Empowering Teachers to See and Support Student Use of Crosscutting Concepts in the Life Sciences

该项目侧重于开发形成性评估工具，以突出学生在9-12年级生命科学专业从事科学和工程实践时使用横切概念（CCCs）的优势。为响应K-12科学教育框架和下一代科学标准（NGSS）的要求，该领域最成功地研究和开发了学科核心思想和科学与工程实践的评估工具。然而，CCCs作为跨科学领域的连接纽带，仍然被更抽象地处理。目前，科学教育者对学生使用CCCs的情况或如何评估和培养这种使用几乎没有指导。该项目明确关注CCCs，在研究和课堂上都推进了真正的三维科学理解。利用形成性评估作为学生和教师发展的工具，利用已被证明成功的教学策略（例如，分享成功学习的愿景，描述性反馈，自我评估），同时也通过加强和说明这些策略如何关注CCCs来推进形成性评估本身。此外，基于优势的方法将关注学生使用CCCs的文化相关差异，以获得更公平的机会参与课堂意义建构实践。本研究通过以下几个方面对科学教育领域产生了影响：1)使NGSS的理想得以更彻底地实现；2)加强教师识别各种CCCs演示的能力；3)展示新型课堂工具的影响，以提高教师在教学实践中征求、注意和采取行动的能力。这个基于设计的实施研究项目将使教师参与到通过形成性评估支持三维科学理解的规则的迭代开发和改进中来。组成研究地点的高中生物教室从事雄心勃勃的科学教学启发教学。归纳，自下而上的方法（Brookhart, 2013）将允许研究人员，教师和学生共同构建规则。对课堂观察、文物收集、对教师和学生的访谈以及专家小组的评分进行分析，将为每个CCC制定一个标准，该标准整合了相关的科学和工程实践，并适用于一系列学科核心思想。这些规则将说明每个CCCs日益高级使用的进展，以指导学习目标的构建、追求和评估。将有两个设计周期，允许有效性证据的收集和产生具有广泛应用的教育家潜力的规则。定性和定量（即心理测量）分析的互补线将有助于开发和验证规则及其形成用途。项目调查将侧重于：1)规则如何代表关键学科实践的核心共识；2)教师和学生对规则的理解在多大程度上一致；3)规则的实施如何影响教师和学生对核心共识的理解。探索研究preK-12项目（DRK-12）旨在通过研究和开发创新资源、模型和工具，显著提高preK-12学生和教师对科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）的学习和教学。DRK-12计划中的项目建立在STEM教育的基础研究和先前的研究和开发工作的基础上，为拟议的项目提供了理论和实证依据。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The project focuses on the development of formative assessment tools that highlight assets of students’ use of crosscutting concepts (CCCs) while engaged in science and engineering practices in grades 9-12 Life Sciences. In response to the calls set forth by the Framework for K-12 Science Education and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), the field has most successfully researched and developed assessment tools for disciplinary core ideas and the science and engineering practices. The CCCs, which serve as the connective links across science domains, however, remain more abstractly addressed. Presently, science educators have little guidance for what student use of CCCs looks like or how to assess and nurture such use. This project, with its explicit attention to the CCCs, advances true three-dimensional scientific understanding in both research and the classroom. Leveraging formative assessment as a vehicle for student and teacher development taps into proven successful instructional strategies (e.g., sharing visions of successful learning, descriptive feedback, self-assessment), while also advancing formative assessment, itself, by strengthening and illustrating how these strategies may focus on the CCCs. Further, a strengths-based approach will center culturally related differences in students’ use of CCCs to achieve more equitable opportunities to engage in classroom sensemaking practices. This work impacts the field of science education by 1) enabling a more thorough realization of NGSS ideals, 2) strengthening teachers’ abilities to identify diverse demonstrations of CCCs, and 3) showcasing the impact of novel classroom tools to sharpen teachers’ abilities to solicit, notice, and act upon evidence of emergent student scientific thinking within their instructional practices. This design-based implementation research project will engage teachers in the iterative development and refinement of rubrics that support three-dimensional science understanding through formative assessment. The high school biology classrooms that compose the study site are engaged in ambitious science teaching-inspired instruction. An inductive, bottom-up approach (Brookhart, 2013) will allow researchers, teachers, and students to co-construct rubrics. Analysis of classroom observations, artifact collection, interviews with teachers and students, and expert-panel ratings will produce a rubric for each CCC that integrates relevant science and engineering practices and is applicable across a range of disciplinary core ideas. These rubrics will illustrate progressions of increasingly advanced use of each of the CCCs, to guide the construction, pursuit, and assessment of learning goals. There will be two design cycles that allow for the collection of validity evidence and produce rubrics with the potential for broad application by educators. Complementary lines of qualitative and quantitative (i.e., psychometric) analysis will contribute to development and validation of the rubrics and their formative uses. Project inquiry will focus on 1) how the rubrics can represent CCCs for key disciplinary practices, 2) the extent to which teachers’ and students’ understandings of the rubrics align, and 3) how implementation of the rubrics impacts teachers’ and students’ understandings of the CCCs.The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.