PI:
Hosun Kang (hosunk@uci.edu, University of California, Irvine, School of Education)

Investigators:
Kristel Dupaya (kdupaya@uci.edu, University of California, Irvine, School of Education)
Rae-Young Kim (raeyounk@uci.edu, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea)

Undergraduate research assistants:
Lani Hisako Matsumura (lmatsumu@uci.edu)
Joshua Visperas (ivispera@uci.edu)
Joshua Isaiah-Cinque Scruggs (jscruggs@uci.edu)

Project funding:
Hellman Foundation

Project duration:
September 1, 2017 to August 31, 2018

Summary:
The call for educating the future citizen who can engage in complex thinking is greater than ever. Complex thinking can be promoted by engaging youth in well-designed learning activities, such as solving a complex problem, developing evidence-based explanations about how and why things occur, constructing arguments with support of evidence, critiquing and asking questions about the quality of a claim, evidence, and its relationship. Science educators generally agree that school science classrooms should provide opportunities for students to advance their thinking and to engage in critical conversations with each other. This vision of science learning is well reflected in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013).

Despite decades of reform efforts and the use of various hands-on, practical, and experiential activities in science instruction, research indicates that classroom learning for students largely remains undemanding, procedural, and often disconnected from the development of substantive science ideas (Banilower et al., 2012; Corcoran & Gerry, 2011; Roth & Garnier, 2007; Roth et al., 2011). Access to high quality instruction is even more limited to the youth from under-represented communities in STEM. Historically, schools have been less successful in educating youth from non-white, multilingual, and low-income family backgrounds, especially in the sciences (Darling-Hammond, 2010).

Objectives of this study include:

  • Design a summer inclusive STEM teaching workshop that facilitates the collaboration among science teachers, science teacher educators, and UCI scientists to produce two sets of inclusive curriculum that promotes complex thinking in STEM for youth from under-represented communities
  • Study its impact on teachers’ instructional capacity and the youth’s advancement of thinking

The project is taking place in a local high school that serves large number of Latinx students from low-income families. Two groups of science teachers (biology and chemistry department) participate in this study, along with principal, district coaches, curriculum coordinators, and UCI scientists.

Both qualitative and quantitative data will be collected to document teachers’ enhanced capacity to adapt curriculum and student engagement. Mixed methods approach will be employed to examine whether and how the collaborative curriculum design activities with multiple actors affect under-represented youth’s advancement of thinking and identity development in STEM.