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Supporting youths' STEM dispositions takes an entire community of adults, yet we must understand the dispositions that adults bring to such community efforts, ways they influence youths' learning and are shaped by the community. In this paper, we examine a sociotechnical system called Science Everywhere, which invited the broader community to interact with science learning experiences youths shared across home, school, and community settings. Integrating frameworks for disposition and asset-based community development, we present a case study of four focal adults within Science Everywhere embedded in one neighborhood. We make the case for a relational perspective of disposition development that leverages community members' science and relational assets to foster dynamic, community-specific learning opportunities for youths, particularly those from resource-constrained communities.

With the spread of learning analytics (LA) dashboards in K-12 schools, educators are increasingly expected to make sense of data to inform instruction. However, numerous features of school settings, such as specialized vantage points of educators, may lead to different ways of looking at data. This observation motivates the need to carefully observe and account for the ways data sense-making occurs, and how it may differ across K-12 professional roles. Our mixed-methods study reports on interviews and think-aloud sessions with middle-school mathematics teachers and instructional coaches from four districts in the United States. By exposing educators to an LA dashboard, we map their varied reactions to visual data and reveal prevalent sense-making patterns. We find that emotional, analytical, and intentional responses inform educators' sense-making and that different roles at the school afford unique vantage points toward data. Based on these findings, we offer a typology for representing sense-making in a K-12 school context and reflect on how to expand visual LA process models.

Purpose: In the USA, 22-40% of youth who have been accepted to college do not enroll. Researchers call this phenomenon summer melt, which disproportionately affects students from disadvantaged backgrounds. A major challenge is providing enough mentorship with the limited number of available college counselors. The purpose of this study is to present a case study of a design and user study of a chatbot (Lilo), designed to provide college advising interactions. Design/methodology/approach: This study adopted four primary data sources to capture aspects of user experience: daily diary entries; in-depth, semi-structured interviews; user logs of interactions with the chatbot; and daily user surveys. User study was conducted with nine participants who represent a range of college experiences. Findings: Participants illuminated the types of interactions designs that would be particularly impactful for chatbots for college advising including setting reminders, brokering social connections and prompting deeper introspection that build efficacy and identity toward college-going. Originality/value: As a growing body of human-computer interaction research delves into the design of chatbots for different social interactions, this study illuminates key design needs for continued work in this domain. The study explores the implications for a specific domain to improve college enrollment: providing college advising to youth.

The purpose of this study was to build a better understanding of the issues that students encounter during the summer that deter them from enrolling in the first semester of college in the fall. In Study 1, responses to a short survey were examined, and 4 critical factors were identified as deterring students: lack of college-bound identity, life circumstances and financial responsibilities, perceived lack of academic preparation, and opting for alternative career choices. In Study 2, transcription data were analyzed from texting dialogues between students and their college advisers. A thematic analysis revealed that several practical issues emerged with great frequency--most notably financial aid concerns. Social-emotional communication was also identified as a possible mechanism for developing the students' college-bound identity. These findings underscore the need to provide underrepresented students with not only information for completing college and financial aid applications but also with the opportunity for social support and emotional guidance during the summer leading up to college enrollment.

What if the environment could be transformed in culturally-responsive and inclusive ways to foster high-quality interactions and spark conversations that drive learning? In this article, we describe a new initiative accomplishing this, called Playful Learning Landscapes (PLL). PLL is an evidence-based initiative that blends findings from the science of learning with community-based participatory research to transform physical public spaces and educational settings into playful learning hubs. Here, we describe our model for conducting this research, which is mindful of three key components: community input, how children learn best, and what children need to learn to be successful in the 21st century economy. We describe how this model was implemented in two PLL case studies: one in a predominantly Latine community and the second in early childhood education classrooms. Furthermore, we describe how research employing our model can be rigorously and reliably evaluated using observational and methodological tools that respond to diverse cultural settings and learning outcomes. For example, our work evaluates how PLL impacts adult-child interaction quality and language use, attitudes about play and learning, and community civic engagement. Taken together, this article highlights new ways to involve community voices in developmental and educational research and provides a model of how science can be translated into practice and evaluated in culturally responsive ways. This synthesis of our process and evaluation can be used by researchers, policymakers, and educators to reimagine early educational experiences with an eye toward the built environment that children inhabit in everyday life, creating opportunities that foster lifelong learning.

