With a belief in the need for a reform in education that prepares students for life, work, and citizenship in a globalized economy, leaders were determined to connect students across the district, state, country, and globe in global collaborative STEM projects. These projects were aligned to the standards but also afforded students the opportunity…

Social capital research has demonstrated the value of relationships and networks to enhance college opportunity for first-generation students. While most work has focused on individual students and their ties, high schools play a critical role in social capital processes by connecting students to external college access organizations and…

This study employed design-based logistic regression to examine the extent to which attending a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) magnet high school, school demographics, and student-level factors explain racial/ethnic differences in a student's intent to declare a STEM major in the first semester of college. Data were drawn…

Analogical reasoning is central to all learning, whether in daily life situations, in the classroom or while doing research. Although analogies can aid the learning process of making sense of phenomena and understanding new ideas in terms of known ideas, these should be used with care. This article reports a study of the use of analogies and the…

We have developed a laboratory exercise designed to help students translate between different field representations. It starts with students qualitatively mapping field lines for various bar magnet configurations and continues with a Hall probe experiment in which students execute a series of scaffolded tasks, culminating in the prediction and…

This paper presents a method to measure the movement of an object from specific locations on a straight line using an iPhone's magnetometer. In this method, called "magnetogate," an iPhone is placed on a moving object (in this case a toy car) and small neodymium magnets are arranged at equal intervals on one side of a straight line. The…

Although lab activities play an important role in physics teaching, many of these activities do not attain the expected objectives. Many reasons can be advanced for this, such as a lack of apparatus/equipment in schools, limits to the lab time allocated, teachers' lack of knowledge and skills about lab-oriented teaching methods or the teachers'…

In order for the model of a STEAM education to be successful, it must be embedded into a school that not only acknowledges the rigor in the arts, but also encourages creativity and innovation. Although claims for a causal link between art and student academic achievement have provided no evidence, further investigation is needed to determine what…

North Salisbury Elementary School (NSS) is located in Salisbury, Maryland, and has the distinction of being a school that serves dual academic programs. The school serves a traditional population of students who live within the school's district, and it also serves the high performing students in the Magnet program, an accelerated academic…

Through school-based networks, parents obtain information, practical help, and other resources. Because networks vary by size and structure, access to these resources is uneven. What accounts for differences in access to social ties and in the mobilization of those ties to provide resources? In this article, we analyze a network of mothers of…

In this paper we discuss the role of transduction in the teaching and learning of science. We video-filmed pairs of upper-secondary physics students working with a laboratory task designed to encourage transduction (Bezemer & Kress, 2008). The students were simply instructed to use a hand-held electronic measurement device (IOLab) to find the…

Systems thinking is highly desirable for re-imagining chemistry education, which will help in the development of an integrated and sustainable approach that takes into account the interdependence of a system under study with other components of the ecosystem rather than practicing a fragmented approach. Thus, to develop a systems' perspective into…

Background/Context: To enhance postsecondary completion and minimize equity gaps, researchers have focused on defining, measuring, and developing students' college readiness, or the preparation required to persist in higher education. While this work has been useful to identify the ingredients of postsecondary success, the emphasis on individual…

The purpose of this explanatory quantitative case study was to examine the relationship between service-learning, cognitive engagement, and self-efficacy for high school students. The study was conducted at a high school located in North Carolina. Fifty-one students in grades 10 to 12 participated in the study. All students in the study had…

The answer to this month's question, "Can electromagnetic waves affect emotions," is yes. Wherever there are electromagnetic (EM) waves (basically everywhere!), there is the potential for them directly or indirectly to affect the emotions. But what about the likely motivation behind the originally-posed question? Can EM waves affect your…