October 29, 2020
Using research and collaboration to improve STEM education
How can STEM teachers support students’ disciplinary engagement in project based learning? Earlier this year, co-authors Susan Nolan, Lia Wetzstein and Alexandra Goodell published the article Designing Material Tools to Mediate Disciplinary Engagement in Environmental Science in the journal Cognition and Instruction. This article describes how teachers and researchers collaborated to address problems of balancing disciplinary authenticity with the realities of teaching in poverty-impacted high schools.
A project-based environmental science curriculum can help students learn to use environmental science skills and practices. How can teachers support authentic engagement in these projects? These researchers worked with teachers to develop tools and iteratively improve them to facilitate disciplinary engagement. Their research led to design principles for developing effective tools to support authentic science engagement.
The Version of Record of this manuscript is available in Cognition and Instruction, February 2020.