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1. How Do We Do CS on Top of Everything Else? A Coaching Cycle Approach in Elementary School

   Pozos, R. (May 2021, Annual Conference on Research in Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT))

   null (Ed.)

   A key strategy for bringing computer science (CS) education to all students is the integration of computational thinking (CT) into core curriculum in elementary school. But teachers want to know how they can do this on top of their existing priorities. In this paper, we describe how our research-practice partnership is working to motivate, prepare, and support an elementary school to integrate equitable and inclusive computer science into core curriculum. Data were collected from teachers at a K-5 school where 65% of students are Hispanic or Latinx, 46% are English Learners, and 65% are eligible for free or reduced lunch. Data included semi-structured interviews, educators’ written reflections, and observations of classroom implementation and professional development. The findings show how the school is building buy-in and capacity among teachers by using a coaching cycle led by a Teacher on Special Assignment. The cycle of preparation, implementation, and reflection demystifies CS by helping teachers design, test, and revise coherent lesson sequences that integrate CT into their lessons. Contrasting case studies are used to illustrate what teachers learned from the cycle, including the teachers’ reasons for the integration, adaptations they made to promote equity, what the teachers noticed about their students engaging in CT, and their next steps. We discuss the strengths and the limitations of this approach to bringing CS for All. 

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2. Under pressure: How do science teachers use capital to achieve agency during turbulent times?

   https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21852  

   Diaz‐Clark, Elizabeth D; Otto, Josie L; Wright, Diane S; Lin_Hunter, Danielle E; Sample_McMeeking, Laura B; Weinberg, Andrea E; Balgopal, Meena M (May 2024, Science Education)

   Abstract Disruptions to education systems (e.g., the COVID‐19 pandemic) evoke a range of responses from teachers. Teachers are required to learn new skills, attend to students' social emotional needs, modify their instructional approaches, and discover innovative ways to engage their students in science, technology, and engineering courses, all while managing their own professional and personal needs. Although teachers of all disciplines adjust their instructional and curricular approaches in response to disruptions, the impetus for this study was to explore the unique challenges of science teachers during the COVID‐19 pandemic that affected their sense of agency (sense of control). To understand how science teachers acquired, used, and invested in capital (i.e., available resources with the potential to meet identified challenges) to achieve professional agency, we studied 113 science teachers in 2020−2021 when they experienced disruptions associated with the pandemic. An analysis of open‐ended responses from 60 teachers indicates that teachers who achieved agency shared four attributes. They (i) demonstrated an awareness of needed capital, (ii) acquired capital, (iii) used capital, and (iv) dedicated effort toward capital‐building for future use. Our findings inform science teacher educators and schools that are committed to mitigating science teacher attrition by understanding how teachers respond to personal and professional stresses. 

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3. 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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4. What do Undergraduate Engineering Students and Pre-service Teachers Learn by Collaborating and Teaching Engineering and Coding Through Robotics?

   Kidd, J.; Kaipa, K.; Sacks, S.; Ringleb, S.; Pazos, P.; Gutierrez, K.; Ayala, O. M.; de Souza Almeida, L. M. (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Online)

   This research paper presents preliminary results of an NSF-supported interdisciplinary collaboration between undergraduate engineering students and preservice teachers. The fields of engineering and elementary education share similar challenges when it comes to preparing undergraduate students for the new demands they will encounter in their profession. Engineering students need interprofessional skills that will help them value and negotiate the contributions of various disciplines while working on problems that require a multidisciplinary approach. Increasingly, the solutions to today's complex problems must integrate knowledge and practices from multiple disciplines and engineers must be able to recognize when expertise from outside their field can enhance their perspective and ability to develop innovative solutions. However, research suggests that it is challenging even for professional engineers to understand the roles, responsibilities, and integration of various disciplines, and engineering curricula have traditionally left little room for development of non-technical skills such as effective communication with a range of audiences and an ability to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams. Meanwhile, preservice teachers need new technical knowledge and skills that go beyond traditional core content knowledge, as they are now expected to embed engineering into science and coding concepts into traditional subject areas. There are nationwide calls to integrate engineering and coding into PreK-6 education as part of a larger campaign to attract more students to STEM disciplines and to increase exposure for girls and minority students who remain significantly underrepresented in engineering and computer science. Accordingly, schools need teachers who have not only the knowledge and skills to integrate these topics into mainstream subjects, but also the intention to do so. However, research suggests that preservice teachers do not feel academically prepared and confident enough to teach engineering-related topics. This interdisciplinary project provided engineering students with an opportunity to develop interprofessional skills as well as to reinforce their technical knowledge, while preservice teachers had the opportunity to be exposed to engineering content, more specifically coding, and develop competence for their future teaching careers. Undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a computational methods course and preservice teachers enrolled in an educational technology course partnered to plan and deliver robotics lessons to fifth and sixth graders. This paper reports on the effects of this collaboration on twenty engineering students and eight preservice teachers. T-tests were used to compare participants’ pre-/post- scores on a coding quiz. A post-lesson written reflection asked the undergraduate students to describe their robotics lessons and what they learned from interacting with their cross disciplinary peers and the fifth/sixth graders. Content analysis was used to identify emergent themes. Engineering students’ perceptions were generally positive, recounting enjoyment interacting with elementary students and gaining communication skills from collaborating with non-technical partners. Preservice teachers demonstrated gains in their technical knowledge as measured by the coding quiz, but reported lacking the confidence to teach coding and robotics independently of their partner engineering students. Both groups reported gaining new perspectives from working in interdisciplinary teams and seeing benefits for the fifth and sixth grade participants, including exposing girls and students of color to engineering and computing. 

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5. How do middle school students think about climate change?

   Bichler, S.; Bradford, A.; Riordan, B.; Linn, M. C. (January 2022, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of the Learning Sciences—ICLS 2022)

   Chinn, C; Tan, E; Chan, C; Kali, Y. (Ed.)

   We use natural language processing (NLP) to train an automated scoring model to assess students’ reasoning on how to slow climate change. We use the insights from scoring over 1000 explanations to design a knowledge integration intervention and test it in three classrooms. The intervention supported students to distinguish relevant evidence, improving connections between ideas in a revised explanation. We discuss next steps for using the NLP model to support teachers and students in classrooms. 

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