Science in Action: Understanding and Sustaining Student Engagement in Environmental Science in Urban, Poverty-Impacted Schools

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY Science in Action: Understanding and Sustaining Student Engagement in Environmental Science in Urban, Poverty-Impacted Schools is a proposal to the Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering (REESE) program to study how domain knowledge, literacy, and the social context of classrooms and schools afford and constrain student engagement and learning in a project-based environmental science course in urban, poverty-impacted high schools. The course concerned, Project-Based Learning Advanced Placement Environmental Science (PBL-APES), was co-designed with a suburban school district. The investigators propose in this (2.5 year, medium empirical) project to study the migration of PBL-APES to two diverse, poverty-impacted urban districts. A design-based implementation research approach will be employed to develop and test specific supports for productive disciplinary engagement that address the wide range of student literacy and domain knowledge that the investigators and others have observed in urban settings.