Workshop on the Nature and Practices of Science to Support Educator Guides for Science in the Classroom

Science in the Classroom (SitC), a collection of annotated research papers, makes Science content more accessible to students and educators. Through reading and deconstructing scientific papers, students can gain an understanding of how scientists design their experiments and present their results, essentially allowing students to experience the logic of getting from a set of data to a new conclusion.

We will create a workshop for the undergraduate STEM community, defined in this proposal as faculty, pre-service teachers (including participants in teacher-prep programs and Learning Assistant programs), graduate students, postdocs, and other interested STEM professionals, that provides a foundation for teaching the nature and practices of science. This workshop will allow us to leverage the expertise of the STEM education community to develop educator guides for SitC resources.

The benefits of our proposal are three-fold.

  1. Through the workshop, participants will learn how to develop high quality educator guides focusing on the nature of science and science practices, a skill that will be useful for STEM education purposes but also transferable to a wide variety of STEM careers.
  2. The educator guides developed by participants will be freely available for use by teachers and students throughout the STEM education community, ultimately increasing the accessibility of annotated primary literature resources that have been vetted by educational experts.
  3. Engaging with the nature and practices of science in a teaching context has been shown to contribute to the improvement of essential research skills. Therefore, participants in our workshop may improve upon their own research skills, essentially becoming better scientists.
  • Focus: Undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, faculty, science teachers and instructors
  • Funder: National Science Foundation
  • Team: Melissa McCartney (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Award number: 077795672
  • Amount: $297,491
  • Contact: Melissa McCartney (mmccartn@fiu.edu), Department of Biological Sciences
  • Website:scienceintheclassroom.org