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The Billion Oyster Project and Curriculum and Community Enterprise for the Restoration of New York Harbor with New York City Public Schools (BOP-CCERS) program is a National Science Foundation (NSF) supported initiative and collaboration of multiple institutions and organizations led by Pace University. The NSF project, Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST), had generated a large amount of data through engagement with teachers and students throughout New York City public schools. This article presents the second part to a large data collection study with focus on Underrepresented Minority (URM) student interest in STEM and engagement with teachers to support them in teaching science through experiential learning and lessons that connect science to the real world, particularly through science in the New York Harbor. The first component of the study focused on URM student interest in STEM. This second component of the study focuses on teacher engagement in the program, and what the researchers had learned in the process. Overall, teachers reported very favorable options on the impact of the BOP-CCERS activities as ways to generate student interest in STEM majors and careers. Teacher participants were generally positive about the amount of support and resources they received as members of the project, as well as the oyster-related knowledge and practices they learned to use with their own students in oyster field research. Data from the study provided evidence that the teacher activities were successful and met the project’s goals to provide support and resources for teachers to engage students in oyster restoration research.
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This content will become publicly available on June 5, 2026
Troubleshooting as an Inquiry Activity: Recognizing and Supporting the Mangle in the Classroom
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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- PAR ID:
- 10613568
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science Education
- ISSN:
- 0036-8326
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- high school physics mangle of practice epistemic agency video analysis troubleshooting
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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