Co-designing Space Weather Curriculum that Responds to High School Students’ Interests

• In Event: Centering Teacher and Student Voice in Classroom Assessment Design: Possibilities and Tensions Between Research and Reality

Abstract

Objectives
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 (NRC, 2012). This paper describes efforts to co-design a a high school space weather curriculum with physics teachers in ways that build on and respond to students’ interests.
Perspectives
The following principles guided our curriculum and assessment co-design:
Culturally relevant/sustaining pedagogies (CRP/CSP). Stemming from work on culturally relevant/sustaining pedagogy and assessment (Paris & Alim, 2017; Evans, 2023; Ladson-Billings, 1995), we focus on student achievement, cultural competence, and critical awareness.
Coherent from students’ perspective. Coherence from students' perspectives invites them to be co-investigators, creating activities based on their questions and ideas about a phenomenon. This fosters a complete contextual picture and investment in their learning (Reiser et al., 2021).
Following design-based approaches, we co-designed the curriculum and assessments with teachers to intentionally embody these principles (Sandoval, 2014) as students learned about the anchoring phenomenon of how satellites are affected by space weather.
Method
Context. The co-design team included physics, Earth, space science, and engineering teachers, as well as educational researchers, astrophysicists, and district curriculum leaders.
Design. The co-design team met regularly to create curriculum and assessments that built on the named principles and engaged students’ interests. The resulting storyline (Figure 1) built on 9th-grade physics students' questions as expressed in responses to an interest survey (Edelson et al., 2021). After each lesson set, teachers administered an exit ticket to track student interest trends, review with colleagues, and inform their teaching, and students created and revised models that represented the unit’s anchoring phenomenon.
Sources of Data. We draw upon multiple sources of data, including students’ responses to embedded modeling prompts, student responses to exit tickets adapted from frameworks for CRP (Likert and open-ended questions), and interviews with two key physics teachers involved in the co-design and pilot.
Exit Ticket Analysis.We coded the student’s open-ended exit ticket responses according to themes. The full paper includes themes triangulated across students’ qualitative responses, students’ written models, and teacher interviews.
Results
Overall, students’ open-ended responses indicated they enjoyed the curriculum; for example, “I think the task was engaging with the models that we would make, it made me understand it more visually...” Teachers also reported student engagement throughout the unit, noting students’ models became more sophisticated through the unit’s embedded assessments (Figure 2).
Simultaneously, tensions emerged with students showing decreased interest as the unit progressed (see Table 1); teachers also noted both this decreased interest, and student fatigue around revising models in response to the same prompt multiple times. Teachers considered how they could adjust instruction in both long and short feedback cycles (e.g., Wiliam, 2007). The full paper will present these trends in greater detail.
Significance
This study contributes to understanding how student interest can be the focus of ongoing classroom assessment and used to help teachers support science learning.

Authors

• Melinda Crystal Lopez, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Erin Marie Furtak, University of Colorado - Boulder