Science and Mathematics Education Commons^™

Addressing The Stem Challenge Through Targeted Teaching : What’S The Evidence?, Dianne Siemon

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

Numerous public reports are pointing to the critical importance of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) to Australia’s future, but the number of students studying STEM subjects in senior years is declining, and many students in the primary and middle years of schooling do not have access to the ways of thinking and learning needed to succeed in school mathematics. Research over the past 10 years has established the critical role of multiplicative thinking in building student knowledge and confidence at this level of schooling, but there is a need for an expanded, evidence-based learning and teaching framework to support …

Coding In The Curriculum : Fad Or Foundational?, Leon Sterling

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

There has been an unprecedented push to revitalise interest in STEM education. Much of the discussion of the ’T’ in STEM education has been whether coding should be a central element of school education. This talk investigates the arguments for and against ‘coding in the curriculum.’ No sensible person thinks that teaching coding in the classroom will produce master programmers’, any more than teaching music in the school curriculum will produce master musicians. However the teaching of music can encourage some students to become musicians and the same would be true for coding. The issue is more what concepts are …

Activating Teachers’ Creativity And Moral Purpose In Science Education, Martin Westwell, Sonia Cooke

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

Over the last three years, the Scientist in Residence program (a collaboration between the Department of Education and Child Development, and Flinders University) investigated a model of professional learning in science education that capitalised upon teachers’ moral purpose and drove their creativity. Insight into how teachers transformed their science classrooms is provided through examples of activities, work samples and clips of teachers describing how they changed their practice and how that, in turn, changed the engagement and achievement of the children. These resources will serve to illustrate some of the principles of practice that the teachers drew upon. In particular, …

Why Is A Steam Curriculum Perspective Crucial To The 21st Century?, Peter Charles Taylor

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

Well-recognised as a powerful driver of national economic growth, STEM lies at the heart of calls worldwide for educational reform. In Australia, Chief Scientists are calling for STEM education to better engage students on STEM-related career pathways. In the USA, STEM educators are being urged to produce graduates with creative and innovative abilities required of an increasingly high-tech workforce. However, an equally important challenge for STEM education is to prepare young people with general capabilities for active participation in community and professional forums for addressing ethical issues associated with the global impact of science and technology. Education for sustainable development …

Infographic: Stem And Gender, Jo Earp

Teacher infographics

A recent report from the Australian Council for Educational Research explored gender differences in relation to STEM participation, achievement and engagement. Here are some of the results.

Stem And Indigenous Learners, Elizabeth Mckinley

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

Achievement disparities between Indigenous students and their non-Indigenous peers in education continue to be documented across the globe. Over the past three decades, there has been a significant amount of writing on Indigenous methodologies, epistemology and, to a lesser extent, pedagogies. All are crucial in the lifelong process of teaching and learning – the nature of knowledge, how it is gained, and the transmission of it. However, much of this work is contested or seen as inappropriate or irrelevant in STEM education. Indigenous students do not perceive STEM subjects as being welcoming. As STEM educators, we need to take a …

Enhancing Students’ Mathematical Aspirations And Mathematical Literacy As The Foundation For Improving Stem Learning, Merrilyn Goos

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

Mathematics is the foundational enabling discipline that underpins STEM and its other constituent disciplines of science, technology and engineering. Central to Australia’s mathematical vitality is universal access to high-quality mathematics education. Without this, young people are at risk of early school leaving, low participation in post-school education and training, poor employment outcomes, and social isolation (COAG, 2008; Parsons & Bynner, 2005). But Australia faces significant problems in ensuring that all young people are successfully engaged in learning mathematics at school, and in providing them with teachers who can inspire their learning. This paper explores approaches to addressing two problems that …

Are Australian Mathematical Foundations Solid Enough For The 21st Century?, Ross Turner, Dave Tout

