Infusing engineering design projects in K-12 settings can promote interest and attract a wide range of students to engineering careers. However, the current climate of high-stakes testing and accountability to standards leaves little room to incorporate engineering design into K-12 classrooms. We argue that design-based learning,

Despite robust rationales for using an inquiry-based pedagogy in university and college-level science courses, it is conspicuously absent from many of today's classrooms. Inquiry-based learning is crucial for developing critical-thinking skills, honing scientific problem solving ability, and developing scientific content knowledge. Inquiry-based pedagogy provides students with opportunities to participate and practice the activities involved in science. There are a number of dimensions that are integral to the creation of an inquiry-based learning environment that are applicable to the geological sciences. We considered these dimensions in the design of an inquiry-based undergraduate geology course and collected quantitative and qualitative data that documents the successful implementation of this redesigned course. Our findings show that when appropriately structured, inquiry-based learning can help students develop critical scientific-inquiry skills, suggesting that inquiry-based learning is essential for teaching geology at the university or college level. With the proper alignment of course objectives, content, pedagogical design, tasks, assessment strategies, and instructor and student roles, geoscience instructors at the university or college level can create inquiry-based learning environments in which students are able to successfully develop skills in scientific inquiry as well as geological content knowledge. , 1997, p. 327) (Barstow and Geary, 2002) details a new vision for teaching and learning in the earth sciences. Blueprint for Change advocates adopting a 'science-as-a-verb' perspective that emphasizes the human elements (e.g., successes, failures and emotional dispositions) that are associated with engaging in science as inquiry (Yore et al., 2002). This is in direct opposition to the 'science-as-a-noun' perspective, which stresses textbook knowledge, lists and procedures about scientific processes. Geoscience education should help students develop thinking skills such as inquiry, visual literacy, understanding of systems and models, and the ability to apply knowledge and problem solving to a range of substantive, real-world issues (Barstow and Geary, 2002). To accomplish such goals, Blueprint for Change recommends that science educators use inquiry-based learning and visualization technologies in the classroom, laboratories, and other environments to promote understanding of the earth as a system of processes. INTEGRATING INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING INTO UNDERGRADUATE GEOLOGY [G]eology is both a body of knowledge and a way of thinking and doing things. That is, there are things that we do operationally as well as things we know. Often in undergraduate education there is a tendency to emphasize the knowledge but not the way of thinking and doing. (Buchwald Blueprint for Change: A Report from The National Conference on the Revolution in Earth and Space Science EducationThe purpose of this paper is to provide practical guidelines to instructors of undergraduate geoscience courses who wish t...

While the purposes of design and science are often different, they share some key practices and processes. Design-based science learning, which combines the processes of engineering design with scientific inquiry, is one attempt to engage students in scientific reasoning via solving practical problems. Although research suggests that engaging students in design-based science learning can be effective for learning both science process and content, more research is needed to understand how to overcome what Vattam and Kolodner (Pragmatics and Cognition 16:406-437, 2008) called ''the design-science gap.'' This study, therefore, takes a first step at systematically delving into this issue of bridging the design-science gap by examining the problem-solving strategies that students are using when they solve a prototypical design task. Videotaped performance assessments of high and low performing teams were analyzed in depth. Results suggest that students use both science reasoning strategies (e.g., control of variables) and design-focused strategies (e.g., adaptive growth). However, the strategies commonly associated with success in science (e.g., control of variables) did not necessarily lead to success in design. In addition, while both science reasoning strategies and design-focused strategies led to content learning, the content learned was different.

Urban teacher residencies have emerged as an innovation for recruiting, preparing, and retaining teachers for high-need urban schools. Though residencies aim to prepare teachers for specific urban contexts, we know little about how context is conceptualized in the teacher education curriculum or what teachers learn about it. This study finds that participants in one residency in San Francisco came to see context as complex and layered, interrupting stigmas often associated with urban schools. Participants felt well prepared to teach in particular high-need settings, but their knowledge and skills did not necessarily transfer to other urban settings in the same city.

This article is an argument about something that is both important and severely underemphasized in most current science curricula. The empirical attitude, fundamental to science since Galileo, is a habit of mind that motivates an active search for feedback on our ideas from the material world. Although more simple views of science manifest the empirical attitude through relation of theories to data, we describe more recent philosophical scholarship that characterizes the relation of theories to data through phenomena (regularities in nature's behavior that can be identified and characterized through data). This view highlights the centrality of material practice, in which scientists design data collection events to inform phenomena. Thus manifestation of the empirical attitude in science is characterized as a design endeavor that involves considerably sophisticated coordination among theories, phenomena, data, and data collection events. If we want students to learn how to participate in such work, curricula should break down these complex processes into more basic components at least at the outset. Our recommendation is to begin with design activities that can focus on the empirical attitude initially without the complex coordination with phenomena and data. We present an example of such an activity and share results that suggest design activities can target the empirical attitude and be built upon in curricula to gradually include coordination with phenomena and theories.Authorship is equal and order of appearance is alphabetical.