Arthur Eisenkraft

Introduction: Why Focus on Energy Instruction?

Energy is one of the most important ideas in all of science and is useful for predicting and explaining phenomena within every scientific discipline. Yet, there are substantive differences in how the energy concept is used across disciplines. While a particle physicist relies heavily on the idea that energy is conserved during interactions between subatomic particles, an ecologist is typically more concerned with the idea energy transfers across system boundaries.

Conclusion and Summary Comments: Teaching Energy and Associated Research Efforts

The Energy Summit and the chapters in this book started with the premise that energy is both a critical disciplinary idea as well as a crosscutting concept, as elaborated in the Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council 2012). Energy serves a central role in our everyday lives, as well as in all science disciplines. We were influenced by the argument presented in Framework for K-12 Science Education that energy is a critical concept that cuts across the disciplines and as such all learners need a solid understanding of this idea. However, the general population and many professionals, including K-12 science teachers, many science graduate students and scientists, lack a solid understanding of energy across all disciplines. Many of the challenges learners face in understanding the energy concept result not only because energy is a challenging concept but also because energy is seldom taught as a unifying idea; it is more likely taught using different language in different disciplines. For example, most learners never develop a rich conceptual understanding of what is meant by “energy is stored in chemical bonds.” This problematic situation most likely arises because there are substantive differences in how the energy concept is used across disciplines that result from shorthand usage of language. Although many scientists can translate between the various shorthand ways of using energy, this language is never clearly explained to students and practitioners, including teachers and curriculum developers. In fact, many graduate students do not fully understand the idea of energy. This has led to many misunderstandings of energy including “energy being stored in chemical bonds” as meaning “energy is released when bonds break.” As such, throughout the globe, we face challenges in teaching the energy concept, both because energy is such a challenging, misunderstood concept and different language is used to express different manifestations of it.

When Do Students in Low-SES Schools Perform Better-Than-Expected on a High-Stakes Test? Analyzing School, Teacher, Teaching, and Professional Development Characteristics:

This empirical study analyzed data from 638 teachers and 11,800 students in low-socioeconomic status (SES) urban schools (and schools with urban characteristics) exploring associations of school, teacher, teaching, and professional development characteristics toward student performance on the revised Advanced Placement (AP) Biology and AP Chemistry examinations. The analyses indicated that districts per-student funding allocations, the days of instruction, teachers’ knowledge and experience, and some aspects of teachers’ professional development participation were significantly associated with student performance on AP science examinations that was better than predicted by students’ Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT) scores.

Adapting to Large-Scale Changes in Advanced Placement Biology, Chemistry, and Physics: The Impact of Online Teacher Communities.

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, the field of teacher professional learning has coalesced around core characteristics of high quality professional development experiences (e.g. Borko, Jacobs, & Koellner, 2010. Contemporary approaches to teacher professional development. In P. L. Peterson, E. Baker, & B. McGaw (Eds.), International encyclopedia of education (Vol. 7, pp. 548–556). Oxford: Elsevier.; Darling-Hammond, Hyler, & Gardner, 2017. Effective teacher professional development. Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute). Many countries have found these advances of great interest because of a desire to build teacher capacity in science education and across the full curriculum. This paper continues this progress by examining the role and impact of an online professional development community within the top-down, large-scale curriculum and assessment revision of Advanced Placement (AP) Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. This paper is part of a five-year, longitudinal, U.S. National Science Foundation–funded project to study the relative effectiveness of various types of professional development in enabling teachers to adapt to the revised AP course goals and exams. Of the many forms of professional development our research has examined, preliminary analyses indicated that participation in the College Boards online AP Teacher Community (APTC) – where teachers can discuss teaching strategies, share resources, and connect with each other – had positive, direct, and statistically significant association with teacher self-reported shifts in practice and with gains in student AP scores (Fishman et al., 2014). This study explored how usage of the online APTC might be useful to teachers and examined a more robust estimate of these effects. Findings from the experience of AP teachers may be valuable in supporting other large-scale curriculum changes, such as the U.S. Next Generation Science Standards or Common Core Standards, as well as parallel curricular shifts in other countries.

How to Build Bridges: Career Stories that Connect the Humanities and the Sciences

In Spring 2013 and 2015 the Honors Program/College at the University of Massachusetts Boston offered a junior Honors Colloquium, Humanity and Humanness: A Debate between the Liberal Arts and the Sciences. An analysis of our colloquium experiences indicated that the most efficient and effective way to instill the habits and means of inter-, cross-, and transdisciplinary thinking into trainees was to allow students to interview and interact with individuals who had incorporated, early or late in their own work, those habits and means. Seeing how others had struggled with and negotiated life and career decisions and arrived at emotionally and psychologically fulfilling positions that allowed expression of both technical and aesthetic parts of people’s personalities was key to students understanding, adopting, and incorporating such attitudes and ideas into their own lives. We wish to share with a wider audience six of the stories told by the Honors Colloquium visitors.

Infusing Engineering Concepts into High School Science: Opportunities and Challenges

This chapter shares data and reflections on the challenges and opportunities of infusing engineering concepts into physical science at the high school level. Teachers involved in Project Infuse, a collaborative research project funded by the National Science Foundation, Discovery Research in K-12 is highlighted. Project Infuse was funded to research teacher learning through an innovative approach to professional development that is engineering concept-driven. The Project Infuse teachers and research team have been engaged in the development and refinement of an engineering concept base, the development of an assessment instrument to measure learning gains of the concepts, and approaches to infusing engineering into instruction. This chapter outlines the approach being taken by this project in these endeavors and highlights the key issues involved with infusing engineering concepts into science, which include what engineering concepts are appropriate for high school science and how these concepts can be infused into instruction. Since the goal of infusing engineering concepts is to facilitate both the learning of science content and engineering, one of the findings from the project has been the importance of embedding the engineering concepts into science-based scenarios and content. This is opposed to simply “doing” engineering-types of activities without a grounding in conceptual level understandings.