Increasingly, STEM focused high schools are used prepare students for college STEM majors and launch them into STEM careers. Yet a new focus on STEM education at the elementary levels suggests that the importance of STEM education is much broader than a preparation for workforce needs in high school or college. This paper describes a case study…

Engineering design-based STEM integration is one potential model to help students integrate content and practices from all of the STEM disciplines. In this study, we explored the intersection of two aspects of pre-college STEM education: the integration of the STEM disciplines, and the NGSS practice of engaging in argument from evidence within…

Mathematics and science have similar learning processes (SLPs) and it has been proposed that courses focused on these and other similarities promote transfer across disciplines. However, it is not known how the use of these processes in lessons taught to children change throughout a preservice teacher education course or which are most likely to…

This research explores how explaining an anchoring phenomena and engaging students in investigations, as central designs of a model-based inquiry (MBI) unit, afforded or constrained the representation of scientific activity in the science classroom. This research is considered timely as recent standards documents and scholars in the field have…

Young children are capable of engaging in STEM investigations when they are guided by skilled and knowledgeable teachers. However, many elementary teachers may lack sufficient STEM content knowledge and report feeling unprepared to teach STEM content. Two university faculty members in mathematics and science education, worked to cultivate and…

This study of a state-funded, 3-year implementation of an integrated STEM professional development (PD) program for teachers from two middle schools in the midwestern U.S. examined if participants in the PD were enabled to transform their practice and perceptions of STEM. An integrated STEM approach includes a focus on the STEM disciplines, along…

The purpose of this study is to determine the effects of metacognitive strategies and content-specific feedback on student achievement in high school mathematics. Participants consisted of a convenience sample of students in honors geometry. An analysis of variance with repeated measures was employed to address the research questions. For both the…

The Clark Fork Watershed Education Program (CFWEP) goals are: (a) increasing students' understanding of the nature of ecological impacts within their watershed as related to historic mining damage; and (b) increasing students' sense of stewardship of newly restored landscapes. Data from 2012 to 2016 were evaluated for student knowledge gains (46…

The purpose of this study is to compare students' mathematics achievement growth rate in Texas science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (T-STEM) academies to students' mathematics achievement growth rate in traditional public high schools. Forty-six schools, 23 of which were T-STEM academies and 23 of which were matched non-STEM schools,…

This paper presents qualitative and quantitative approaches to exploring teachers' experiences of mathematics anxiety (for learning and doing mathematics) and mathematics teaching anxiety (for instructing others in mathematics), the relationship between these types of anxiety and test/evaluation anxiety, and the impacts of anxiety on experiences…

Despite agreement among teacher educators, scholars, and policymakers on the importance of teachers' subject matter knowledge (SMK), existing models provide limited information about the nature of this foundational component of teacher knowledge. The common assumption is that teachers need to know more about the science subject matter than their…

This paper examines the implementation of an instructional module on preservice elementary teachers' professional noticing of children's mathematical thinking. The module focuses on professional noticing skills through the content focus of early algebraic reasoning and uses complex video vignettes from whole class instruction in authentic…

Implementing mathematically challenging tasks is difficult for teachers when working with emergent bilinguals because cognitively demanding tasks in mathematics commonly have high language demand. Currently, inadequate teacher preparation for teaching emergent bilinguals is becoming a significant concern in the United States as this population of…

To increase the likelihood for continuous growth and improvement, professional development for high school biology teachers should include long-term, targeted instruction with an accompanying peer-coaching component. This study examined the views of biology teachers who were engaged in a two-year professional development program, which included a…

Research indicates there is a need for teachers to experience multiple mastery experiences with engineering teaching in order to improve teaching engineering self-efficacy. To prepare future K-5 teachers to teach the engineering design process, one science methods course integrated 2-day engineering mini-units into the class meeting and…