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This paper presents findings from a qualitative study of eleven experienced STEM educators who worked alongside developers to design and implement data-rich lessons in their grades 6–9 mathematics and science classrooms. In the context of a project that seeks to develop professional learning for data fluency, researchers documented the co-development process to articulate a model of what teachers need to know and be able to do in order to support their students’ data fluency. The project team distilled key findings into two framing documents: 1) a description of high-leverage areas of focus for PL which highlight challenges faced by teachers, which are common, important for data fluency, and represent opportunities for supporting teacher and student growth; and 2) a logic model that describes how the PL course under development is expected to influence teacher, classroom, and student outcomes. This paper contributes to the larger education community by defining the professional learning needs of educators who wish to integrate data into their STEM classrooms. These frameworks provide designers and researchers with touchpoints to structure and study PL experiences, lesson materials, and other classroom resources for both new and veteran educators. These tools can provide STEM teachers with guidance for reflecting on their current knowledge, skills, beliefs, and teaching practices that help their students become more data fluent. 

This work-in-progress paper describes the development of an assessment for teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for data fluency – the ability and confidence to actively make sense of and use data. In the context of a project that seeks to develop and pilot test data fluency professional learning for mathematics and science teachers in grades 6–9, researchers constructed a novel instrument for assessing teachers’ specialized knowledge for teaching, which lives at the intersection of data knowledge, domain-specific knowledge, pedagogy, and technology. This online one-hour instrument is a written performance task and is sensitive to three dimensions of PCK: 1) teachers’ ability to analyze student thinking, 2) teachers’ ability to plan instruction, and 3) the degree to which teachers’ responses reflect a learner-centered orientation. The project team is currently developing a scoring rubric for this instrument, which will be revised based on the pretest and posttest data from the pilot study. 

Integration of computational thinking (CT) within STEM subjects is common, although not often at the elementary school level where teachers have minimal experience with CT. We have designed and are refining INFUSECS, a narrative-centered digital learning environment to support upper elementary students’ CT and science knowledge construction as they create digital stories. We used orchestration as our theoretical framework, to examine how elementary teachers planned to approach this multidisciplinary implementation. Through a series of three focus groups, we learned that teachers planned for their students to take notes or utilize other graphic organizers to align the science content with the narrative planning, to engage in collaborative sense-making, and to observe the teacher modeling use of the INFUSECS system. Ultimately, the results have informed the next phase of our research design as we collect teacher and student level data as INFUSECS is utilized in authentic classroom settings. 

Elementary school teachers are increasingly looking to incorporate computational thinking (CT) into their practice. Unlike middle and high school where CT is often integrated into a single subject, elementary school teachers have the unique opportunity to integrate CT across multiple content areas. However, there is little research on the in-platform supports elementary teachers need to accomplish this integration successfully. To investigate this integration, we are iteratively developing a narrative-centered learning environment to facilitate learning outcomes in physical science via the creation of digital narratives that elicit CT. The learning environment enables students to use their science understanding to propose a solution to a problem through story creation using custom narrative-centered programming blocks that set a story’s scene, selects characters, and controls the story’s unfolding dialogue and actions. We have engaged with four upper elementary teachers to gather their perspectives on the usability of the learning environment and input on future design iterations. In this paper, we report results from a focus group study with the teachers that examines their perceptions on whether and how the learning environment facilitates story creation and if the learning environment provides learning supports for integrated science, language arts, and CT. Initial results suggest that teachers found the environment to be engaging and supportive of students’ creativity.