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1. Supporting Teachers Supporting Students: Iterative Development of TIPS in a Teacher Dashboard

   Adair, A. (January 2020, International Conference of the Learning Sciences)

   When implementing the Next Generation Science Standards, it is challenging for teachers to support students on inquiry practices; technological tools are a good solution to help inform teachers’ pedagogical practices. In this study, we developed actionable, evidence-based Teacher Inquiry Practice Supports (TIPS) that are presented as fine-grained real-time alerts within the teacher dashboard Inq-Blotter. These TIPS aid teachers in providing detailed support to students in order to scaffold students’ specific inquiry difficulties on the practices. 

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2. Using Innovative Methods to Explore the Potential of an Alerting Dashboard for Science Inquiry.

   https://doi.org/10.18608/jla.2021.7153  

   Dickler, R. (September 2021, Journal of learning analytics)

   Educational technologies, such as teacher dashboards, are being developed to support teachers’ instruction and students’ learning. Specifically, dashboards support teachers in providing the just-in-time instruction needed by students in complex contexts such as science inquiry. In this study, we used the Inq-Blotter teacher-alerting dashboard to investigate whether teacher support elicited by the technology influenced students’ inquiry performance in a science intelligent tutoring system, Inq-ITS. Results indicated that students’ inquiry improved after receiving teachers’ help, elicited by the Inq-Blotter alerts. This inquiry improvement was significantly greater than for matched students who did not receive help from the teacher in response to alerts. Epistemic network analyses were then used to investigate the patterns in the discursive supports provided to students by teachers. These analyses revealed significant differences in the types of support that fostered (versus did not foster) student improvement; differences across teachers were also found. Overall, this study used innovative tools and analyses to understand how teachers use this technological genre of alerting dashboards to dynamically support students in science inquiry. 

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3. Troubleshooting as an Inquiry Activity: Recognizing and Supporting the Mangle in the Classroom

   https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21979  

   Stephens, A Lynn (June 2025, Science Education)

   ABSTRACT Although there is a push to provide more student agency in science classrooms, teachers and students may become frustrated when inquiry activities and equipment do not work as planned—teachers because of the time crunch to “cover” topics and students because of the perceived lack of value in activities that are “off task.” In classroom implementations of a data‐rich high school physics activity sequence as part of the InquirySpace 2 (IS2) project, numerous episodes of equipment troubleshooting were observed. Teachers questioned whether the time spent had disciplinary value. Students expressed concern regarding what, if anything, they were learning. This qualitative case study of one such episode considers students' activity in terms of their engagement with the “mangle of practice” and misalignments between their conceptual and material worlds, their exercise of epistemic agency in recognizing and repairing those misalignments, and their epistemic affect during and after the activity. Video analysis revealed all three aspects deeply intertwined with evidence of student engagement in multiple science practices. The students expressed their feelings about the episode immediately afterward and the teacher and IS2 observer when interviewed much later, at the end of the project. One reason for the negative perceptions of teacher and students may be that the alignments being explored were related to the instrumentation more than to the target phenomenon. This study argues that in such situations, students may not recognize or value science practices that emerge, and may need explicit support to reframe their activity as valid scientific practice. 

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4. Supporting Upper Elementary Students’ Engineering Practices in an Integrated Science and Engineering Unit.

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--35258  

   Lilly, S.; McAlister, A.; Fick, S.; Chiu, J. L.; McElhaney, K. (June 2020, Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line.)

   To support teachers in providing all students with opportunities to engage in engineering learning activities, research must examine the ways that elementary teachers support how diverse learners engage with engineering ideas and practices. This study focuses on two teachers' verbal supports in classroom discussions across two class sections of a four-week, NGSS-aligned unit that challenged students to redesign their school to reduce water runoff. We examine the research question: How and to what extent do upper-elementary teachers verbally support students' engagement with engineering practices across diverse classroom contexts in an NGSS-aligned integrated science unit? Classroom audio data was collected daily and coded to analyze support through different purposes of teacher talk. Results reveal the purpose of teachers’ talk often varied between the class sections depending on the instructional activity and indicate that teachers utilized a variety of supports toward students' engagement in different engineering practices. In one class, with a large percentage of students with individualized educational plans, teachers provided more epistemic talk about the engineering practices to contextualize the particular activities. For the other class, with a large percentage of students in advanced mathematics, teachers provided more opportunities for students to engage in discussion and support for students to do engineering. This difference in supports may decrease the opportunities for some students to rigorously engage in engineering ideas and practices. This study can inform future research on the kinds of educative supports needed to guide teaching of integrated engineering activities for diverse students. 

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5. A spatiotemporal analysis of teacher practices in supporting student learning and engagement in an AI-enabled classroom

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36272-9_37  

   Karumbaiah, S.; Borchers, C.; Falhs, A. C.; Holstein, K.; Rummel, N.; Aleven, V. (July 2023, Springer)

   Wang, N.; Rebolledo-Mendez, G.; Matsuda, N.; Santos, O.C.; Dimitrova, V. (Ed.)

   Research indicates that teachers play an active and important role in classrooms with AI tutors. Yet, our scientific understanding of the way teacher practices around AI tutors mediate student learning is far from complete. In this paper, we investigate spatiotemporal factors of student-teacher interactions by analyzing student engagement and learning with an AI tutor ahead of teacher visits (defined as episodes of a teacher being in close physical proximity to a student) and immediately following teacher visits. To conduct such integrated, temporal analysis around the moments when teachers visit students, we collect fine-grained, time-synchronized data on teacher positions in the physical classroom and student interactions with the AI tutor. Our case study in a K12 math classroom with a veteran math teacher provides some indications on factors that might affect a teacher’s decision to allocate their limited classroom time to their students and what effects these interactions have on students. For instance, teacher visits were associated more with students’ in-the-moment behavioral indicators (e.g., idleness) than a broader, static measure of student needs such as low prior knowledge. While teacher visits were often associated with positive changes in student behavior afterward (e.g., decreased idleness), there could be a potential mismatch between students visited by the teacher and who may have needed it more at that time (e.g., students who were disengaged for much longer). Overall, our findings indicate that teacher visits may yield immediate benefits for students but also that it is challenging for teachers to meet all needs - suggesting the need for better tool support. 

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