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Preparing for the Next Generation Science Standards—Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions
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Dr. Katherine L. McNeill
Katherine L. McNeill (Ph.D. 2006, Science Education, University of Michigan) is
an Associate Professor of science education at Boston College. A former middle school
science teacher, she received her doctorate in science education from the University
of Michigan. Her research focuses on two overlapping areas: 1. Scientific explanations
and arguments; and 2. Science curriculum design and implementation. Through the
generous funding of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Carnegie Corporation
of NY, she has worked on a number of projects focused on the design of middle school
and high school science curriculum developed to support scientific inquiry practices.
Currently, she is on the leadership team with colleagues at the Lawrence Hall of
Science to design a digital middle school science curriculum that provides teachers
with multimedia supports around explanation and argumentation. From this work, Dr.
McNeill has published a book on supporting middle school students in scientific
explanations, a book on supporting elementary students in scientific explanations,
numerous book chapters, and articles in a variety of journals including the Journal
of Research in Science Teaching, Science Education, and The Journal of the
Learning Sciences. In 2011, she received the Early Career Research
Award from the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST). She
has also conducted numerous workshops at the annual meeting of the National Science
Teachers Association (NSTA) and for school districts including the Detroit Public
Schools, the Denver Public Schools and the Boston Public Schools.
Dr. Leema K. Berland
Leema K. Berland (Ph.D. 2008, Learning Sciences, Northwestern University) is an assistant professor of STEM education at the University of Texas in Austin. Dr. Berland is broadly interested in facilitating and studying students as they engage in the disciplinary practices such as scientific argumentation, modeling, and explanation, as well as engineering design practices. In this work, she focuses on understanding how students interpret the disciplinary discussions, how those interpretations influence their participation in the discourse, and why they interpret it in the ways that they do. Each of these questions is designed to better understand the dynamics of how and why students are able (or unable) to productively engage in substantive classroom discourse. She is currently a Co-Principal Investigator on the National Science Foundation funded project “Supporting scientific practices in elementary and middle school classrooms.” In addition, she is a researcher on the NSF funded project “UTeach Engineering.”
For more information contact webseminars@nsta.org
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Underwritten by the Carnegie Corporation of New York
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