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We are investigating factors that influence elementary teachers’ professional learning (PL) in science and engineering. The intervention and ongoing supports are offered at a distance to participants teaching grades 3-5 in rural school districts. Overarching research objectives include examining: (1) the impacts of online science and engineering PL; (2) the effectiveness of modest supports on the sustainability of PL outcomes; and (3) the changes to teachers’ engineering instructional practices. 

Engineering Structured Poster Session: During these 75-minute concurrent sessions, up to 12 presenting projects will share information about their work related to engineering education with each other and with attendees interested in the topic. Following brief introductions, interactive poster presentation and viewing occured in two rounds, and the session concluded with facilitated discussion across all projects. 

Though it has been nearly ten years since the Framework (NRC, 2013) and NGSS have been released, there remains a persistent need for effective professional learning (PL) that supports teachers’ knowledge of the NGSS and their science and engineering content knowledge. Grades 3-5 rural teachers across four states participated in a week-long PL with ongoing supports. We asked to what extent the intervention enhanced teachers’ knowledge of NGSS-aligned teaching strategies and science and engineering content knowledge. We developed a vignette that embedded practical planning and teaching experiences that align with the NGSS vision. More specifically, the vignette focused on planning and classroom instruction with both hypothetical and realistic situations that were brief and incomplete and had open questions that targeted their own perspective. A purposefully selected subgroup of teachers (n=33) representing a range of grades and the four states were asked to complete the vignette in Spring 2024. We are following the six-step thematic analysis process (Braun & Clark, 2012). Findings indicate teachers needed more support with the following themes: what the three dimensions are, how the three dimensions should be integrated, how phenomena should be implemented, and how to align the lesson with the standard. 

Teachers in rural schools have consistently faced challenges in accessing high-quality professional learning (PL). Approximately 150 rural teachers in four states received intensive, online summer PL paired with a variety of Modest Supports throughout the following school year. We used Picciano’s multi-modal online educational model in characterizing the online summer PL and to evaluate the effectiveness of the Modest Supports. End-of-year surveys and interviews with teachers asked about their experiences with and perceptions of the Modest Supports. Initial descriptive statistics and thematic analysis found that teachers reported using the collaborative Modest Supports much more frequently than others and that they were more helpful and created a sense of community within the project while also supporting their NGSS learning and implementation. 

Teachers in small communities may be geographically isolated and have smaller collegial networks. Consequently, teachers in these settings may have limited exposure to contemporary strategies for engaging learners in science and engineering as suggested in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Thus, we provided a 5-day online PL experience and a year-long of modest supports (e.g., online professional learning community) to over 150 rural teachers from four states (CA, MT, ND, WY) to bridge the access gap and to enhance their instructional capabilities in teaching NGSS-aligned science and engineering lessons. Considering that the quality of the questions posed in a formative assessment impacts the quality of student thinking and what it reveals, we provided a formative assessment task, “Planning a Park” developed by Stanford NGSS Assessment Project (SNAP) and SCALE Science at WestEd, to participating teachers to implement in their classrooms. Teachers received online professional learning opportunities about the task before and after administering it in their classrooms. To understand their experiences with the task, we collected multiple data sources for triangulation, such as surveys about teachers’ preparedness to implement science lessons, teachers’ self-reported observations while delivering the task, their reflections about students’ performance, examples of student responses to the task, and interview responses from a sub-sample of teachers. As an initial analysis, we employed a descriptive coding process to capture teachers’ diverse experiences with the SCALE task (Saldaña, 2021). In this session, we will report rural teachers’ experiences with the formative assessment task that was provided as part of a year of modest supports. We believe this study will support the science education community, especially individuals preparing teachers to teach science and researchers on assessment, by sharing the benefits of implementing a formative assessment task during inservice teachers’ professional learning. 

Many professional learning (PL) opportunities with inservice teachers often focus on enhancing their understanding of the nature of engineering and the work of engineers. However, few studies connect inservice teachers’ conceptualizations of science and engineering and how these inform their classroom practice. Therefore, this study explores inservice elementary teachers’ conceptions of teaching science and engineering and how they connect their understandings of these disciplines to classroom practice. We examined the breakout discussions of 11 inservice elementary teachers regarding five vignettes of science and engineering classroom activities in a completely online PL experience. We employed the Attending-Interpreting-Responding (AIR) Teacher Noticing Framework and followed a six-step thematic analysis process by Braun and Clark (2012). These steps included collaborative sense-making sessions to discuss the descriptive coding (Saldaña, 2021) generated during independent coding sessions. Our analysis revealed several consistent key (mis)conceptions about teaching science and engineering. Teachers often characterized engineering classroom activities as tasks where students should be building and solving a problem, while they characterized science as involving observation and learning content knowledge about a topic. When describing a vignette as engineering, teachers often used the words goal, problem, and purpose interchangeably. Additionally, we uncovered teachers’ misconceptions about science that do not align with the nature of science or science and engineering practices. This gap in how teachers make sense of classroom science and engineering tasks versus how they conceptualize science and engineering disciplines highlights a significant need to address in teacher education.