Barbara lynn Schneider

Michigan State University | MSU · college of education

Global science education reform calls for developing student knowledge-in-use that applies the integrated knowl- edge of core ideas and scientific practices to make sense of phenomena or solve problems. Knowledge-in-use devel- opment requires a long-term, standards-aligned, coherent learning system, including curriculum and instruction, assessment,...

Global science education reform calls for developing student knowledge-in-use that applies the integrated knowledge of core ideas and scientific practices to make sense of phenomena or solve problems. Knowledge-in-use development requires a long-term, standards-aligned, coherent learning system, including curriculum and instruction, assessment, and...

This longitudinal study examines the relationship between students' knowledge-in-use performance and their performance on third-party designed summative tests within a coherent and equitable learning environment. Focusing on third-grade students across three project-based learning (PBL) units aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS...

Meta-analysts often ask a yes-or-no question: Is there an intervention effect or not? This traditional, all-or-nothing thinking stands in contrast with current best practice in meta-analysis, which calls for a heterogeneity-attuned approach (i.e., focused on the extent to which effects vary across procedures, participant groups, or contexts). This...

As AI and machine learning permeates every area of life, its use to ameliorate educational inequities becomes of great interest. One important application of machine learning within education is to help students increase their alignment of career choice, educational attainment, and projected salary. Alignment theory has shown that having alignment...

For nearly a decade, two science interventions anchored in project-based learning (PBL) principles have been shown to increase student science learning in 3rd grade and high school physical science classes. Both interventions employed a randomized control trial of several thousand students (N = 3,271 in 3rd grade and N = 4,238 in 10th, 11th, and 12...

Meta-analysts often ask a yes-or-no question: Is there an intervention effect or not? This traditional, all-or-nothing thinking stands in contrast with current best practice in meta-analysis, which calls for a heterogeneity-attuned approach (i.e., focused on the extent to which effects vary across procedures, participant groups, or contexts). This...

This investigation studied the effects of the Multiple Literacies in Project-Based Learning science intervention on third graders' academic, social, and emotional learning. This intervention includes four science units and materials, professional learning, and post-unit assessments; features of project-based learning; three-dimensional learning (Na...

Student science proficiency development demands sustainable and coherent learning environment support. Scholars argue that project-based learning (PBL) is an efficient approach to promoting student science learning, compared to conventional instructions. Yet, few studies have delved into the learning process to explore how a coherent PBL system con...

As AI and machine learning permeates every area of life, its use to ameliorate educational inequities becomes of great interest. One important application of machine learning within education is to help students increase their alignment of career choice, educational attainment, and projected salary. Alignment theory has shown that having alignment...

We study the long-term effects of a psychological intervention on longitudinal academic outcomes and degree completion of college students. All freshmen at a large public university were randomized to an online growth mindset, belonging, or control group. We tracked students' academic outcomes including GPA, number of credits attempted and earned,...

Crafting Engaging Science Environments is a high school chemistry and physics project-based learning intervention that meets Next Generation Science Standards performance expectations. It was administered to a diverse group of over 4,000 students in a randomized control trial in California and Michigan. Results show that treatment students, on aver...

To meet the demands of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), teachers need to reconsider their current instructional practices, shifting from learning about scientific ideas to making sense of phenomena and solving problems using three-dimensional learning components. Project-Based Learning (PBL) provides a framework for creating NGSS-align...

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, research teams in the United States and Finland were collaborating on a study to improve adolescent academic engagement in chemistry and physics and the impact remote teaching on academic, social, and emotional learning. The ongoing “Crafting Engaging Science Environments” (CESE) intervention afforded a rare data...

In response to the call for promoting three-dimensional science learning (NRC, 2012), researchers argue for developing assessment items that go beyond rote memorization tasks to ones that require deeper understanding and the use of reasoning that can improve science literacy. Such assessment items are usually performance-based constructed responses...

We present teacher–researcher partnership (TRP) as a way of fostering teachers’ professional learning. Teachers’ participation as research group members is an essential aspect of the partnership. Teachers and researchers share the same goal, which is to improve their understanding of and enhance students’ engagement in science. Project-based learni...

Init2Winit, a gamified mobile application designed to increase students' alignment knowledge between college, career, and salary expectations has been beta-tested in midwestern urban and rural U.S. high schools (age 14-18). Students earn different points in the game when their educational expectations and expected annual income are matched with the...

Init2Winit is a gamified mobile application designed to promote college and career knowledge among adolescents. Init2Winit offers students multiple opportunities to explore college and career pathways using game tunnels; this tunnel play informs students’ understanding of how mis/aligned choices can have varying consequences for their future. Our s...

Meeting the vision of the Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, A framework for K-12 science education: Practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas, The National Academies Press, 2012) and the Next Generation of Science Standards (NGSS) requires a more integrated approach to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educati...