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

This presentation will look at some key messages from the Australian results of both the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). PISA assesses the mathematical literacy of 15-year-old students around Australia, whilst PIAAC assesses the numeracy proficiency of adults aged 15–74. What do the two surveys assess and are they telling a similar story? How solid are Australia’s mathematical foundations and what do they say about teaching and learning? How do Australia’s results compare internationally with those leading the field? What are some of the research outcomes and implications …

High-Altitude Ballooning In 3rd Grade, Emily L. Mathews, Brianna Marszalek, Bernhard Beck-Winchatz

2017 Academic High Altitude Conference

In this poster presentation we report on a high altitude balloon project conducted with third-graders from Gower West Elementary School in Willowbrook, IL in spring 2016. In the weeks before the launch students used a vacuum jar to investigate the effects of pressure changes on different objects, substances and sounds in the classroom and conducted pressure, temperature and wind measurements inside and outside of their school using Vernier probeware. To learn how to use the balloon tracking equipment and how to fill a balloon and prepare it for launch, students simulated a flight with a tethered balloon outside of their …

The Stem Teacher Enrichment Academy : Evaluating Teachers’ Approaches To Implementing Stem Education In Secondary School Contexts, Judy Anderson

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

Amidst calls for a greater focus on STEM education in schools, attention is inevitably drawn to the quality of teaching and to appropriate means of supporting the teaching workforce so that more young people are engaged and interested in STEM subjects. This presentation describes the development and implementation of a STEM Teacher Enrichment Academy at the University of Sydney, and presents some of the outcomes from teachers’ efforts to implement STEM education across a variety of school systems. The findings draw on survey and interview data from two cohorts of participant teachers and their STEM mentors as they progressed through …

Drawing To Learn In Stem, Russell Tytler

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

Scientists, mathematicians and engineers draw and model to create knowledge. This presentation will describe a guided inquiry approach to teaching and learning science that involves students actively creating visual and other representations to reason and explain as they explore the material world. The approach has been successfully used in a number of major professional learning initiatives in Victoria and NSW. Evidence will be presented of increased student engagement and quality learning flowing from the approach, which aligns classroom processes more authentically with processes of imaginative scientific discovery. Examples of activities and student drawings and model construction will be used to …

Lifting Australian Performance In Mathematics, Sue Thomson

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

One in five Australian 15-year-old students was found to be failing to achieve what the OECD describes as a basic level of mathematical literacy to enable students to actively participate in 21st century life. In many cases, these students are also unmotivated and disengaged with schooling, perceive their school experience in a negative light, and have low aspirations for the future. In a disproportionate number of cases, low-achieving students come from low socio-economic backgrounds, have an Indigenous background, and live in rural areas. This paper investigates the relationship of these and other demographic and educational background variables with being a …

Must Try Harder : An Evaluation Of The Uk Government’S Policy Directions In Stem Education, Pauline Hoyle

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

There is a common issue across Europe and the UK that vexes governments, employers and educationalists: the need for more young people to choose to study STEM subjects, become graduates in STEM subjects and then take up STEM careers. In addition, there is an urgent need for more STEM skills in the total workforce. For decades, the UK government has been committed to addressing this issue with a range of activities and strategies. Since the influential UK Government report conducted by Sir Gareth Roberts (2002), there have been policy and funding commitments by the various UK governments to improve outcomes …

Abstracts From The 2016 Ahac Conference, Erick Agrimson

2017 Academic High Altitude Conference

This is a listing of Abstracts from AHAC 2016

Acer Research Conference Proceedings (2016), Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

The focus of ACER’s Research Conference 2016 will be on what we are learning from research about ways of improving levels of STEM learning. Australia faces significant challenges in promoting improved science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning in our schools. Research Conference 2016 will showcase research into what it will take to address these challenges, which include: the decline in Australian students’ mathematical and scientific ‘literacy’; the decline in STEM study in senior school; a shortage of highly qualified STEM subject teachers, and curriculum challenges. You will hear from researchers who work with teachers to engage students in studying …

Creating Art Patterns With Math And Code, Boyan Kostadinov

Publications and Research

The goal of this talk is to showcase some visualization projects that we developed for a 3-day Code in R summer program, designed to inspire the creative side of our STEM students by engaging them with computational projects that we developed with the purpose of mixing calculus level math and code to create complex geometric patterns. One of the goals of this program was to attract more minority and female students into applied math and computer science majors.

