Category: Main Blog
At the Concord Consortium, we believe that the most powerful educational experiences engage the whole learner, and that educational technologies are most effective when they leverage students’ social, cognitive, and creative abilities. Yet as trends in educational technology push us toward more individualized, computer based-instruction on personal devices, these advances threaten to constrain learning to […]
With renewed attention to global environmental challenges, understanding how Earth’s systems work is essential to both thinking about those challenges and finding potential solutions. Teaching about human interactions with Earth systems requires that students apply relevant science concepts to these challenges. For example, students should understand the water cycle when exploring freshwater distribution, the atmospheric […]
Are you attending the 2018 NSTA annual conference in Atlanta March 15-18? We’re leading 10 presentations at the Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC) and the Omni Atlanta Hotel at the CNN Center and one short course at the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel. Something for everyone, from modeling science in kindergarten to data science education. Join […]
When you live in New England in the winter, you pay attention to the forecast. Large snowstorms can make travel near impossible. Heavy snow and blowing winds can cause coastal flooding, power outages, and roof collapses. The National Weather Service (NWS) exists to “provide weather, water, and climate data, forecasts and warnings for the protection […]
To kick off this Everyday Inquiry with R series, I’d like to recount a conversation between my friend Eric and me about one of Americans’ favorite foods, yogurt. R is a free programming language for statistical computing and graphics, which we’re using in our new National Science Foundation-funded CodeR4MATH project to research the development of […]
How well do students learn genetics concepts using Geniverse in their high school biology class? Scarlett, the Geniverse female avatar, and Arrow the dragon journey to the remote Drake Breeder’s Guild. With funding from the National Science Foundation, we sought to understand the contributions and challenges of teacher implementation of digital games by studying Geniverse, […]
There are three kinds of mathematics: the math that’s taught, the math that’s learned, and the math that’s needed in the 21st century STEM workplace. With support from the Advanced Technological Education Program at the National Science Foundation, Michael Hacker, Co-Director of the Center for STEM Research at Hofstra University, and I organized a conference […]
Integrating computational thinking into core science content and practices is a major goal of our InSPECT project, which is developing hands-on high school biology investigations using simple electronic sensors with Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity—a far cry from the simple germination experiments students usually encounter. An article in the Fall 2017 Concord Consortium newsletter (“Science Thinking […]
Google’s Doodle on January 9 honored Har Gobind Khorana, a Nobel laureate whose work with DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis was seminal to deciphering the genetic code. Did anyone besides us (shout out to our own Eli Kosminsky!) notice that, midway through the day, the cartoon changed? Google Doodle in the morning… The same […]
Nine publications illuminate our research in educational technology in 2017. Learn about engineering design tools that may help bridge the design-science gap (#5), a systems modeling tool that supports students in the NGSS practice of developing and using models and the crosscutting concept of systems (#1), an Earth science curriculum that increases student scientific argumentation […]