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1. Impact of a Teacher Action Planner Capturing Student Ideas on Customization Decisions

   Gerard, L. (January 2020, Computersupported collaborative learning)

   This design-based research takes advantage of advanced technologies to support teachers to rapidly respond to evidence about student ideas generated in their classrooms. Leveraging advances in natural language processing methods, the Teacher Action Planner (TAP) analyzes students’ written explanations embedded in web-based inquiry projects to provide teachers with a report on student progress in developing the three-dimensional understanding called for by the Next Generation Science Standards. Based on the pattern in student scores, the TAP recommends research-based ways for teachers to customize instruction. This study examines how ten middle school teachers in 4 schools used the analysis of student ideas and suggestions for instructional customization presented in the TAP. This paper reports on how well their implemented customizations addressed student learning needs. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for redesign of the TAP. 

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2. What Does It Take to Support Problem Solving in Programming Classrooms? A New Framework from the K-12 Teacher Perspective

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3706599.3719763  

   Limke, Ally; Islam, Saminur; Riahi, Bahare; Tian, Xiaoyi; Hill, Marnie; Cateté, Veronica; Barnes, Tiffany (April 2025, ACM)

   Developers rarely build programming environments that help secondary teachers support student learning. We interviewed 11 K12 teachers to discover how they support students learning to program and how tools might assist their teaching practice. Based on thematic analysis and organizing teacher activities around student actions, we have derived a new framework that can be used to design a programming learning system to support teachers. Our results suggest that teachers structure their activities based on their ideals about effective programming teaching and learning, and student problem solving and help-seeking processes. Therefore, our framework relates the themes we discovered about teacher activities to ideals and student problem solving in a time-based framework that can inform the design for new programming learning systems. 

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3. Using evidence of student thinking as resources in a digital collaborative platform

   Park, Sunyoung; Edson, Alden J (August 2024, Mathematics education research and practice)

   Learning mathematics in a student-centered, problem-based classroom requires students to develop mathematical understanding and reasoning collaboratively with others. Despite its critical role in students’ collaborative learning in groups and classrooms, evidence of student thinking has rarely been perceived and utilized as a resource for planning and teaching. This is in part because teachers have limited access to student work in paper-and-pencil classrooms. As an alternative approach to making student thinking visible and accessible, a digital collaborative platform embedded with a problem-based middle school mathematics curriculum is developed through an ongoing design-based research project (Edson & Phillips, 2021). Drawing from a subset of data collected for the larger research project, we investigated how students generated mathematical inscriptions during small group work, and how teachers used evidence of students’ solution strategies inscribed on student digital workspaces. Findings show that digital flexibility and mobility allowed students to easily explore different strategies and focus on developing mathematical big ideas, and teachers to foreground student thinking when facilitating whole-class discussions and planning for the next lesson. This study provides insights into understanding mathematics teachers’ interactions with digital curriculum resources in the pursuit of students’ meaningful engagement in making sense of mathematical ideas. 

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4. Critical thinking during science investigations: what do practicing teachers value and observe?

   https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2023.2191186  

   Butcher, Kirsten R.; Hudson, Michelle; Lane, McKenna; Larson, Madlyn (August 2023, Teachers and Teaching)

   This paper examines how practicing teachers approach and evaluate students’ critical thinking processes in science, using the implementation of an online, inquiry-based investigation in middle school classrooms as the context for teachers’ observations. Feedback and ratings from three samples of science teachers were analysed to determine how they valued and evaluated component processes of students’ critical thinking and how such processes were related to their instructional approaches and student outcomes. Drawing from an integrated view of teacher practice, results suggested that practicing science teachers readily observed and valued critical thinking processes that aligned to goal intentions focused on domain content and successful student thinking. These processes often manifested as components of effective scientific reasoning—for example, gathering evidence, analysing data, evaluating ideas, and developing strong arguments. However, teachers also expressed avoidance intentions related to student confusion and uncertainty before and after inquiry-based investigations designed for critical thinking. These findings highlight a potential disconnect between the benefits of productive student struggle for critical thinking as endorsed in the research on learning and science education and the meaning that teachers ascribe to such struggle as they seek to align their instructional practices to classroom challenges. 

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5. Supporting Teachers to Customize Curriculum for Self-Directed Learning

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-022-09985-w  

   Gerard, Libby; Bradford, Allison; Linn, Marcia C. (August 2022, Journal of Science Education and Technology)

   Abstract Guiding teachers to customize curriculum has shown to improve science instruction when guided effectively. We explore how teachers use student data to customize a web-based science unit on plate tectonics. We study the implications for teacher learning along with the impact on student self-directed learning. During a professional development workshop, four 7th grade teachers reviewed logs of their students’ explanations and revisions. They used a curriculum visualization tool that revealed the pedagogy behind the unit to plan their customizations. To promote self-directed learning, the teachers decided to customize the guidance for explanation revision by giving students a choice among guidance options. They took advantage of the web-based unit to randomly assign students (N = 479) to either a guidance Choice or a no-choice condition. We analyzed logged student explanation revisions on embedded and pre-test/post-test assessments and teacher and student written reflections and interviews. Students in the guidance Choice condition reported that the guidance was more useful than those in the no-choice condition and made more progress on their revisions. Teachers valued the opportunity to review student work, use the visualization tool to align their customization with the knowledge integration pedagogy, and investigate the choice option empirically. These findings suggest that the teachers’ decision to offer choice among guidance options promoted aspects of self-directed learning. 

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