Festival was just the start

News

Debuted in 2012, the Arizona SciTech Festival celebrated its sixth season with more than 800 organizations planning to stage nearly 1,500 events for an audience total exceeding 400,000.

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Peanut butter and jelly: The edible algorithm

News

The Arizona Chief Science Officer (CSO) program, supported by State Farm, gets students involved in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) activities, while teaching them about careers in these fields. During a CSO institute, State Farm volunteers used a childhood favorite – the PB&J, to demonstrate the importance of algorithms. Students plotted the steps needed to build the perfect PB&J, then shared their algorithms with volunteers –

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Career Maturity Inventory Form C

Instruments

It is a 24-item scale that measures change along four scales of student career awareness and planning, along with open-response items about specific schooling intentions and career aspirations. Four scales are Concern, Curiosity, Confidence, and Consultation.

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Measuring Cognitive and Psychological Engagement: Validation of the Student Engagement Instrument

Instruments

A review of relevant literatures led to the construction of a self-report instrument designed to measure two subtypes of student engagement with school: cognitive and psychological engagement. The psychometric properties of this measure, the Student Engagement Instrument (SEI), were assessed based on responses of an ethnically and economically diverse urban sample of 1931 ninth grade students. Factor structures were obtained using exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) on half of the dataset, with model fit examined using confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) on the other half of the dataset. The

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A School Connectedness Scale for Use with Adolescents

Instruments

Evaluators are frequently asked to assess the effectiveness of school programs implemented to improve academic achievement. School connectedness has been shown to be directly related to academic achievement and is therefore of interest to evaluators. The construct of school connectedness has been shown to consist of 3 elements: connectedness to adults in schools, connectedness to peers, and connectedness to the school. This paper reports the psychometric properties and factor analyses findings from a School Connectedness Scale (SCS) given to adolescents in 2 very different high schools in the

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American Teens' Knowledge of Climate Change

Instruments

American Teens’ Knowledge of Climate Change reports results from a national study of what American teens in middle and high school understand about how the climate system works, and the causes, impacts and potential solutions to global warming. There are 75 individual questions. A straight grading scale was constructed (scores 90% and above = A, 80-89% = B, 70-79% = C, 60-69% = D, and scores 59% and below = F), using only items for which there was a correct or best answer.

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What Makes for Powerful Classrooms, and How Can We Support Teachers in Creating Them? A Story of Research and Practice, Productively Intertwined

Publications

This article and my career as an educational researcher are grounded in two fundamental assumptions: (a) that research and practice can and should live in productive synergy, with each enhancing the other, and (b) that research focused on teaching and learning in a particular discipline can, if carefully framed, yield insights that have implications across a broad spectrum of disciplines. This article begins by describing in brief two bodies of work that exemplify these two fundamental assumptions. I then elaborate on a third example, the development of a new set of tools for understanding and

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