Rapid advances in science and engineering, and pervasive adoption of resulting technological products, are influencing every aspect of human living and fueling a growing demand for a workforce that is adequately prepared for the emerging occupations in STEM fields. Educating students for success in the modern technology-rich workplace requires…

Capstone experiences function as a process in which students consolidate knowledge and skills throughout their degree programme and apply this understanding towards real-world contexts. This process is most often understood, in undergraduate programmes, as a transformation of identity, moving from "student" to "professional".…

This note outlines some connections between projective geometry and some designs used in clinical trials in the health sciences. The connections are not immediately obvious but they widen the scope for enrichment work at both the senior high school level and for capstone subjects at the undergraduate level.

Every three years, the Organisation for European Cooperation and Development evaluates the scientific competence of European students. Recent results have demonstrated that scientific competence in Spain is somewhat underdeveloped, which underscores the need to apply educational methodologies that favour the development of said competence. This…

Increasing student access to college has become a central issue in education policy of the United States. Many students from underrepresented cultural backgrounds, if they access college, arrive when not sufficiently prepared. This research investigated the influence of advisory programs within Capital Prep Schools on the college readiness of…

School systems across the United States increasingly use performance-based assessments (PBAs) as alternatives to traditional standardized tests, like the SAT, to make post-secondary and workforce readiness (PWR) determinations. However, very little research has been conducted to validate such alternative assessments as valid indicators of a…

Performance assessments encompass a wide variety of activities, all of which require students to show what they know, rather than selecting answers from predetermined options on a multiple-choice test. For the graduate capstone, Oakland Unified School District (Oakland Unified) seniors conduct original research, write a paper based on the…

In our investigation of university students' knowledge about real numbers in relation to computer algebra systems (CAS) and how it could be developed in view of their future activity as teachers, we used a computer algorithm as a case to explore the relationship between CAS and the knowledge of real numbers as decimal representations. Our work was…

The authors of this article, a 7-12 English teacher, a 7-12 social studies teacher, sought to cultivate spaces where their students could "wrestle with making sense of systemic oppression that exists within historic, geographic, and economic structures of our reality" (Duncan et al., 2023, p. 241) and, hopefully, sustain their civic…

While the importance of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education to address complex world problems, such as global warming, disease, and an increasingly interdependent world economy has led to many educational reform efforts in recent years, other content areas, such as social studies, have unnecessarily become…

The AP Capstone Diploma ™ program was launched in 2014 to offer high school students an opportunity to learn interdisciplinary critical thinking and collaboration skills and complete college-level academic research by means of two Advanced Placement® (AP® ) courses: AP Seminar and AP Research. In these early years of the AP Capstone program,…

Schools in underserved districts experience pressure to improve achievement outcomes, trapping curricula, teachers, and students in a skills-driven literacy framework, repeatedly reinscribing a racist pedagogy. Although the research community recommends resisting skills-based literacy, researchers often neglect to commit to a research-practice…

In this design case, we describe our work to design and develop a socio-scientific issue (SSI) based unit of instruction for use in high school biology. Our team includes university based science educators, an experienced classroom teacher, and a microbiologist. The unit focuses on antibiotic resistant bacteria as a context for student exploration…

The choice of academic major is one of the most important decisions an undergraduate student makes at a university. Many of the "best and brightest" math and science students in America are shunning Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) majors. The point in the STEM pipeline where the highest losses occur is between high…