Investigating Urban Trees

Publication

Mobile geospatial technologies enable high school students to engage in authentic scientific data collection and analysis that promote spatial-thinking and reasoning skills, as well as problem-solving in a school’s local environment. We developed and implemented an Ecological Services investigation aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards in an urban high school with a large population of economically disadvantaged students. The investigation includes local field data collection with mobile devices and classroom data analysis using a freely available Web Geographic Information System

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Companion Guidelines on Replication & Reproducibility in Education Research

Publication

A Supplement to the Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) jointly issued the Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development in 2013 to describe “shared understandings of the roles of various types of ‘genres’ of research in generating evidence about strategies and interventions for increasing student learning” (IES and NSF, 2013: 7). In the intervening period, the education research community and federal policymakers have been increasingly attentive to the role of, and factors that

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Socio-Environmental Science Investigations

Curricular Materials
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Socio-environmental science investigations (SESI) are a series of secondary level geospatial investigations that focus on social issues related to environmental science. The investigations focus on local problems and utilize fieldwork to gather data in a local setting. Students use the Esri Collector app to gather geo-referenced data outside their school. The student-collected data is then shared into a Cloud-based map service over the Internet. The collaborative data set is analyzed in ARCGIS.com, a Web-based GIS with interactive mapping visualization tools that students use to manage, query

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Massachusetts K–12 Computer Science Curriculum Guide

Curricular Materials

This guide helps school districts choose the computer science (CS) curricula that best suit their communities’ needs. The guide was developed as part of an initiative for school districts to accelerate the creation of classroom opportunities for learning CS that are standards based, high quality, career relevant, and accessible to all students at all grade levels.

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National Science Foundation - Instructional Materials Development Program

Instruments

This document presents the final report on the evaluation of the Instructional Materials Development (IMD) program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and focuses on issues related to the development, dissemination, adoption, implementation, and impact of new instructional materials. The IMD program evaluates products at each step, from product development to classroom use. Instruments are included for evaluating elementary and secondary school science and mathematics materials for classroom use.

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The Synergies Project: Preliminary Results and Insights from Two Years of Longitudinal Survey Research

Publication

Our study seeks to improve understanding of how STEM interest develops during adolescence, and how a variety of community resources and out-of-school activities support that development. Our 4-year, Synergies project is a longitudinal study that documents STEM interest and participation trajectories of a cohort of middle school-aged youth as they progress from 5th through 8th grade. The premise of the project is that if one more fully understood how and why people, in particular early adolescent youth, develop STEM-related interests through the utilization of STEM resources, it should be

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The Synergies Research–Practice Partnership Project: A 2020 Vision Case Study

Publication

This paper, describes Synergies, an on-going longitudinal study and design effort, being conducted in a diverse, under-resourced community in Portland, Oregon, with the goal of measurably improving STEM learning, interest and participation by early adolescents, both in school and out of school. Authors examine how the work of this particular research-practice partnership is attempting to accommodate the six principles outlined in this issue: (1) to more accurately reflect learning as a lifelong process occurring across settings, situations and time frames; (2) to consider what STEM content is

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OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

Instruments

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a collaborative effort among OECD member countries to measure how well 15-year-old students approaching the end of compulsory schooling are prepared to meet the challenges of today’s knowledge societies. The assessment is forward-looking: rather than focusing on the extent to which these students have mastered a specific school curriculum, it looks at their ability to use their knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. This orientation reflects a change in curricular goals and objectives, which are increasingly

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