Recruiting high-quality physics teachers for low-socioeconomic status (SES) schools is essential for ensuring equity but is challenging globally. China launched a four-year program to meet the challenge by providing free education and stipends and promising a career position to attract high-performance secondary graduates, while using a contract to...

Recruiting high-quality physics teachers for low-socioeconomic status (SES) schools is essential for ensuring equity but is challenging globally. China launched a four-year program to meet the challenge by providing free education and stipends and promising a career position to attract high-performance secondary graduates; while using a contract to...

Using a randomized controlled trial in a nationally representative sample of 65 public high schools (N = 13,660), we tested the effects of a growth mindset intervention on math course- taking patterns and student achievement and explored whether school context was related to the success of the intervention. Students were randomly assigned to comple...

This study seeks to understand how different scientific practices in high school science classrooms are associated with student situational engagement. In this study, situational engagement is conceptualized as the balance between skills, interest, and challenge when the reported experiences are all high. In this study, data on situational engageme...

Background/Context All organizations face turnover in their workforce; however, in schools high turnover can interfere with the effectiveness and efficiency of the school. While past research has examined school-related factors linked to teacher turnover, few studies have examined how external contextual factors are related to teacher turnover. Thi...

This chapter explains a new approach that survey samplers can use when designing probability samples for survey experiments where there is a possibility of treatment heterogeneity. It begins by explaining why probability samples are preferred to nonprobability samples for estimating two quantities (or estimands): population average treatment effect...

A global priority for the behavioural sciences is to develop cost-effective, scalable interventions that could improve the academic outcomes of adolescents at a population level, but no such interventions have so far been evaluated in a population-generalizable sample. Here we show that a short (less than one hour), online growth mindset interventi...

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1979, this article examines the relationship between adolescents‘ educational and occupational expectations, and how they correspond to their subsequent labor market outcomes in adulthood. We show that over-aligned adolescents, those who expect to obtain more education than is necessary f...

Michigan Merit Curriculum (MMC) is a statewide college-preparatory policy that applies to the high school graduating class of 2011 and later. Using detailed Michigan high school transcript data, this article examines the effect of the MMC on various students’ course-taking and achievement outcomes. Our analyses suggest that (a) post-MMC cohorts too...

This study examines the association between high school teachers’ collegial networks and their own familiarity with, and practices related to, supporting students’ admission to college. Using survey data collected at two time points from 163 teachers in four mid-Michigan high schools in 2011-2012, this study (a) employs cluster analysis to map coll...

This study examines the association between student situational engagement and classroom activities in secondary school science classrooms in Finland and the U.S. Situational engagement is conceptualised as times when students feel that a task is interesting and challenging to them and that they have the skills to complete it (see Schneider et al.,...

Adolescence is a time in the life course when educational interventions can have a meaningful impact on future outcomes, extending and supplementing successful early childhood programs. However, waiting a decade or more for the long‐term results of these early childhood programs without intervening in the lives of many adolescents is likely to comp...

Recent policy changes leading to the development of new standards in both the United States and Finland highlight the prioritization of improving opportunities for students to increase their engagement in science. While the goal of engaging students in their learning is highly desirable and can elicit images of eager students on the edge of their s...

This study examines the association between high school teachers’ collegial networks and their own familiarity with, and practices related to, supporting students’ admission to college. Using survey data collected at two time points from 163 teachers in four mid-Michigan high schools in 2011-2012, this study: 1) employs cluster analysis to map coll...

Light-touch social psychological interventions have gained considerable attention for their potential to improve academic outcomes for underrepresented and/or disadvantaged students in postsecondary education. While findings from previous interventions have demonstrated positive effects for racial and ethnic minority and first-generation students i...

Research on student engagement often uses diverse definitions and measures, which can lead to confusion in the understanding and application of findings. As previous reviews of the literature have shown, these measures can overlap with other constructs, such as motivation, but also can differ in other regards. This chapter responds to the research...

Based on their experiences from their work with two national initiatives designed to reform educational practice in U.S., the authors present seven guiding principles of evidence-based/informed educational policy and research to lay the foundation for making rigorous and comprehensive judgments about what evidence and scientific research designs sh...

Since the No Child Left Behind Act was enacted, grading and labeling of schools as low performing have been increasingly used as means to incentivize failing schools to raise student achievement. Using statewide high school data from Michigan, our regression discontinuity analyses show that the bottom 5% of schools identified as persistently lowest...

This study investigates adolescents’ situational passionate experiences, defined as states of strong commitment and intense affect. We examine the extent to which experiencing passion was specific to situations versus individual differences, and explore which activities are likely to elicit adolescents’ passion. Using longitudinal experience sampli...

