National Science Teachers Association

OpenSciEd curriculum materials and professional learning resources are Creative Commons licensed, freely available, and aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). This report offers direction to researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and developers by identifying OpenSciEd practitioners’ most urgent needs, the factors driving these needs, promising approaches for addressing these needs, and implications for OpenSciEd-enabled research. We gathered survey responses from 155 teachers and leaders and conducted focus group interviews with 28 of the survey respondents. Our analysis indicated three broad challenge areas related to district adoption and implementation, classroom enactment and engagement, and obtaining evidence of NGSS-based student outcomes. We also identified seven themes related to supporting OpenSciEd practitioners through research, development, and innovation: (1) access to and benefits of professional learning, (2) supporting teacher agency, collaboration, and management, (3) improving teacher capacity to enact OpenSciEd, (4) meeting students’ needs, (5) shifting classroom culture, (6) enabling formative assessment practices, and (7) access to assessment resources. Notably, professional learning and other supports for teachers appear to address root causes of many challenges experienced by practitioners. More generally, we see a need for research that would elaborate how adoption and implementation of OpenSciEd could drive system-level change in science education.

ABSTRACT Background & Context Continuously developing teachers’ knowledge, practice, and professional identity is one of the key standards for effective computer science (CS) teachers. Objective This study aims to understand the landscape of CS teachers in the United States, the professional identity they hold, and how their background and teaching context are associated with their CS teacher identity. Method Using data of 3540 teachers, we performed a two-step cluster analysis to reveal homogeneous subgroups of CS teachers. The relationship between teachers’ backgrounds and their CS teacher identity was also assessed. Findings This study identified four profiles of CS teachers based on their professional identity. . CS teacher identity is strongly associated with teachers’ Computer Science Teachers Association membership, teaching responsibility, teaching experience, and their exposure to CS coursework. Implications More professional support is needed for CS teachers, especially for early-career CS teachers, elementary school teachers, and teachers with multiple responsibilities and little CS background.

Most states identify content knowledge, and to a lesser extent pedagogical content knowledge, as the primary criteria for credentialing or authorization to teach computer science. However, there is an additional set of knowledge, skills, and dispositions related to equity and inclusion that are critical to effectively teach computer science to all students. The 2020 CSTA Standards for CS Teachers were designed to articulate a broad vision for what is required of teachers to prepare their students to effectively and equitably meet the learning outcomes delineated in K-12 CS standards and the K-12 CS Framework. One of the five teacher standards is focused on equity and inclusion, and this was also used as a cross-cutting theme throughout the other four standards. In this panel, authors of the standards and teacher development leaders will discuss how equity and inclusion can and must be infused into both the initial and ongoing development programs of K-12 computer science teachers.

Current efforts to expand K-12 CS education highlight the great need of well-prepared CS teachers with a strong sense of professional identity. This study proposes the CS teacher identity scale, a quantitative instrument for measuring CS teachers' sense of professional identity. The survey was piloted through a national teacher survey and tested for its reliability, dimensionality, and validity. The analysis reveals a four-factor solution for the CS teacher identity scale.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Alternative fuels such as LPG, CNG, hydrogen etc. have emerged as solutions to address depleting crude oil resources as well as deteriorating urban air quality. As a gaseous fuel, LPG has already been proven in terms of low emissions of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon. The Government of India has taken an important and encouraging step towards the reduction of atmospheric pollution by directing its attention towards use of LPG as an automobile fuel. On Indian roads it has been found that, the vehicles that run on LPG have low compression ratio. It was also found that LPG could be directly retrofitted in existing gasoline fuelled engine and hence operating parameters such as compression ratio and ignition timing might affect performance and exhaust emission. So, the present work performed experiments to study the performance and emission characteristic of LPG fuelled SI engine at different compression ratios such as 9,10,11,12 and at ignition timing 10°BTDC, 20°BTDC, 30°BTDC and 40°BTDC. A single cylinder, 4-stroke, water-cooled, diesel engine converted to operate in SI mode was used; an arrangement was made to vary compression ratio and ignition timing. The results obtained shows that the engine running on an LPG fuel system has low brake thermal efficiency (4% - 10%) at lower compression ratio as compare to gasoline fuelled engine. But at higher compression ratio it was found to be increased in the range 13.18% to 40.78%. The CO (40% - 70%) and HC (70% - 80%) were found to be much lower as compared to gasoline fuelled engine.</div></div>

In this panel we explore efforts to improve computer science education in four countries.

Prior research has demonstrated that the quality of moderation and management in online communities of practice is key to their successful support of learning. However, as communities grow in size and complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult for unaided experts to fully understand and take action in response to the activity of participants within them. Learning analytics has the potential to provide the support that community of practice leaders need to improve their performance. The National Science Teachers Association and U.S. Department of Education's Connected Educators project are exploring three approaches for managing forums to make them accessible and to synthesize the knowledge they generate: archiving, summarizing, and reorganizing. This paper describes manual heuristics for the first two of these, as well as the use of social network analysis to help develop algorithms to automate the third, community forum reorganization.

To prosper in the global economy, each nation must focus on growing its next generation of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. Success will require exciting many more young students about science and mathematics. When appropriately organized and directed, science and engineering competitions can provide a lifelong appreciation of, interest in, and enjoyment of science and engineering activities in much the same way that involvement in sports competitions provides a lifetime enjoyment of sporting events. In February, the second-ever White House Science Fair celebrated the student winners of a broad range of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) competitions from across the United States. And this year will see monetary and scholarship prizes awarded to students by longstanding prestigious competitions that include the Intel Science Talent Search; the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology; the Google Science Fair; the FIRST Robotics Competition; and the Toshiba/National Science Teachers Association ExploraVision competition, among others. But these competitions require financial support in much the same way that extracurricular sports and Olympic teams do. More private industries, large and small, are needed to support STEM education by sponsoring such competitions.

Understanding Earth and space science is important not only to AGU members. It is also critical to citizens making decisions in their private lives, to voters, and to policy makers and government officials whose actions shape global societies. AGU's education and outreach activities aim to bring Earth and space science to the world beyond the scientific community (see AGU's strategic plan: http://www.agu.org/about/strategic_plan.shtml). To support these objectives, some AGU sections have formed a specific Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) committee or working group (http://www.agu.org/education/professionals.shtml). These groups engage in activities that range from interacting with teachers to supporting media releases.