Co-Designing Space Weather Curriculum that Responds to High School Students' Interests

Co-Designing a spacce weather curriculum Lopez full poster image

Melinda Lopez, CU PhD Student School of Education

Objective:
    Science education reforms emphasize curriculum and assessments that respond to and sustain students' interests as they engage in science practices, apply crosscutting concepts, and learn disciplinary core ideas (National Research Council, 2012). This poster proposal describes efforts to co-design a high school space weather curriculum with physics teachers, educational researchers, and scientists specializing in satellite surface charging in ways that build on and respond to students' interests.

Theoretical Framework:
    Two guiding principles shaped our curriculum and assessment co-creation process: culturally responsive pedagogies and coherence from the students' perspective. Building on the work of scholars focused on culturally relevant, sustaining, and responsive pedagogies (Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris, 2012), our conceptual framework for analyzing this study draws from Carla Evans' research within a multicultural K-12 education setting in Hawaii (Evans, 2023). Working with a similarly diverse school district, we expanded on Evans' culturally responsive pedagogical frameworks for designing and evaluating assessments, adapting to fit our work of creating curriculum materials and student interest surveys.
    Recent science education reforms emphasize the importance of curricula being coherent from the student's perspective, rather than organized according to the thought process of a disciplinary expert. When designed from a student's perspective, students are brought in as co-investigators alongside their teacher, creating activities driven by the questions and ideas they propose regarding the phenomenon. This results in the complete contextual picture, why they are doing what they are doing, and investment in their learning (Reiser et al., 2021).

Methods:
Research Questions:
    For this analysis of the ninth-grade space weather science curriculum, centered on student interests, we ask the following research questions:
1.    How can we design a curriculum for space weather based on CRP principles?
2.    To what degree are students interested in the curriculum? How is this sustained through the unit?
    To answer our research questions, this study implemented a mixed-methods approach, triangulating data from multiple sources: the co-designed curriculum materials, student exit ticket responses, and teacher interviews.

Results:
    We found that a physics curriculum from a co-design space centering students' interests and voices results in an engaging curriculum. The three sources of data for the analysis - the Student Exit Ticket, Curriculum Material Analysis, and Teacher Interviews - suggest that the curriculum materials support the Culturally Responsive framework 
    Overall, our co-design team successfully developed a curriculum that aligns with our culturally responsive principles (RQ1). Improvements are ongoing for areas for Student Cultural Identity & Assets. Additionally, the study has found that the importance of student voice in identifying questions for the unit is reflected in their overall interest and engagement (RQ2).

Scholarly Significance
    This study contributes to understanding how student interest can be the focus of ongoing classroom curriculum and used to help teachers support science learning.

Poster PDF: https://www.colorado.edu/csl/media/1227

 

References
Evans, C. M. (2023). Applying a Culturally Responsive Pedagogical Framework to Design and Evaluate Classroom Performance-Based Assessments in Hawaii. Applied Measurement in Education, 36(3), 269-285. https://doi.org/10.1080/08957347.2023.2214655

Gay, G. (2018). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. In Teachers College Press (2034276370; ED581130; Third edition). Teachers College Press; ERIC; Social Science Premium Collection.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 2.0: A.k.a. the Remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74 - 84. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.84.1.p2rj131485484751

National Research Council. (2012). A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. In National Academies Press (1238190289; ED536476). National Academies Press; ERIC; Social Science Premium Collection. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/13165/a-framework-for-k-12-science-education-practices-crosscutting-concepts

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93-97. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X12441244

Reiser, B. J., Novak, M., McGill, T. A. W., & Penuel, W. R. (2021). Storyline Units: An Instructional Model to Support Coherence from the Students' Perspective. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 32(7), 805-829. https://doi.org/10.1080/1046560X.2021.1884784