The number of students interested in pursuing STEM in post-secondary institutions is on the decline. This is due to several factors, one being a lack of effective and innovative science enrichment (summer or after-school) programs for high school students (Baran et al., 2019; Kong et al., 2014). While traditional lecture-based science courses…

The Higher School Certificate is a certificate that recognises the successful completion of secondary education in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The most recent enrolment information available suggests that at least 13,472 students undertaking the NSW Higher School Certificate (HSC) in 2019 conducted research projects that involved human…

Big Ideas in school mathematics can be seen as overarching concepts that occur in various mathematical topics in a syllabus. Although there has been much interest recently in the understanding of Big Ideas, there is little research done in the assessment of Big Ideas thinking. In this paper, we discuss our research on Big Ideas in School…

National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) programs provide opportunities for professional development for teachers. The goal of the RET site at North Dakota State University (NDSU), established in May 2020 (NSF Awards #1953102 and #2224135), was to increase the knowledge of secondary (6th to 12th grade)…

The inaugural publication in "Discover and Learn with the Library," an educational series published by the Library of Congress in association with the American Library Association, "The Civil Rights Movement" explores this important topic through classroom-ready materials for teachers, librarians, and home educators working…

This paper explores enabling conditions for scaling high-quality project-based learning (PBL) to understand factors that influence how PBL spreads, whether and how it can be sustained and the extent to which it informs meaningful change in schools. We report on a year-long collaboration across three research projects. Each project team analyzed…

This work refers to a research project named 'Math walks', whose aim is to investigate a few students' common conceptions and difficulties related to symmetries as well as to guide the student in the transition from visualization to conceptualization. As far as this issue is concerned, we designed a learning activity (LA) according to Dina van…

There is growing attention to the potential for developing professional learning experiences for content area teachers to infuse computational thinking (CT), which refers to the set of problem-solving practices related to the computer science discipline, into their classrooms. Although research has begun to document professional learning models…

Many university and high school introductory physics courses include a laboratory portion where students follow a manual to conduct "cookbook" experiments. Here, we present an authentic research project for introductory physics students that focuses on kinematics that can be done outside a formal laboratory space. This experiment can be…

The study reported in this dissertation is a response to the call for school science argumentation interventions to shift from a focus on argument framework towards epistemic criteria valued by the scientific community, and to focus on the practice of critiquing in addition to constructing arguments, as both practices are part of scientific…

This article describes a sequence of design research projects, some exploratory others more formal, on the teaching of modelling and the analysis of modelling skills. The initial motivation was the author's observation that the teaching of applied mathematics in UK high schools and universities involved no active modelling by students, but was…

Information literacy (IL) is a multifaceted skill that encompasses information seeking, identifying research questions, finding answers to research questions, and then evaluating and using information appropriately (ALA 2001). Much research has been conducted on the low level of IL found amongst high school students. Failure to make connections…

For anyone concerned about students' moral development, academic dishonesty presents a pervasive problem but also a promising possibility. The present paper describes the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of process-oriented, four-component model approach to promoting students' "moral functioning" related to academic integrity, and…

This paper describes the use of Mathematics Action Research Projects (ARPs) as a capstone experience in lieu of a Master's Thesis in a Master's program for in-service secondary teachers. The ARPs include two primary components: (i) each teacher participant conducts mathematical research that is new to them on a topic that is connected in some way…

This article reflects a metaview of the work of the three research projects funded through the Institute for Education Sciences under the Reading for Understanding competition that addressed middle-grade through high school readers (grades 4-12). All three projects shared the assumption that instruction is necessary for successful reading to learn…