, they used the wrong theory protocol (WTP) to generate harmful and humiliating ideas, and a variant in
ITEST Snapshot 2022: An Overview of NSF's ITEST Program
PublicationsAccessible Playground Design: A Community-Connected Elementary Engineering Unit Focused on Designing Accessible Playground Equipment
PublicationsIn the ConnecTions in the Making project, researchers and district partners work to develop and study community-connected, integrated science and engineering curriculum units that support diverse elementary students’ science and engineering ideas, practices, and attitudes. In the community-connected units, students in the third, fourth, and fifth grades use human-centered design strategies to prototype and share functional solutions to a design challenge rooted in the students’ local community while scientifically exploring the phenomena and mechanisms related to the challenge.One of the units
Delivering Hands-On Experiences with STEM Technologies in Virtual Learning Environments: Professional Development for a Diverse Network of School Educators
PublicationsDiversifying the STEM pipeline requires reforming school educator practices to adjust how STEM messaging and learning experiences influence diverse young people’s interests and trajectory into STEM long-term. Catalyzing Inclusive STEM Experiences All Year Round (CISTEME365) is an NSF multi-pronged project designed to offer professional development and networked community for school educators to improve their knowledge and implementation of STEM experiences for their students. We worked with school educators to create and implement informal hands-on activities with STEM technologies for
Your Phone as a Sensor: Making IoT Accessible for Novice Programmers
PublicationsDistributed computing, computer networking, and the Internet of Things are all around us, yet only computer science and engineering majors learn the technologies that enable our modern lives. This paper introduces PhoneIoT, a mobile app that makes it possible to teach some of the basic concepts of distributed computation and networked sensing to novices. PhoneIoT turns mobile phones and tablets into IoT devices and makes it possible to create highly engaging projects through NetsBlox, an open-source block-based programming environment focused on teaching distributed computing at the high