The "Next Generation Science Standards" place an emphasis on the practices of science and engineering, where ensuring that students understand and experience how science works is as important as, or maybe more important than, memorizing facts. The idea is that, while some facts may change, the practices will always be applicable, and it…

At High Tech Elementary Chula Vista in California, teachers are using improvement science, a method for solving a problem of practice with disciplined inquiry, to help students make their thinking visible. The teachers wanted to increase students' use of how and why language to articulate their thinking; to that end, they have been using short…

Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) on the Sunshine Coast is growing rapidly. It has expanded from one inaugural Year 8 class in 2012 to the current state of play with the involvement of over 3,000 CASE students from eleven Sunshine Coast State High Schools. It is being taught by more than seventy CASE teachers with…

This study explores the effects of a professional development teacher leadership training program on the pedagogical and content development of math and science teacher leaders at the elementary level. The study is qualitative in nature, and the authors collected data using the online survey instrument Survey Monkey. The major implications of the…

This paper reports on a project that aims to foster interdisciplinary collaboration between mathematicians and mathematics educators in pre-service teacher education. The project involves 23 investigators from six universities. Interviews were conducted with selected project participants to identify conditions that enable or hinder collaboration,…

This paper sets out to explore science teachers' classroom assessment practices and outlines some of the tensions and synergies in changing assessment practices. It describes episodes from a collaborative action research project with science teachers designed to support the strengthening of classroom assessment practices--the King's Researching…

To address the need to better prepare teachers to enact science education reforms, the National Science Foundation has supported a Research Experience for Teachers (RET's) format for teacher professional development. In these experiences, teachers work closely with practicing scientists to engage in authentic scientific inquiry. Although…

This paper reports on a year-long citizen science project that focused on improving learning for students identified as most at risk of not succeeding at school. This project was one element of a broader university-based aspirations Initiative which aimed to engage students from low socio-economic schools in rigorous learning in order to increase…

In collaboration with preservice elementary teachers and in-service kindergarten teachers, the authors engaged in small-scale, demand-side production of educational software focused on numeracy skills. That is, the authors built applications designed to address children's specific learning needs as they surfaced in the classroom and were…

The new standards for K-12 science education in the United States call for science teachers to integrate engineering concepts and practices within their science teaching in order to improve student learning. To accomplish this, teachers need appropriate instructional materials as well as the knowledge and skills to effectively use them. This mixed…

Math is often taught poorly emphasizing rote, procedural methods rather than creativity and problem solving. Alberta Education developed a new mathematics curriculum to transform mathematics teaching to inquiry driven methods. This revised curriculum provides a new vision for mathematics and creates opportunities and requirements for professional…

In late 2006, the New Zealand Government embarked on a series of initiatives to explore how the resources and expertise of eight, small, state-owned science research institutes could be combined efficiently to support science teaching in schools. Programmes were developed to enable students and teachers to access and become involved in local…

In South Africa, poor performance of learners in mathematics across the school system is a problem demanding new solutions. One possible solution is to try to raise standards through the use of open educational resources (OER). This article presents and discusses findings from a case study of a collaborative OER development project initiated by…

Health science students like students in many disciplines exhibit difficulty with transferring content from one course to another. For example, the problem explored in this study occurred when overlapping concepts were presented in introductory biology and chemistry courses, but students could not transfer the concepts to the other disciplinary…

This case study reviewed the collaborative efforts of university engineers, teacher educators, and middle school teachers to advance sixth- and seventh-grade students' learning through a series of project-based engineering activities. This two-year project enriched regular school curricula by introducing real-world applications of science and…