With the growing popularity of MOOCs and sharp trend of digitalizing education, there is a huge amount of free digital educational material on the web along with the activity logs of large number of participating students. However, this data is largely unstructured and there is hardly any information about the relationship between material from…

Graphing and calculating percentages are integral skills in a STEM curriculum. Teaching students how to create graphs allows them to identify numerical trends and to express results in a clear and concise manner. In this activity, students will remain engaged in the lesson by moving around the room and then work together to generate their own…

In our science for non-science majors course "21st Century Physics," we investigate modern "Hubble plots" (plots of velocity versus distance for deep space objects) in order to discuss the Big Bang, dark matter, and dark energy. There are two potential challenges that our students face when encountering these topics for the…

On a recent autumn afternoon at Harmony Leland Elementary in Mableton, Georgia, students in a fifth-grade science class investigated the essential process of classification--the act of putting things into groups according to some common characteristics or attributes. While they may have honed these skills earlier in the week by grouping their own…

Using data to redesign instruction is a means of increasing student achievement. Educators in Camden County (Georgia) Schools have used data from benchmark testing since 1999. They hired a commercial vendor to design a benchmark test that is administered four times a year and use the data to generate subject-area reports that can be further…