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)
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.
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.
In this paper, Anderman and colleagues examine the skills adolescents need in order to learn science effectively. They note that many negative experiences associated with science learning could be avoided if educators were more aware of the abilities of adolescents and the types of environments that foster particular abilities. They offer seven recommendations to practitioners.
When engaging in inquiry, learners find it difficult to control variables, design appropriate experiments, and maintain continuity across inquiry sessions. To support learners, researchers developed an inquiry task that promoted record keeping. The aim was to highlight the role that record keeping can play in metacognition and, ultimately, in successful inquiry.
This article makes a case for providing multiple types of hands-on resources to support learner inquiry. More specifically, a computer simulation of an electric circuit complemented work with a real circuit to support learners’ conceptual development. When learners had the opportunity to use both simulated and real circuits, less structured guidance seemed to benefit the inquiry process.
This study focused on girls’ engagement with science and how they negotiate identities with and in opposition to science in a three-year study of community-based afterschool initiatives. Rahm conducted a multi-sited ethnography, observing girls’ whose families had recently immigrated to Montreal, Canada and were participating in a community organization creating science newsletters and science fair projects.
This paper presents a case study of two currently high-achieving 13-year-old British Asian schoolgirls: One appears keen to pursue advanced science learning, whilst the other seems more likely to reject such a path. Wong’s discussion offers insight into how young people develop an identity with science—or not. His analysis adds to the literature on why students rapidly lose interest in science on reaching adolescence and secondary school.
Fields and Enyedy studied how two students who learned computer programming in an OST program leveraged their skills in the classroom to broker positions as experts in the classroom community. Expert identity is reinforced by the interactions among what students do, how they see themselves, and how others see them.
This article examines middle school girls’ participation in school-day science classes and out-of-school time science clubs to understand the girls’ identification with and relationship to science. Looking at the girls’ science experiences across settings, researchers compared how the identities developed from these experiences supported or worked against the girls’ future trajectories in STEM.
This paper explores how a school-day science and nutrition curriculum, Choice, Control and Change (C3), shaped student thinking, decision making, and actions outside the classroom. The curriculum taught health science content and engaged students in activities focused on analyzing and changing their personal health choices.