The projects are designed to be implemented using the high-level, open-source and free computational environment R, a popular software in industry for …

Raise Your Cards - A Look At Plickers In An Adult Learning Environment, Megan Taylor

SIDLIT Conference

At SIDLIT 2015, the session on the free Plickers polling system dazzled many of us. Members of the National Weather Service Training Center immediately began integrating this tool into their classes. In this session, we will review our successful integration of Plickers. We will also examine the results of using this technique with adult learners with a predominately introverted, scientific mindset. This session will also include information about what has and has not worked. Are you unfamiliar with Plickers? No worries, we will do a quick overview of this tool at the beginning of the presentation.

Conventionalizing And Axiomatizing In A Community College Mathematics Bridge Course, Mark Alan Yannotta

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation consists of three related papers. The first paper, Rethinking mathematics bridge courses--An inquiry model for community colleges, introduces the activities of conventionalizing and axiomatizing from a practitioner perspective. In the paper, I offer a curricular model that includes both inquiry and traditional instruction for two-year college students interested in mathematics. In particular, I provide both examples and rationales of tasks from the research-based Teaching Abstract Algebra for Understanding (TAAFU) curriculum, which anchors the inquiry-oriented version of the mathematics bridge course.

The second paper, the role of past experience in creating a shared representation system for a mathematical operation: …

Mathematics Without Calculations – It’S A Beautiful Thing!, Jason J. Molitierno

Mathematics Faculty Publications

All students should have the opportunity to do mathematics in a meaningful way for the sheer fun of it. Such experiences, if well designed, improve students’ effective thinking skills, increase their appreciation of the beauty and utility of mathematics, and prepare them to be mathematically-literate members of society. This session invites talks on how we can engage the liberal arts student through courses specifically designed for them. We welcome presentations on innovative course design, pedagogy, projects, or activities, as well as talks on tools used to assess such courses. Presentations should include a research basis for the design or pedagogical …

Comparing Math Fluency And Automaticity Using Explicit Timing With Students With Disabilities, Andrew Ehala

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine the mathematical fluency performance of a group of students with various learning disabilities in an eighth grade classroom by implementing and intervention intensification program that incorporates an explicit timing model. Students demonstrated a wide range of progression with their mathematical fluency with all students showing progress from the start of the study to the conclusion. Analysis of the data determined that students fluency levels increased at a faster rate when provided with a consistent intensive regime of math computational facts. Implications for teaching students with disabilities mathematical fluency are discussed.

First-Year Students: Investigating The Impact Of Participating In A Mathematics Learning Community, Lindsay Barrie

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate how participating in a mathematics learning community can impact a first-year students’ experience in college. The total population in the Math Learning Community (MLC) was 40, 36 of these members participated in a survey and five volunteered to participate in an interview. The survey collected demographic information and responses to statements regarding the students’ transition to college, their connectedness to Rowan, their peer interaction, faculty interaction, and their overall satisfaction at Rowan. The interview questions asked about their most and least satisfying aspects of participating in the MLC and what recommendations they …

Episodic Future Thinking In Mathematical Situations, Wes Maciejewski, Reece Roberts, Donna Rose Addis

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Episodic future thinking is a process of mentally projecting one's self into a future event, allowing the event to be experienced before it actually occurs (Atance & O'Neill, 2001). The current study explores the possibility that students engage in episodic future thinking while solving mathematical tasks. Participating students were given mathematical situations and verbalized thoughts that emerged as they planned resolutions to the situations. All participants exhibited episodic future thinking and we present a categorization of these thoughts. Given extant results on the positive influence episodic future thinking has on general problem-solving ability, we propose that a similar influence might …

