Designing School District Infrastructures that Support Elementary Science Learning through Leveraging Students’ Communicative Practices

About This Grant

Throughout the United States, elementary classrooms include students with a range of communicative practices and strengths, including strengths in speaking one or more languages, and strengths in generating and understanding different types of representations. Although an emerging body of research has begun to explore how individual teachers can productively leverage these communicative strengths toward enhanced science learning and further develop language through science, there is currently little research on how larger-scale district infrastructures can be designed to support science learning that leverages and supports language development. This project will address this critical gap by developing a process through which school districts can design comprehensive infrastructures that leverage a broad range of linguistic and communicative practices for enhanced science learning among elementary students. Specifically, researchers will partner with district experts in multiple roles, including supervisors, specialists, coaches, principals, and educators. Together, they will envision, co-design, implement, and refine materials that foster the use of research-based practices in science learning, such as using multiple forms of language and communication in the context of standards-aligned tasks in which students explain phenomena or use engineering design processes to develop solutions to problems. Research will explore whether and how different components of the district infrastructure influence elementary educators' science teaching. This project will result in a framework and processes that school districts can adapt as they develop their own instructional visions and systems of teacher support that improve science learning for all elementary students. In this exploratory project, researchers will partner with school districts to co-develop coherent infrastructures that support science learning and language development among elementary students. These infrastructures include a shared instructional vision; a tailored needs assessment; coherent professional learning materials; routines that shape teachers' daily practice; and additional tools as identified during the co-design process. Design-based implementation research will be used to develop and study infrastructure, including investigating how the elementary educators interpret the resulting recommended teaching practices, and whether and how components of the district infrastructure influence their science instruction. Research will also explore how specific envisioning and co-design processes support or constrain the design of district infrastructures and how instructional leaders in different roles learn to support science instruction that leverages the communicative strengths of elementary learners. To achieve these research purposes, the project team will use qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze a range of data sources, such as transcripts from classroom observations and interviews; artifacts from district meetings (e.g., transcripts of audio-recordings, field notes, and participant-generated products); and validated surveys. After initial co-design work with one school district, five districts, each of which includes a significant population of multilingual elementary students, will hold inter-district implementation meetings in which they iteratively discuss, evaluate, and refine the infrastructural materials, prior to their dissemination on a national level. Ultimately, this project will result in empirically-based materials that school districts can use to build coherent systems that support elementary students' science learning, forming the foundation for future success in science pathways for students across the nation who engage in a variety of linguistic and communicative practices. This project is supported by the Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) which seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.