Professional development to support principals' vision of science instruction: Building from their prior experiences to support the science practices

The implementation of science reform must be viewed as a systems-level problem and not just focus on resources for teachers and students. High-capacity instructional leadership is essential for supporting classroom science instruction. Recent reform efforts include a shift from learning about science facts to figuring out scientific phenomena in which students use science practices as they build and apply disciplinary core ideas. We report findings from a research study on professional development (PD) to support instructional leaders' learning about the science practices. After participating in the PD, the instructional leaders' familiarity with and leadership content knowledge of the science practices significantly improved. Initially, principals used their understandings from other disciplines and content neutral visions of classrooms to make sense of science instruction. For example, they initially used their understandings of models and argument from ELA and math to make sense of science classroom instruction. Furthermore, some principals focused on content neutral strategies, like a clear objective. Over the course of the PD workshops, principals took up the language of the science practices in more nuanced and sophisticated ways. Principals' use of the language of the science practices became more frequent and shifted from identifying or defining them to considering quality and implementation in science classrooms. As we design tools to support science, we need to consider instructional leaders as important stakeholders and develop resources to specifically meet their needs. If the science feels too unfamiliar or intimidating, principals may avoid or reframe science reform efforts. Consequently, it is important to leverage instructional leaders' resources from other disciplines and content neutral strategies as bridges for building understanding in science. We argue that the science practices are one potential lever to engage in this work and shift instructional leaders' understandings of science instruction.     

Quantitatively Investigating Inservice Elementary Teachers’ Nature of Science Views

Research in Science Education - Many nature of science (NOS) studies have demonstrated that teachers can improve their understandings of NOS with explicit and reflective instruction; however, the...     

Accuracy and consistency in morphological spelling: evidence from Greek-speaking children with and without spelling difficulties

Reading and Writing - In this study, we examined the accuracy and consistency of Greek-speaking children with spelling difficulties using a spelling level-matched design at two time points....     

The roots of reading for pleasure: Recollections of reading and current habits

Children's early literacy experiences are critical, yet it remains unclear whether memories of early reading instruction continue to be associated with reading habits into adulthood. We examined the association between recollections of reading experiences and present-day reading habits in an adult population. University students responded in writing to three open-ended prompts asking about their memories of reading during early childhood, elementary school and high school. They also completed two questionnaires inquiring about reading enjoyment and frequency in elementary school and high school. For the concurrent measures of reading, participants described their current reading habits in an open-ended prompt and completed an author recognition test. Results showed positive links between favourable memories of reading during elementary and high school years and present-day reading habits. Conversely, unfavourable memories during high school were associated with unenthusiastic present-day reading habits. We found that reading instruction in school forms long-lasting memories, and these memories are linked in meaningful ways with print exposure during adulthood.     

University students’ strategies and criteria during self-assessment: instructor’s feedback,rubrics, and year level effects

European Journal of Psychology of Education - This study explores the effects of feedback type, feedback occasion, and year level on student self-assessments in higher education. In total, 126...     

Factors related to a college student's career optimism and their perception of career services

A student's expectation for a positive outcome for their future career development is referred to as career optimism. Career Services, a common university department, utilizes the social cognitive career theory (SCCT) to understand how students form career interests and make educational and vocational choices. Then Career Services can assist students in finding a career that matches their interests. We hypothesize that students' perception of the assistance provided by the Career Services department when the SCCT is applied, impacts the student's career optimism. In addition, we hypothesize, and results support, that different factors, such as a student's chosen major, impact student perception of Career Services and career optimism.     

Changes in children’s anger,sadness, and persistence across blocked goals: Implications for self-regulation

The current study took a person-centered approach to examine the heterogeneity of changes in children’s emotions and persistence during a goal-blocking task and examined how different profiles of emotions and persistence related to children’s self-regulation. Children’s anger, sadness, and persistence were rated in a goal-blocking task in toddlerhood (T1; N = 140, 72 boys, M_age = 2.67 years, 90.7% White) and preschool (T2). Children’s self-regulation, specifically sustained attention and engagement, was assessed at T1, T2, and early school-age (T3) from 2005 to 2012. Growth mixture modeling revealed two classes of children at T1 and three classes at T2 with different patterns of anger, sadness, and persistence. Children’s classification at T2, but not T1, significantly predicted their sustained attention and engagement both concurrently and longitudinally.     

How students reason about matter flows and accumulations in complex biological phenomena: An emerging learning progression for mass balance

In recent years, there has been a strong push to transform STEM education at K-12 and collegiate levels to help students learn to think like scientists. One aspect of this transformation involves redesigning instruction and curricula around fundamental scientific ideas that serve as conceptual scaffolds students can use to build cohesive knowledge structures. In this study, we investigated how students use mass balance reasoning as a conceptual scaffold to gain a deeper understanding of how matter moves through biological systems. Our aim was to lay the groundwork for a mass balance learning progression in physiology. We drew on a general models framework from biology and a covariational reasoning framework from math education to interpret students' mass balance ideas. We used a constant comparative method to identify students' reasoning patterns from 73 interviews conducted with undergraduate biology students. We helped validate the reasoning patterns identified with >8000 written responses collected from students at multiple institutions. From our analyses, we identified two related progress variables that describe key elements of students' performances: the first describes how students identify and use matter flows in biology phenomena; the second characterizes how students use net rate-of-change to predict how matter accumulates in, or disperses from, a compartment. We also present a case study of how we used our emerging mass balance learning progression to inform instructional practices to support students' mass balance reasoning. Our progress variables describe one way students engage in three dimensional learning by showing how student performances associated with the practice of mathematical thinking reveal their understanding of the core concept of matter flows as governed by the crosscutting concept of matter conservation. Though our work is situated in physiology, it extends previous work in climate change education and is applicable to other scientific fields, such as physics, engineering, and geochemistry.