UC Berkeley

Over the last decade, the demands on secondary science teachers have shifted to encompass a new range of objectives. Science teachers need support in their efforts to be responsive as they navigate shifting demands in the teaching profession: new state standards, an ever-diversifying student body, and a drive to integrate social justice into science learning. In the US, for example, the K-12 population has immensely diversified, necessitating curriculum adaptations to support the diverse lived experiences and range of prior knowledge represented in their classrooms. Moreover, new curriculum standards such as the Next Generation Science Standards in the US, have required teachers to adapt curriculum materials to meet new performance expectations. Further, technology has become ubiquitous in classrooms, requiring teachers to learn how to meaningfully integrate new tools into their practice. My dissertation project explores how to support teachers as they navigate these emerging trends within the context of a Research Practice Partnership devoted to promoting coherent science learning in technology-enhanced learning environments.

The studies presented in this dissertation are guided by the overarching research questions: How can we leverage technology to support teachers in their efforts to be more responsive to the needs and ideas of their students? Taken together, the three studies presented in this dissertation shed light on teachers’ trajectories for customizing curriculum to be more responsive, their trajectories for teaching science for social justice, and their trajectories for leveraging technology as a support for their teaching practice.

Specifically, the first study leverages the Knowledge Integration Framework to design and study a professional development workshop to empower teachers to customize their curriculum to better support their students develop understanding of NGSS performance expectations. The workshop activities and supporting technologies foreground pedagogy and emphasize using student work as evidence to inform customization decisions. The second study applies the professional development model from the first study to support teachers to customize the curriculum to feature social justice issues. The study follows the development and implementation of the units with three teachers across two school years. The third study focuses on the design and implementation of automatic scoring models that increase teachers’ access to the social justice and science ideas students use to explain the focal phenomena in the units designed in the second study. Across the studies, the findings have implications for expanding our understanding of Knowledge Integration pedagogy by integrating social justice principles and for the design of technologies that support teachers in principled customization.