Category: 2021
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) describe eight science and engineering practices with the goal of having students engage in authentic science practices. Although many teachers are committed to three-dimensional NGSS teaching, doing so remotely during a pandemic was challenging, especially with 20, 30, or more students on Zoom, and without access to labs. At […]
In the past year, Karla Orosco has taught 7th grade science in person, remotely online, remotely and in person simultaneously, from home as well as from her classroom, to students locally and as far away as Italy. Needless to say, she has had logistical challenges, but mostly, she missed her students. Orosco teaches at the […]
Modeling is key to how scientists help explain complex phenomena—from the coronavirus pandemic to climate change—and explore scientific and engineering problems. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) recognize the importance of Systems and Systems Models as one of the crosscutting concepts, and Developing and Using Models and Using Computational Thinking as two of the science […]
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is providing an unprecedented amount of health and social science data, and serves as a compelling starting point to engage in data science activities. A new project funded by the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program at the National Science Foundation is designed to empower young people to […]
We typically think of stories as a narrative composed of text or perhaps text and images. But in the Data Age (i.e., right now), we hope to expand that definition to include data. The goal of the National Science Foundation-funded Writing Data Stories project is to help middle school students tell stories about patterns they […]
When we released our new real-time Class Dashboard in the fall, we asked for teacher feedback. Several teachers have reached out and said that this new tool has been a big help as they try to manage classes and track students, both remotely and in person. During a recent classroom observation, we even overheard one […]
Cleaning the house while the children are growing is like shoveling the driveway while it’s still snowing. A framed needlepoint of this adage adorned the wall of our kitchen as I was growing up and its message occupied my thoughts as I shoveled our New England driveway for the third time in just over a […]
We live in an interconnected world. A storm hits, the season’s crop is ruined, stocks go higher or lower, and a broker loses a job. A governor’s actions on mask mandates affect travelers in and out of the state, and COVID cases rise across the country. Or as Thich Nhat Hanh says in The Heart […]
You can’t get a Ph.D. in nuclear physics without learning a lot of math. Even so, Kenia Wiedemann did not think of herself as a “math person.” She is now on something of a crusade to debunk the “I am not a math person” myth that holds back so many students. Wiedemann is a postdoctoral […]
You could say that Concord Consortium’s project Coding with R for Mathematical Modeling (CodeR4MATH) is very sneaky, says Kenia Wiedemann, a postdoctoral researcher on the project. Creative is a different way of describing how CodeR4MATH is getting high school students—especially those who think math and computer science are not for them—coding and creating mathematical models, […]