Embedded Files
Equity Projects
Equity Projects
The current ACESSE work is focused on developing professional learning resources to support diverse equity learning pathway resources for use across state and territorial teams to use with their communities. Each of these projects, while being a center of focus for work, will also be intersectional with other projects as we work towards equitbale science and engineering learning as outlined in A Framework for K-12 Science Education.
ACESSE Resources
ACESSE Resources
Resource A: Introduction to Formative Assessment to Support Equitable 3D Instruction
The NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education includes a signature focus on engaging all students in integrated three-dimensional science learning using inclusive instructional approaches. New approaches to classroom assessment are needed to work towards this vision. Resource A provides an introduction to formative assessment that supports equitable three-dimensional science instruction. Participants develop a shared understanding of formative assessment and relate it to equity and justice goals. They are introduced to three-dimensional cognitive & cultural formative assessment approaches & to resources they can use to learn more about these approaches.
Resource B: How to Assess Three-Dimensional Learning in the Classroom
How is assessing three-dimensional science learning different than past assessments of science learning? How can we design assessment tasks that elicit the core ideas, practices, and crosscutting concepts in the NRC Framework vision? Through this workshop, participants will analyze multiple tasks that aim to assess a performance expectation, discuss strengths and weaknesses of these tasks and gain practice adapting them to better elicit three-dimensional science learning—with a focus on making them fair to multilingual students.
What role do students’ cultures play in science learning? And how might teachers use formative assessments to root science learning in students’ cultural contexts, interests, identities, and knowledge? This session asks participants to explore cultural dimensions of science learning, then showcases a general instructional technique for cultural formative assessment called “self-documentation”—in which students collect information related to a particular topic in their everyday lives. After analyzing student work of this kind, participants design a piece of culturally responsive instruction for their classroom using the self-documentation technique.
Resource D: How to Craft a Three-Dimensional Formative Assessment
This session provides a step-by-step process to support participants as they design a three-dimensional assessment task. Along the way, they learn how to define three-dimensional learning performances for specific lessons—and how to use a range of tools to support their assessment design work. A key goal of the session is to improve the connection of intended learning goals to assessment practices. Participants build their three-dimensional assessment design capacity by creating and workshopping tasks—before piloting them in their classrooms. The approaches learned in this workshop can be used with any curricula, at any grade level, and across all subjects of science.
Resource E: Selecting Anchoring Phenomena for Equitable Three-Dimensional Teaching
This workshop sequence is designed to introduce participants to the process of selecting phenomena to anchor an entire unit and support students’ three-dimensional science learning. Many educators have heard a lot about phenomena, but what exactly are they, and how is using phenomena different from how educators teach science already? This session will help participants explore what phenomena are, then engage with a process that has been developed and tested for selecting good phenomena to anchor a unit.
Resource F: Basing Instruction on the Range of Student Thinking Through Cognitive Formative Assessment (Facets of Student Thinking)
Students bring a range of intellectual and cultural resources, which they have accumulated in their unique life experiences, into the classroom as they learn science. These resources can be considered different “facets” of student thinking. These resources may relate to their conceptual understanding of natural phenomena, their repertoires of practice when engaging in scientific activity, or their abilities to productively engage with school and classroom structures of learning. Student’s facets of thinking can be used to help students refine their understanding. This session introduces the facet-based approach, then engages participants in identifying facets in a batch of student work, preparing them to use this approach in their teaching. Draft available at tinyurl.com/ACESSE-Drive
Resource G: Learning to See the Resources Students Bring to Sense-Making
In this workshop, we will consider how to foster equity and justice within science teaching and learning contexts. Specifically, this resource will support educators in crafting 3D learning performances and related formative assessments that connect to learners’ interest and knowledge while at the same time promote equity and social justice. This resource can also be used by individuals wanting to learn how equity involves promoting the rightful presence of all students across scales of justice, desettling inequities, and supporting expansive learning pathways. This learning experience will help you:
Explore equity dimensions of sense-making through the science and engineering practices.
Learn to see different ways students contribute to making sense of phenomena—and connect to science.
Better appreciate that navigating multiple ways of knowing is the basic human condition—not the exception for some students.
Make a commitment to shape instruction to support diverse sense-making.
STEM Teaching Tools
STEM Teaching Tools
Some STEM Teaching Tools have been collaboratively designed with ACESSE participants. These tools will have an ACESSE logo on the back and are listed below.
Explore the research practice briefs at www.stemteachingtools.org generally and ones produced by the ACESSE project specifically:
STEM Teaching Tool #55: Why it is crucial to make cultural diversity visible in STEM education
To increase student engagement in STEM, students need to see in themselves the potential to pursue STEM interests and careers.For STEM education to support all students in becoming STEM literate, instruction needs to broadly recognize who has done science, for what range of purposes, and how diversity enriches science.STEM Teaching Tool #56: Engaging Students in Computational Thinking During Science Investigations
Computational thinking practices enable unique modes of scientific inquiry that allow scientists to create models and simulations to generate data, and to understand and predict complex phenomena. K-12 science classrooms are natural contexts in which students can engage in computational thinking practices during their investigations.STEM Teaching Tool #57: How place-based science education strategies can support equity for students, teachers, and communities
Place-based science education is fundamentally transdisciplinary and cross-cultural, fostering scientific communication practices needed to address existing and emerging problems while truly involving stakeholders from diverse backgrounds.STEM Teaching Tool #58: How can science instruction leverage and develop student interests? Short answer: In so many different ways!
