Concord Consortium Inc

Programs: In the second year of the geniguide project (https://concord. Org/projects/geniguide), the concord consortium (cc) collaborated with project partners at north caroline state university (ncsu). The project's goal is to investigate how to best use the guide intelligent tutoring system (its) to support students and teachers as they use our game-like genetics software, geniventure. The geniguide its and teacher dashboard will give real-time feedback on student progress through geniventure, identifying problem areas, and providing both teachers and students with strategies for success. Design and development of the guide its reached four significant milestones during year 2 of the project: (1) initial integration of evidence-centered design (ecd)-derived rules, (2) implementation of a first-pass student model based on ecd-based concepts, (3) the ability to provide basic hints based on student performance within the context of geniventure, and (4) initial integration with the geniventure learning environment utilizing the guide its protocol developed in year 1 of the project. This work was completed through the close collaboration of ncsu and cc teams. During this year, additional geniventure challenges were designed and developed to gather evidence of student learning of specific ecd-based concepts. Preliminary teacher training and support materials were also developed. Geniventure was tested in four pilot classrooms (two in nc and two in ma), one afterschool program, and one summer camp. Classroom observations, teacher feedback, and preliminary analysis of data collected by the its informed improvements to both the in-game challenges and the hints delivered by the its. Significant effort also went into recruiting teachers and planning more extensive pilot tests in the 2017-2018 school year.

in this year of the common online data analysis platform (codap) project (http://concord. Org/projects/codap and http://codap. Concord. Org), we worked on software design and development; research; and community building and dissemination. Codap offers easy-to-use web-based software that makes it possible for students in grades 6 through college to visualize, analyze, and ultimately learn from data. We have made great strides in creating a community of curriculum and software developers in that we now have a total of nine funded projects on which the codap team collaborates, up from an initial three. In software design and development, we released 46 new software builds with regular bug fixes and feature enhancements (to maps, graphs, functions, software system integration, user control over hierarchical data structures, and new plugins for data simulations). Co-design meetings with our collaborators continued. Significant community building and dissemination has occurred primarily through planning discussions with curriculum development groups, meetups, webinars, presentations at national conferences, and publications, and conducting our first official developer conference in february 2017, with 100 participants in attendance, in berkeley, california.

the major goal of the sensing science through modeling matter: kindergarten students' development of understanding of matter and its changes project (https://concord. Org/our-work/research-projects/sensing-science- modeling-matter) is to develop, research, and document an approach to building a conceptual understanding of matter and its changes in kindergarten students. There is little research that has systematically used a model-based inquiry framework to explore early childhood students' learning of physical science concepts of matter and its changes. Another goal of this project is to integrate probeware and simulations into an inquiry-based and model-centered curriculum that will contribute important data on the evolving structure and content of kindergarten children's physical science models as well as demonstrate children's understanding of models and modeling as they engage in discourse and guided inquiry. Significant effort has been dedicated to the curriculum, assessments, and technology development during the first year by the concord consortium in collaboration with partners at purdue university and the university of massachusetts, amherst. Curriculum: the project created a multi-day, multi-lesson curricula. The unit consists of two inquiry-rich, model-based kindergarten lessons (states of matter and phase changes) that align with core science ideas and skills as outlined in a framework for k-12 science education: practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas. The teacher guide is designed to help teachers facilitate productive student science discourse. The student science notebook prompts students to make predictions, articulate (through words and drawings) their developing models, make sense of emerging patterns in data, and refine their models. Assessments: the project developed assessments to examine student ideas about matter, its composition, behavior, and properties. For the pilot year, assessments were created with the intention of being facilitated by project staff with one to two students at a time. The assessments aimed to gather both physical artifacts (drawings) and verbal data that expressed the students' understanding prior to the curriculum, as well as post-curriculum. The research team also worked on a coding protocol for video of a pilot classroom of 32 kindergarten students in chelmsford, ma, for both interviews and activity implementation. Technology: the project developed multiple forms of technology to engage students and support the curriculum in educating students about the different states of matter. 1) the thermoscope was updated to provide students with an experiential learning opportunity where they can put the sensor into a liquid, solid, or gas at varying temperatures and see how the particles of which it is comprised interact. 2) the particle modeler was developed to provide an interface that allows students to better understand what particles look like and how they interact with each other. Additionally, two interactive videos for students were developed or updated, including the land of bump, an engaging story about how temperature affects particles, and the flying zippies, an interactive online story for students to learn about the different states of matter.

the concord consortium produced technology-based curriculum materials for science, math, and engineering for students in elementary school through college. Our major programs produced dozens of curricular units and activities supporting learning in physics, physical science, earth and environmental science, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and engineering. Aside from our major programs, we gathered and investigated research data from 43 additional programs that inform the development and refinement of curriculum materials, and benefit other researchers and organizations developing educational technology.