Students who drop out of their science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors commonly report that they lack skills critical to STEM learning and career pursuits. Many training programs exist to develop students' learning skills and they typically achieve small to medium effects on behaviors and performance. However, these programs…

The Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards propose that students learn core ideas and practices related to engineering as well as science. To do so, students will need high-quality curricular materials designed to meet these goals. We report an efficacy study of an elementary engineering curriculum,…

A shortcoming of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is the lack of substantive integration of hands-on activities into online classrooms. We conducted a randomised control trial (RCT) in a MOOC where we sent the treatment group at-home lab kits with which they could perform experiments in their own homes. In our intervention research, we found…

This research summary accompanies the report "Final Report of the i3 Impact Study of Making Sense of SCIENCE, 2016-17 through 2017-18." Science education has experienced a significant transition over the last decade, catalyzed by a re-envisioning of what students should know and be able to do in science. That re-envisioning culminated in…

These appendices accompany the report "Final Report of the i3 Impact Study of Making Sense of SCIENCE, 2016-17 through 2017-18." Science education has experienced a significant transition over the last decade, catalyzed by a re-envisioning of what students should know and be able to do in science. That re-envisioning culminated in the…

This randomized controlled trial examined the efficacy of an elementary school service-learning program, Connect Science (CS), on classroom practices and students' science achievement, civic engagement, and social skills. Fourth grade teachers were enrolled into intervention versus control conditions resulting in 41 classrooms (20 intervention)…

This study tests the influence of a video-based, analysis-of-practice professional development (PD) program on upper-elementary teachers' science content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and teaching practice and on their students' achievement. Using a cluster-randomized experimental design, the study compares the outcomes for teachers in…

The National Math + Science Initiative (NMSI) is a nonprofit organization committed to improving educational outcomes that traces its roots back to the early 1990s. NMSI's College Readiness Program (CRP) is a long-standing program with the goal of promoting STEM education in high schools to improve students' preparation for college. The three-year…

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) Ready to Learn project, "Hero Elementary," has an emphasis on reaching Latino communities and supporting the needs of children with disabilities. The project embeds the expectations of kindergarten to 2nd grade science standards into a series of…

This study's goal was to understand the extent to which providing access to media resources focused on critical science and engineering concepts can help children living in low-income households learn. The resources examined were from the PBS KIDS multi-platform property "The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!" Researchers found that…

The present study employed population-level educational records from 4 public school student cohorts (n = 112,916; Grades 7-12) in British Columbia (Canada) to examine relationships between music education (any participation, type of participation, music achievement, and engagement level) and mathematics and science achievement in Grade 10 as well…

In this experimental study, 20 multiple-choice test items from the Massachusetts Grade 5 science test were linguistically simplified, and original and simplified test items were administered to 310 English learners (ELs) and 1,580 non-ELs in four Massachusetts school districts. This study tested the hypothesis that specific linguistic features of…

This article uses fixed effects models to estimate differences in contemporaneous and downstream academic outcomes for students who take courses virtually and face-to-face--both for initial attempts and for credit recovery. We find that while contemporaneous outcomes are positive for virtual students in both settings, downstream outcomes vary by…

The purpose of this study was to document the design, classroom implementation, and effectiveness of interactive online units to enhance science learning over 3 years among students with learning disabilities, English learners, and general education students. Results of a randomised controlled trial with 2,303 middle school students and 71…

This causal-comparative study analyzed the college readiness of Latino ELLs educated in two different bilingual education programs, Transitional Bilingual (TB) and Dual Language (DL), by examining science and mathematics scores on the nationally recognized college entrance exam, the ACT. A statistically significant difference was found in the…