Researchers and developers of learning analytics (LA) systems are increasingly adopting human-centred design (HCD) approaches, with growing need to understand how to apply design practice in different educational settings. In this paper, we present a design narrative of our experience developing dashboards to support middle school mathematics teachers' pedagogical practices, in a multi-university, multi-school district, improvement science initiative in the United States. Through documentation of our design experience, we offer ways to adapt common HCD methods -- contextual design and design tensions -- when developing visual analytics systems for educators. We also illuminate how adopting these design methods within the context of improvement science and research-practice partnerships fundamentally influences the design choices we make and the focal questions we undertake. The results of this design process flow naturally from the appropriation and repurposing of tools by district partners and directly inform improvement goals.

There is a great need to understand how we might leverage research-practice partnerships (RPPs) to change K–12 school practices, organizations, and policies that continue to reflect structural racism in schooling. In this paper, we present case vignettes of RPPs that aim to create educational improvement efforts but focus on building from the racialized understandings of student and educator experiences. The case vignettes explore the tensions and obstacles that RPPs might face in this context and how partnerships might operationalize processes to create conditions for positive change when putting racial experiences at the center of their work. We illustrate how the creation of RPPs and the moves we made helped us understand the connection between race and the personal, interpersonal, and systemic dynamics of partnership work. These cases contribute a deeper conceptual understanding that may be transferable to other RPP contexts and inform the work of other RPPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present analyses from a researcher-practitioner partnership in the District of Columbia Public Schools, where we are exploring the impact of educational software on students' academic achievement. We analyze a unique data set that combines student-level information from the district with data of student usage of a mathematics game platform: First in Math (FIM). These data offer a window into long-standing issues in the educational technology literature around implementation, equity, and student achievement. We show that time spent in FIM was correlated with improved future performance on standardized math assessments for students in Grades 4-8. However, student time spent using FIM was highly related to factors such as race, gender, and prior achievement. Such observations from data are helpful for school districts and researchers to inform equitable implementation of new technologies and maximize benefits to learners.

In this article, we offer theory‐grounded narratives of a 4‐year participatory design process of a Learning Analytics tool with K‐12 educators. We describe how we design‐in‐partnership by leveraging educators' routines, values and cultural representations into the designs of digital dashboards. We make our long‐term reasoning visible by reflecting upon how design decisions were made, discussing key tensions and analysing to what extent the developed tools were taken up in practice. Through thick design narratives, we reflect upon how cultural forms—recognizable cultural constructs that might cue and facilitate specific activities—were identified among educators and informed the design of a dashboard. We then examined the extent to which the designed tool supported coaches and teachers to engage in Generative Uncertainty, an interpretive stance in which educators manifest productive inquiries towards data. Our analysis highlights that attuning to cultural forms is a valuable first step but not enough towards designing LA tools for systems in ways that fit institutionalized practices, challenge instrumental uses and spur productive inquiry. We conclude by offering two key criteria for making culturally‐grounded design decisions in the context of long‐term partnerships. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Participatory design can invite stakeholders to directly inform the creation of LA artefacts that fit their needs, context and cultural markers.What this paper adds Cultural forms can be identified and leveraged in the design of LA tools.HCLA scholars ought to design for systems—the complex body of organizational routines, cultural practices and interactions among multiple stakeholders—and not just for users.Implications for practice and/or policy Leveraging cultural forms in LA needs to be accompanied by a critical view of which practices, behaviours, values and structures are suggested by such forms.Designing features that are easy to use, are associated with concrete tasks, and fit into existing cultural practices are three criteria for embedding cultural forms into LA design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the school library community, there have been persuasive calls for school librarians to contribute to science learning. We present a conceptual framework that links national standards of science education ("Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas," referred to as "Framework") to core elements embedded in "AASL's Standards for the 21st-Century Learner" (referred to as "Standards"), the standard that guides the teaching and learning of multiple literacies for which librarians are responsible in schools. Based on this conceptual framework, we highlight how four middle school librarians in a large school district in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States enact and expand their five roles--information specialist, instructional partner, teacher, program administrator, and leader--while they participate in Sci-Dentity, a science-infused after-school program. We observed clear links between skills, dispositions, and responsibilities from the "Standards." taught and facilitated by these school librarians, to principles in the Framework. We contend that the learning of the Standards is crucial to creating and sustaining science-learning environments as envisioned in the "Framework" and argue that school librarians' role in science learning is more vital than it has ever been. (Contains 1 figure and 1 footnote.)