Research Mathematicians & Mathematics Educators: Collaborations For Change, Greg Oates, Wes Maciejewski

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Definition Of A Method For The Formulation Of Problems To Be Solved With High Performance Computing, Ramya Peruri

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

Computational power made available by current technology has been continuously increasing, however today’s problems are larger and more complex and demand even more computational power. Interest in computational problems has also been increasing and is an important research area in computer science. These complex problems are solved with computational models that use an underlying mathematical model and are solved using computer resources, simulation, and are run with High Performance Computing. For such computations, parallel computing has been employed to achieve high performance. This thesis identifies families of problems that can best be solved using modelling and implementation techniques of parallel …

Automating Stem Learning By Engaging In Artful-Inspired Play, Katie E. Roth

Open Access Theses

A full range of experimental methodologies split between two distinct yet related projects was performed in an effort to define ways to automate STEM learning in artful-inspired play. Both projects aim to offer impactful learning experiences through artful-inspired activities meant to automate STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) learning in children that are both scientifically and non-scientifically inclined. By participating in play that is both fun and engaging, learning is a byproduct of the activity which acts to automatically embed STEM knowledge and experiences within the user. Bridging the gap between STEM and artistic tendencies has the potential to provide a …

Effects Of Soil Erosion Barriers On Percent Cover And Sediment Size, Michael Perez

STAR Program Research Presentations

Ranching began on Santa Rosa Island in the 1840’s, introducing nonnative megafauna that put selective grazing pressures on endemic species. Dense groves of island oak (Q. tomentella) are aid in sediment deposition and retention. A current restoration effort, involved installing soil erosion barriers, known as wattles, to prevent sediment from being lost upslope and recruit plant growth whose root systems could further stabilize the slope. This experiment was designed to compare percent cover of vegetation growth in areas with and without soil erosion barriers. This was done using the line intercept method (n=42) on three meter transects, measuring …

Stem Stories, August 2016, Mir Ashfaquzzaman

STEM Stories

Student Profile - Courtney Massey

Students' Reasoning With Haptic Technologies: A Qualitative Study In The Electromagnetism Domain, Sadhana Balachandran

Open Access Theses

With abundant applications in the medical training and entertainment industry, haptic technology is slowly making its way into the realm of science education, particularly in conveying abstract and non-visible concepts. Electric field is one such abstract concept. Past studies have shown that learning concepts such as electric fields in a traditional classroom can be quite challenging since students have a hard time visualizing the phenomena and applying its effects to reason. Furthermore, these concepts are the building blocks for more complex concepts such as matter and molecular interactions. Visuo-haptic devices provide a great platform to enable students to visualize and …

The Educational Journeys Of First-Generation College Women In Stem: A Grounded Theory Study, Susan Geier

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to ascertain the various factors that influenced these first-generation college women as they chose a college and selected a STEM major and subsequently persisted to upper level (junior/senior) status. Twenty-five first-generation college women in STEM majors who attended a research-intensive university in the Midwest were interviewed. Approaching this study using constructivist grounded theory provided the opportunity for deeper insights by examining data at a conceptual level while preserving the voices of the women in this study. The women faced numerous challenges on their journeys, yet they persisted. As the women in this study selected …

A Phenomenographic Study Of The Ability To Address Complex Socio-Technical Systems Via Variation Theory, John A. Mendoza Garcia

Open Access Dissertations

Sometimes engineers fail when addressing the inherent complexity of socio-technical systems because they lack the ability to address the complexity of socio-technical systems. Teaching undergraduate engineering students how to address complex socio-technical systems, has been an educational endeavor at different levels ranging from kindergarten to post-graduate education. The literature presents different pedagogical strategies and content to reach this goal. However, there are no existing empirically-based assessments guided by a learning theory. This may be because at the same time explanations of how the skill is developed are scarce.

My study bridges this gap, and I propose a developmental path for …