“Not everyone will be a scientist, but all students need scientific knowledge to understand our world”
Recently, both the United States and Finland have developed new science standards that stress the value of instructional activities that are interesting, challenging, and relevant to students’ lives and futures. This project is a collaboration between researchers and teachers in the both countries to:
- Measure the academic, social, and emotional learning of students in secondary science classes
- Investigate the effect of the implementation of a new form of science instruction modeled after the new Next Generation Science Standards
- Create an integrated exchange program between the United States and Finland for students, teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and policy leaders to foster the professional development of science teachers and improvement of teacher education programs.
Background On Our Research
Since 2013, our team has been studying student engagement. Our perspective is that student engagement is temporally situated and changeable and that what students experience in their everyday classrooms should be examined. However, this has received only limited attention from the research community. We seek to contribute to this area of research by determining how engagement can be measured in situ, identifying activities that enhance engagement, and analyzing links between engagement and a range of student outcomes.
National Science Foundation
“Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) is an NSF-wide program that supports international activities across all NSF supported disciplines. The primary goal of PIRE is to support high quality projects in which advances in research and education could not occur without international collaboration. PIRE seeks to catalyze a higher level of international engagement in the U.S. science and engineering community.
International partnerships are essential to addressing critical science and engineering problems. In the global context, U.S. researchers and educators must be able to operate effectively in teams with partners from different national environments and cultural backgrounds. PIRE promotes excellence in science and engineering through international collaboration and facilitates development of a diverse, globally-engaged, U.S. science and engineering workforce.” (National Science Foundation, 2015)