Science and engineering instruction should help students understand “why does this matter to me?” Science learning is centrally shaped by the interests and concerns of learners and their communities. This resources outlines strategies to weave learner interests into instruction— by creating experiences, by adapting curriculum, or by resourcing and positioning students.STEM Teaching Tool #59: Creating science learning experiences that support learners receiving special education services
Instruction must be designed in ways that enable multiple opportunities and avenues for engaging in deep and meaningful sense-making about the natural and designed worlds, rather than creating cognitive, physical, behavioral, neurological, developmental, and emotional barriers.STEM Teaching Tool #60: Designing ‘productive uncertainty’ into investigations to support meaningful engagement in science practices
Science investigations can be viewed as “working through uncertainty.” However, 3D instructional materials often try to support engagement in science practices by making them very explicit and scaffolding the process to make it easy to accomplish—arguably, too easy.STEM Teaching Tool #61: Using science investigations to develop caring practices for social-ecological systems
How can we be more present for other species at a time of ecological devastation? Developing deep commitments to the human and more-than-human inhabitants of ecosystems is crucial for cultivating students’ caring knowledge and practices. All learners should build interdependent, caring relationships with more-than-humans focused on shared thriving to promote ecological identities, deep STEM learning about local places, and responsibilities.STEM Teaching Tool #62: What does subject matter integration look like in elementary instruction? Including science is key!
We do not live in disciplinary silos, so why do we ask children to learn in that manner? Leading with science leverages students’ natural curiosity and builds strong knowledge-bases in other content areas. Integration among the content areas assures that science is given priority in the elementary educational experience.STEM Teaching Tool #63: How to integrate the argumentation from evidence practice into engineering design projects
Argumentation is sometimes exclusively considered a scientific practice, rather than also being fundamental to the engineering design process. Students should learn how to support engineering claims with specific evidence throughout the design process.
A Framework for K-12 Science Education suggests that students at all grade levels should be identifying engineering design problems and developing criteria and constraints. However, in practice, students often receive pre-written criteria and constraints, or begin design challenges without specified criteria or constraints.
STEM Teaching Tool #65: Using 3D interim assessments to support coherence, equity, and a shared understanding of learning
Interim assessments are shared classroom assessments administered by groups of teachers in departments, schools, districts, or states. They can be used to collect evidence of students’ facility with science and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas when explaining phenomena or solving problems. Interim assessments can be a valuable part of a more balanced and comprehensive 3D assessment system.STEM Teaching Tool #66: Why you should stop pre-teaching science vocabulary and focus on students developing conceptual meaning first
Many science educators focus on pre-teaching technical vocabulary at the start of the unit to help students become comfortable with science discourse. However, it is much more productive to support learners as they organically develop language (terms, phrases) that interprets and explains phenomena, rather than asking them to merely acquire terms. Additionally, it is key for equity that educators identify, value, and leverage students’ home languages.STEM Teaching Tool #67: Focusing Science and Engineering Learning on Justice-Centered Phenomena across PK-12
Basing investigations on justice-centered phenomena can be a powerful and rightful way to support science and engineering learning. Justice-centered investigations can open up important opportunities for students to engage in projects that support equity for communities and to see how the application of science and engineering are fundamentally entwined with political and ethical questions, dimensions, and decisions.STEM Teaching Tool #71: How can you advance equity and justice through science teaching?
This brief describes seven equity projects that can help advance Indigenous self-determination and racial justice by confronting the consequences of legacies of injustice and promoting liberatory approaches to education. These projects are: centering racial justice, meaningful phenomena, multi-generational learning, cultural pedagogies, supporting diverse sense-making, disrupting ablism, and place-based learning and ecological caring.
As children collect and grapple with patterns in data to understand phenomena, differing perspectives naturally arise. Scientific communities—including PK-12 learning communities—negotiate agreement based on evidence to construct the strongest explanations about how the world works, building new knowledge together. Young children are capable of engaging in this challenging scientific practice, yet argumentation is rare in elementary school science.
STEM Teaching Tool #81: Organizing for educational transformation using Actor-Network Theory
Groups engaged in changemaking projects can use Actor-Network analysis to shape how people, groups, policies, and resources can be organized into more productive, aligned networks— so expertise and resources are creatively mobilized to promote equity.STEM Teaching Tool #83: Steps to Designing Justice-Focused Assessments in Science
This resource outlines a nine-step process to help teams develop Framework-aligned assessment tasks in science focused on justice-centered phenomena and scenarios. It builds on the thinking about 3D assessment design from STEM Teaching Tool #29 (from March 2020), but has been significantly revised.
Use this link to download PDFs of all tools
Guidance for Developing a Research Practice Brief
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