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Background: Despite the prevalence and potential of K-12 engineering outreach programs, the moment-to-moment dynamics of outreach educators' facilitation of engineering learning experiences are understudied. There is a need to identify outreach educators' teaching moves and to explore the implications of these moves. Purpose/Hypothesis: We offer a preliminary framework for characterizing engineering outreach educators' teaching moves in relation to principles of ambitious instruction. This study describes outreach educators' teaching moves and identifies learning opportunities afforded by these moves. Design/Method: Through discourse analysis of video recordings of a university-led engineering outreach program, we identified teaching moves of novice engineering outreach educators in interaction with elementary student design teams. We considered 18 outreach educators' teaching moves through a lens of ambitious instruction. Results: In small group interactions, outreach educators used ambitious, conservative, and inclusive teaching moves. These novice educators utilized talk moves that centered students' ideas and agency. Ambitious moves included two novel teaching moves: design check-ins and revoicing tangible manifestations of students' ideas. Ambitious moves offered students opportunities to engage in engineering design. Conservative moves provided opportunities for students to make technical and affective progress, and to experience engineering norms. Conclusions: Our work is formative in describing engineering outreach educators' teaching moves and points to outreach educators' capability in using ambitious moves. Ambitious engineering instruction may be a useful framework for designing engineering outreach to support students' participation and progress in engineering design. Additionally, conservative teaching moves, typically considered constraining, may support productive student affect and engagement in engineering design.

Professional development opportunities for museum educators are often short-term experiences that are void of reflections to support one's professional growth and practices within a collaborative environment. Video clubs may serve as an effective approach to supporting the professional growth and practices of educators in museum settings. Video clubs are composed of a group of educators engaged in video-based reflections around their work and interactions with others. In collaboration with six museums, we considered how video clubs, developed and implemented to promote professional growth and learning in school learning environments, would translate to a museum learning environment with a specific focus on interactions of failure experiences in STEAM-related making programs. In this paper, we highlight benefits, challenges, learnings, and recommendations as a way to support museums interested in establishing and implementing reflective practices within video recording and video sharing.

Background: Capturing measures of students' attitudes toward science has long been a focus within the field of science education. The resulting interest has led to the development of many instruments over the years. There is considerable disagreement about how attitudes should be measured, and especially whether students' attitudes toward science can or should be measured unidimensionally, or whether separate attitude dimensions or subscales should be considered. When it is agreed upon that the attitudes toward science construct should be measured along separate subscales, there is no consensus about which subscales should be used. Methods: A streamlined version of the modified Attitudes Towards Science Inventory (mATSI), a widely used science measurement instrument, was validated for a more diverse sample as compared to the original study (Weinburgh and Steele in Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering 6:87-94, 2000). The analytical approach used factor analyses and longitudinal measurement invariance. The study used a sample of 2016 self-reported responses from 6 and 7th grade students. The factor analysis elucidated the factor structure of students' attitudes toward science, and some modifications were made in accordance with the results. Measurement invariance analysis was used to confirm the stability of the measure. Results: Our results support that the subscales, "anxiety toward science" and "value and enjoyment of science," are two factors and stable over time. Conclusions: Our results suggest that our proposed modified factor structure for students' attitudes toward science is reliable, valid, and appropriate for use in longitudinal studies. This study and its resulting streamlined mATSI survey could be of value to those interested in studying student engagement and measuring middle-school students' attitudes toward science.

The purpose of this exploratory study is to propose a pedagogical nexus for maker educators that is specific to making and tinkering in K–12 formal learning environments. The intent is to document the pedagogical approaches of practising teachers as they gain experience with making practices and principles. Based on the analysis of interview data from 24 self-identified maker educators, participants created opportunities and provided instructional support to engage students in making through the use of five approaches: Tool/Technique-Focused Making, Curriculum-Focused Making, Inquiry-Focused Making, Application-Focused Making and Interest-Focused Making. While differences in terms of the goal of the making activity existed within each approach, there were also commonalities across the approaches such as student outcomes and means of assessment. The authors discuss implications for the use of these pedagogical approaches of making and possibilities for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractMuseum educators play a major role in how visitors’ experience failure moments during STEM-related activities. The purpose of this study was to explore how museum educators co-constructed iteration through failure moments with visitors during an engineering activity. Utilizing an instrumental case study, we analyzed video data and one-on-one reflective meetings from five museum educators. Through our analysis, we highlight how educators and visitors are able to jointly attend, interpret, and respond to failures that leads to continuous improvements of the prototype and/or design process (i.e., iteration). The significance of this study lies in providing informal educators with approaches they can incorporate to support visitors during the failure-learning process, namely, strategies that develop visitors’ noticing skills around failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]