Many of the biggest problems facing the United States and the world require engineering expertise to solve: climate change, feeding a growing population, energy independence, access to clean water, crumbling infrastructure, and others. And with global economic competitiveness inextricably linked to innovation, employers across a wide range of engineering and non-engineering fields such as health care, management, and marketing are seeking employees with engineering knowledge and related skills. These skills include the ability to creatively and systematically solve ill-defined problems
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Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE)
Bang, Warren, Rosebery, and Medin explore empirical work with students from non-dominant communities to support teaching science as a practice of inquiry and understanding, not as a “settled” set of ideas and skills to learn.
The adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards means that many educators who adhere to model-based reasoning styles of science will have to adapt their programs and curricula. In addition, all practitioners will have to teach modeling, and model-based reasoning is a useful way to do so. This brief offers perspectives drawn from Lehrer and Schauble, two early theorists in model-based reasoning.
Calabrese Barton and colleagues examine the beliefs and science practices of two students in a two-year study across settings. The study seeks to answer the question, “What do girls from non-dominant populations do to author themselves into or out of science, in spite of – or because of – their grades?” The study also examines how structures such as teacher support, community organizations, and school tracking systems promote or hinder opportunities for these students to author identities in science.
Where do kids’ beliefs about their ability to do science originate? How do these self-efficacy beliefs relate to unspoken theories about whether scientific ability is fixed or fluid? Researchers set out to answer these questions in a study of 1,225 middle and high school students.
This Australian study by Logan and Skamp reports on students’ science interest across their first four years of secondary school. The findings will be relevant to all concerned about the decline in the numbers of students choosing to study science at higher levels and pursue science-related careers. Findings highlight the importance of an individual teacher’s pedagogical practices in either fostering or hindering student interest in science.
This paper examines how students, teachers, and parents evaluate residential fieldwork courses. As in prior research, findings from questionnaire data indicate that fieldwork effects social, affective, and behavioural learning. More surprisingly, focus group interviews captured increases in cognitive learning as well. This paper underscores the value of out-of-school experiences, particularly for students from under-resourced backgrounds.
This paper focuses on the ways students can construct scientific explanations and arguments as part of scientific inquiry. Berland and Reiser synthesize understandings from philosophy, science, and logic in order to interpret students’ arguments during a unit on invasive species in the Great Lakes.
Students with special educational needs score significantly below their peers across several measures of science achievement. However, educational approaches that provide appropriate scaffolding and support, such as the inquiry-based science writing heuristic described in this paper, can benefit special educational needs students and ensure an equitable experience for all.
Research has intimated that engineering design activities can enhance students’ understanding of engineering and technology and can increase their interest in science. Few studies, however, have defined or measured this interest empirically. Dohn examined the effect of an eight-week engineering design competition on 46 sixth-grade students. His findings suggest that design tasks can indeed stimulate interest. He found four main sources of interest: designing inventions, trial-and-error experimentation, making the inventions work, and collaboration.
This study examines how youth navigate socioscientific issues through the case studies of two students in an afterschool program. The study explores how the students’ thinking changed during the program and what influenced the students’ final stance on whether or not to build a new hybrid power plant in their community.
This study helps us understand how children and adolescents perceive science and scientists, and it suggests some factors that influence those images. Researchers collected drawings from Catalan students ages 6 to 17 and analyzed them using the Draw-A-Scientist Test (Chambers, 1983). Findings show that, in general, Catalan students, and particularly boys over 12, retained classic stereotypes of scientists.