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Students need learning experiences that build capacities to agentively engage with issues challenging our world today. Teachers are often under-supported in endeavors to facilitate such learning experiences. Grounded in principles of consequential learning and expansive framing, this design-based research study sought to better understand the ways in which STEM teachers support students’ real work in the world as members of a school-based citizen science lab. Qualitative analysis of transcripts from teachers’ post-professional development and post-enactment interviews was used to characterize the ways teachers frame roles, goals, and community relationships intended to support students’ real work with real consequences. Findings illuminate ways teachers foster consequential STEM learning and suggest design principles for supporting teachers’ ongoing learning for and facilitation of real work with real consequences. 

A limiting factor in school-based citizen science is teachers’ capacity to facilitate active student engagement in place-based inquiry practices. We extend Harris and colleagues’ student data interaction constructs of visibility, believability and meaningfulness using a design-based research approach to qualitatively examine professional development structures designed to enable teachers to foster students’ contributions as visible, believable, and meaningful. 

This empirical case study utilizes conjecture mapping to capture and systematically map conjectures about the support needed for K-12 teachers to incorporate computational thinking into teaching. The case analysis highlighted a teacher’s year-long professional development experience focused on integrating computational thinking. The evolving conjecture map provides a framework to trace and understand relationships between the learning designs, activities, and teacher outcomes. Using rich data from the teacher's experience, the study tests and refines the hypothesized connections laid out in the original conjecture map to build an understanding of effective computational thinking professional development design. 

This exploratory research analyzes the video-recorded data of four elementary-grade teachers debugging a school tour activity while utilizing a programable robot, Photon. This summer’s professional development session on computational thinking (CT) integration was four hours long and was focused on debugging as a key CT component. The results indicate that teachers worked collaboratively to debug their way through errors using different strategies, such as step-by-step execution or incremental code development. 

Elementary grade teachers are often not fully prepared to teach a computing-rich curriculum, and the demand of the digital age to integrate Computational Thinking (CT) into their classrooms has put them at a challenge. Under the larger umbrella, abstraction lies at the heart of CT. Abstraction allows moving between various information levels while targeting complex problems and creating rich design solutions. This study focuses on how one pair of elementary-grade teachers collaborated, using abstraction to solve a maze challenge, helping each other move between different layers of information. The videotaped data of one day of teachers' professional development was analyzed through three dimensions of Community of Practice (CoP). Results suggest that through mutual engagement in pursuing a joint enterprise and their shared repertoire, elementary-grade teachers moved their focus between different levels of abstraction simultaneously and effectively. 

Learning online is now ubiquitous. However, teachers’ self-directed and guided learning online deserves further exploration because most research on successful teacher professional learning has been conducted on in-person programs. The present study examined teacher behaviors in an online platform designed to support teachers’ professional learning in elementary mathematics. In particular, this study explored whether teacher behaviors on an online professional learning platform clustered in ways that suggest distinct use cases and whether those behaviors were associated with particular teacher characteristics. Results revealed a cluster of teachers who predominately focus their behaviors on the guided learning modules on the website, which was associated with teacher characteristics, including being less likely to enjoy teaching mathematics and being newer to teaching the curriculum supported on the website. Implications for future research and for supporting teacher learning are discussed. 

Gesture has been shown to play an important role in how learners conceptualize phenomena in physics. However, we know little about how gesture is used to conceptualize instantaneity. Drawing on multimodal microanalysis of interaction, we examine how undergraduate physics students use representational gesture to make sense of instants while modeling energy dynamics. Our analysis describes four different forms of representational gesture used to capture instantaneity: These include (1) Replay loop of scenario, (2) Subinterval on timeline, (3) Freeze frame of scenario, and (4) Indexical location on timeline. 

Gestures play a key role for physicists and physics students in representing physics entities, processes, and systems. One affordance of gesture is the ability to laminate or layer together representations of concrete physical features (e.g., objects and their interactions) and symbolic representations (e.g., coordinate systems) to make sense of and model physical scenarios. Using interaction analysis, we illustrate how students can laminate these different layers of abstraction together in gesture to generate complex explanations to solve physics problems. We argue that laminating different layers of abstraction (both the symbolic and concrete) constitute a key form of representational competence in physics.