An official website of the United States government
Interventions can enhance students' motivation for reading, but few researchers have assessed the effects of the specific motivation‐enhancing practices that comprise these interventions. Even fewer have evaluated how students' perceptions of different intervention practices impact their later motivation and academic outcomes. In this study, we utilised data from a study of Concept‐Oriented Reading Instruction, a programme designed to enhance seventh‐grade students' reading comprehension and motivation. We examined the effects of students perceiving one practice from this intervention, emphasising the importance of reading, which was designed to enhance their task values for reading (Eccles‐Parsons et al.,). Unexpectedly, structural equation modelling analyses showed that students' perceptions of importance support predicted their later competence‐related beliefs, but not their task values. Students' competence‐related beliefs predicted their reading comprehension and behavioural engagement, whereas students' task values predicted reading engagement. However, there were no significant indirect effects of perceiving importance support on students' reading outcomes.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on September 12, 2026
Solarizing Your School: Engineering Design in Students’ Authentic Epistemic Practices of Adopting Renewable Energy
Abstract Engineering design has been widely implemented in K-12 curricula to cultivate future workforce. In this study, seventh-grade students (N = 38) participated in theSolarizing Your Schoolcurriculum, an action-oriented program where they engaged in engineering design processes to tackle a real-world problem related to renewable energy adoption. The study sought to explore how students balanced constraints and criteria in engineering design. Over a five-day period, seventh-grade students developed plans for adopting solar energy on their school campus and simulated the plan on a technology-enhanced epistemic tool, Aladdin (https://intofuture.org/aladdin.html). Data was collected through design artifacts, log data from design processes, and surveys about their learning experience. Three distinct patterns of balancing design criteria and constraints emerged, including designing for practice, for performance, and for irrelevant goals. The group who designed for practice gave priority to criteria and constraints recorded a higher level of design performance. The study underscores the benefits of integrating action-oriented learning opportunities via engineering design processes in science education.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10635531
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Nature
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Science Education and Technology
- ISSN:
- 1059-0145
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
The practice of persisting and learning from design failures is essential to engineering design and offers unique ways of knowing and learning for K-12 students. To understand how students engage in the practice of persisting and learning from design failures, we must first understand how, if at all, they recognize that a design failure has occurred. We studied a classroom of fourth grade students engaged in an engineering design challenge and examined the ways in which design failure occurred and how students recognized, neglected to recognize, or misinterpreted design failure. In addition to anticipating failure, conducting fair tests, and making focused observations, we found that students must have an understanding and awareness of the evolving criteria and constraints of the design problem in order to recognize design failure. If lacking an understanding and awareness of criteria and constraints represents a barrier to recognizing an initial design failure, it also represents a barrier to recognizing any subsequent design failures in the design process and thus a barrier to persisting and learning from design failures.more » « less
-
Abstract Inquiry instruction often neglects graphing. It gives students few opportunities to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to take advantage of graphs, and which are called for by current science education standards. Yet, it is not well known how to support graphing skills, particularly within middle school science inquiry contexts. Using qualitative graphs is a promising, but underexplored approach. In contrast to quantitative graphs, which can lead students to focus too narrowly on the mechanics of plotting points, qualitative graphs can encourage students to relate graphical representations to their conceptual meaning. Guided by the Knowledge Integration framework, which recognizes and guides students in integrating their diverse ideas about science, we incorporated qualitative graphing activities into a seventh grade web‐based inquiry unit about cell division and cancer treatment. In Study 1, we characterized the kinds of graphs students generated in terms of their integration of graphical and scientific knowledge. We also found that students (n = 30) using the unit made significant learning gains based on their pretest to post‐test scores. In Study 2, we compared students' performance in two versions of the same unit: One that had students construct, and second that had them critique qualitative graphs. Results showed that both activities had distinct benefits, and improved students' (n = 117) integrated understanding of graphs and science. Specifically, critiquing graphs helped students improve their scientific explanations within the unit, while constructing graphs led students to link key science ideas within both their in‐unit and post‐unit explanations. We discuss the relative affordances and constraints of critique and construction activities, and observe students' common misunderstandings of graphs. In all, this study offers a critical exploration of how to design instruction that simultaneously supports students' science and graph understanding within complex inquiry contexts.more » « less
-
Abstract We compared the performance of DREAM3D simulations in reproducing the long‐term radiation belt dynamics observed by Van Allen Probes over the entire year of 2017 with various boundary conditions (BCs) and model inputs. Specifically, we investigated the effects of three different outer boundary conditions, two different low‐energy boundary conditions for seed electrons, four different radial diffusion (RD) coefficients (DLL), four hiss wave models, and two chorus wave models from the literature. Using the outer boundary condition driven by GOES data, our benchmark simulation generally well reproduces the observed radiation belt dynamics insideL* = 6, with a better model performance at lowerμthan higherμ, whereμis the first adiabatic invariant. By varying the boundary conditions and inputs, we find that: (a) The data‐driven outer boundary condition is critical to the model performance, while adding in the data‐driven seed population doesn't further improve the performance. (b) The model shows comparable performance withDLLfrom Brautigam and Albert (2000,https://doi.org/10.1029/1999ja900344), Ozeke et al. (2014,https://doi.org/10.1002/2013ja019204), and Liu et al. (2016,https://doi.org/10.1002/2015gl067398), while withDLLfrom Ali et al. (2016,https://doi.org/10.1002/2016ja023002) the model shows less RD compared to data. (c) The model performance is similar with data‐based hiss models, but the results show faster loss is still needed inside the plasmasphere. (d) The model performs similarly with the two different chorus models, but better capturing the electron enhancement at higherμusing the Wang et al. (2019,https://doi.org/10.1029/2018ja026183) model due to its stronger wave power, since local heating for higher energy electrons is under‐reproduced in the current model.more » « less
-
This paper analyzes students’ design solutions for an NGSS aligned earth sciences curriculum, the Playground Design Challenge (PDC), for upper-elementary school (grade 5 and 6) students.We present the underlying computational model and the user interface for generating design solutions for a school playground that has to meet cost, water runoff, and accessibility constraints. We use data from the pretest and posttest assessments and activity logs collected from a pilot study run in an elementary school to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum and investigate the relations between students’ behaviors and their learning performances. The results show that (1) the students’ scores significantly increased from pretest to posttest on engineering design assessments, and (2) students’ solution-generation and testing behaviors were indicative of the quality of their design solutions as well as their pre-post learning gains. In the future, tracking such behaviors online will allow us to provide adaptive scaffolds that help students improve on their engineering design solutions.more » « less
