Elementary teachers' verbal supports of science and engineering practices in anNGSS‐alignedscience, engineering, and computational thinking unit

Abstract

Contemporary science education frameworks identify computational thinking as an essential science and engineering practice that supports scientific sense-making and engineering design. Despite national emphasis on teaching science, engineering, and computational thinking (NGSS Lead States, 2013), little research has investigated the ways that elementary teachers support students to engage in science and engineering practices (SEPs) within integrated science, engineering, and computational thinking curricula. This study explores how teachers provide verbal support of SEPs to upper elementary students during a 4-week NGSS-aligned curricular unit that challenged students to redesign their school to reduce water runoff. Students conducted hands-on investigations of water runoff and created computational models to test their designs. Teacher audio data during the classroom implementation was collected and qualitatively coded for different purposes of verbal support, such as to understand how (pragmatic), when, and why (epistemic) to use SEPs, in three focal lessons. Results show that teachers provided a range of pragmatic and

A comparison of elementary teachers' verbal supports for students in inclusive and general classroom contexts during an NGSS‐aligned science, engineering, and computer science unit

“…The teachers in this study are unique among elementary teachers due to their domain expertize in science and their experiences enacting NGSS‐aligned projects. Specifically, both teachers have degrees in a science field, implemented a pilot version of the project the previous year, and codeveloped the iteration of the project used in this study in collaboration with the researchers (Lilly et al, 2022). Further, the cases in this study are unique in consideration of NGSS‐aligned enactment, as the same teachers in the same school were implementing the same curricular unit to two different classroom contexts.…”

“…The three computer science activities included variables, loops, and set commands to create computational models that calculated the total rainfall and total water absorbed for each engineering design through a modeling environment specifically designed for this project (Lilly et al, 2020). For a more detailed description of the goals and timing of individual lessons, see Lilly et al (2022).…”

“…To examine the kinds of verbal supports that teachers use during instruction, and how the supports may change in response to different class contexts, we consider different factors that can influence how teachers take up curriculum materials for use in classroom instruction (Figure 1). Specifically, we build upon other models of professional knowledge and classroom enactment (e.g., Gess-Newsome, 2015;Remillard, 2005) to consider teachers' enactment of a specific, NGSS-aligned STEM + CS curriculum through a model of factors that influence classroom enactment and teachers' verbal supports (Lilly et al, 2022). Factors that shape teachers' enactment of STEM + CS curriculum and the ways that teachers' verbally support their students include availability and use of interdisciplinary curricular materials, teacher characteristics, and classroom context (Figure 1).…”

“…Teachers can use pragmatic verbal support to help students engage in disciplinary practices (e.g., Lilly et al, 2022) by helping students to engage in the practices themselves, making the invisible aspects of the practice visible, and breaking down large tasks into smaller pieces (Reiser & Tabak, 2014). In this study, pragmatic supports include ways in which teachers provide verbal support to help students to engage in SEPs by making sense of new information ( sensemaking ), eliciting and utilizing students' prior experiences and understandings ( engaging prior knowledge ), and modeling activities through demonstration and specific instruction ( doing ).…”

“…In particular, this study seeks to understand the verbal supports implemented by teachers during classroom enactment of NGSS‐aligned curricular materials across general and inclusive classroom contexts. This study builds upon a previous case study that investigated the nature of verbal support in a general classroom context (Lilly et al, 2022) to compare verbal supports across general and inclusive classrooms.…”