Chapter 5: Using Visual Data in a Professional Development Program to Improve Science Teaching and Learning in K–6 Classrooms¹

“Reinvigorating interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects has been the national agenda since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983” (STEMblogTM, 2012, American STEM Education section, para. 1). Reform documents in science education in the United States, such as National Science Education Standards (NSES) by National Research Council (NRC) in 1996 and Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1993, place great emphasis on “… the inclusion of inquiry, a ‘less is more’ philosophy, and the movement to standards-based education” (Yang, Soprano, & McAllister, 2012, p. 241). A recent reform effort is the publication of A Framework for K–12 Science Education (NRC, 2012), which was intended to guide the development of new science standards (from here on, the Framework is used to refer to the NRC document, A Framework for K–12 Science Education). The Framework presents a new “vision for education in the sciences and engineering in which students, over multiple years of school, actively engage in scientific and engineering practices and apply crosscutting concepts to deepen their understanding of the core ideas in these fields” (NRC, 2012, pp. 9–10).