Resources from STEM Smart Workshops

The goal of Urban Advantage (UA) is to improve students’ understanding of scientific knowledge and inquiry through collaborations between public school systems and informal science education institutions, such as museums, gardens, zoos, and science centers. UA designs and shapes learning experiences to align with the science standards and assessments in school systems. In addition, both students and teachers are provided opportunities to engage in authentic science—conducting investigations in which they pose scientifically oriented questions, prioritize evidence, and develop logical explanations—a prerequisite to understanding science

The state-led Common Core State Standards Initiative represents the leading wave of a sea change in public education aimed at putting United States education and students on par with those of leading countries—intensifying educational standards, improving coherence among the state education systems, improving instruction, and developing and deploying new approaches to curriculum and in-class and summative assessment. Educators across the country are discovering that the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) represent major changes from “business as usual”: fundamental changes in depth of content, as well as earlier introduction of major blocks of content, compared to previous state standards. The need for sustained coherent professional development to support CCSSM implementation is widely acknowledged.

Three projects based out of Indiana University—Spark to Flame, Assessment of Multinational Interest in STEM, and Undergraduate Scientists: Measuring the Outcomes of Research Experiences—are trying to gain a deeper understanding on the experiences that generate and maintain interest in STEM across the K–20 spectrum and in both formal and informal settings.

Perhaps the greatest challenge required by <em>The Next Generation Science Standards is the creation of coherence—coherence in order to develop deeper learning from grade to grade, and coherence in the support systems of curriculum, assessment, and professional development. To help students develop scientifically sound ideas and practices, curricula need to support deep restructuring of their knowledge. This requires that the core ideas of science are addressed with coherence from one grade to the next. Moreover, it requires alignment among curriculum, assessment, and professional development.

Following the release of the Framework for K-12 Science Education (Framework), the National Research Council (NRC) published recommendations for how to track national progress toward improved STEM education in a report entitled Monitoring Progress Toward Successful K–12 STEM Education (Monitoring Progress; NRC, 2013). One of the recommendations of Monitoring Progress was to identify a set of criteria that could be used to determine the degree to which widely used instructional materials promote the vision of science education described in the Framework and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In 2014, the NSF funded BSCS to develop a set of guidelines for evaluating instructional materials that could be used for this purpose.

WISE is a research-based digital learning platform that fosters exploration and science inquiry. Standards-based WISE projects are specifically tailored for classroom use, and revolve around key conceptual difficulties that students encounter in biology, chemistry, physics. WISE gives teachers powerful tools to customize projects and watch student work unfold online in real-time. WISE inquiry projects are based in the knowledge integration concept, the process of synthesizing multiple knowledge models in a common representation.

WISEngineering (http://www.wisengineering.org) is a free online learning environment that supports learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) concepts through engineering design projects.

The mission of the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Center (SEEC) is two-fold: to provide a high-quality educational program for young children and to advance educational opportunities for all children by sharing SEEC’s expertise on a national level, thereby furthering the education mandate of the Smithsonian Institution (SI).