This article examines the impacts of the Michigan Merit Curriculum (MMC), a statewide college-preparatory curriculum that applies to the high school graduating class of 2011 and later. Our analyses suggest that the higher expectations embodied in the MMC had slight impact on student outcomes. Looking at student performance in the ACT, the only clea...

While the underrepresentation of women in the fast-growing STEM field of computer science (CS) has been much studied, no consensus exists on the key factors influencing this widening gender gap. Possible suspects include gender differences in aptitude, interest, and academic environment. Our study contributes to this literature by applying student...

Most adolescents, regardless of their occupational aspirations, are educationally ambitious. However, these high education ambitions are often unaligned with their occupational ones. This misalignment between students’ educational expectations and their desired careers can be personally and institutionally costly. In contrast to earlier studies of...

One major finding of the Equality of Educational Opportunity (EEO) report was that a smaller proportion of African Americans than whites reported “wanting to go no further than high school in each region of the country.” Blacks in the 1960s had high college aspirations, and those aspirations have continued, but today, as then, fewer blacks than whi...

Many federal, state, and local education policy priorities are aimed at preparing high school students, especially those at risk, to be college- and career-ready when they graduate from high school. A number of programs across different institutional entities have been initiated to achieve these goals, encompassing individual partnerships with scho...

There are many promising psychological interventions on the horizon, but there is no clear methodology for preparing them to be scaled up. Drawing on design thinking, the present research formalizes a methodology for redesigning and tailoring initial interventions. We test the methodology using the case of fixed versus growth mindsets during the tr...

Forty years ago, the National Center for Education Statistics initiated the national longitudinal studies program in response to congressional concern for policy-relevant information on school-to-work transitions. This program has grown substantially, and not unexpectedly, questions have arisen about its usefulness and present operation. This essay...

This essay briefly describes some of the early AERA presidents who were empiricists, several of them directors of research, and how their work connects with some of the issues of design, measurement, analysis, and interpretation today. Beginning with the first president of AERA, a number of presidents through the late 1940s are highlighted, as well...

This study contributes to the research on student engagement in three ways: 1) by combining questionnaire and situational measures of engagement using the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), 2) by applying a demands-resources model to describe the positive and negative aspects of student engagement, and 3) by adopting a person-oriented approach to de...

The transition to adulthood is not easily marked by specific life events such as completing school, getting married, or having children. Variations in timing and the economic and social pressures associated with the traditional signs of adulthood make young people’s decisions about their futures complex and uncertain. Experiences vary by gender, ra...

This article gives an overview about a decade of passion research (2003–2013). First, definitions and measurements of passion are introduced, differentiating between general models on the one hand and domain-specific definitions on the other hand. Second, the relations of passion to other constructs are addressed and the research findings concernin...

This study explores how often students are engaged in their science classes and their affective states during these times, using an innovative methodology that records these experiences in situ. Sampling a subset of high schools in the U.S. and Finland, we collected over 7,000 momentary responses from 344 students over the course of a week. We exam...

The College Ambition Program (CAP) is designed to encourage low-income and minority students to enroll in college. The following analysis presents updated results from my AERA presidential talk in 2014. Results indicate that CAP, which is a schoolwide intervention, increased college attendance for low-income and minority students in seven treatment...

This study investigated gender differences in the experience of situational anxiety (referred to as 'state anxiety') among a sample of 268 US and 202 Finnish lower-and upper-secondary-school / high-school students (51.

This research brief examines the gender gap in specific STEM majors among college sophomores and whether this gap varies across institutions of different selectivity. Using national longitudinal data, results show that women’s underrepresentation on STEM is solely driven by the field of physics, mathematics, engineering, and computer science (PEMC)...

The decreasing number of students who are engaged in science learning has been recognised as a problem. The pre-conditions of engagement and actual engagement were examined using a novel research method to obtain detailed information on Finnish students’ engagement in different situations and to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon. The s...

This essay examines a range of meanings and markers of adulthood, from biological to social, psychological, and legal. It describes a shift from more universal and traditional definitions of adulthood, which were also heavily gendered, to an increasingly diverse and personalized set of definitions. This shift reflects the prolonged, complex, and hi...

Impact evaluation plays a critical role in determining whether federally funded research programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are wise investments. This paper develops quantitative methods for program evaluation and applies this approach to a flagship National Science Foundation–funded education research program, Research a...

What is the role of parents, peers and teachers in shaping school experiences and informing the career choice of males and females? Does the school context matter, and to what extent do educational experiences influence young people's self-concept, values and their outlook to the future? Do teenage aspirations influence later outcomes regarding edu...

This chapter discusses the conflicts between the social and individualized benefits of schools for different groups of students, how they have been institutionalized through various educational reforms over time, and what promises they suggest for the future. Many scholars remain optimistic about the contributions schools can make toward overcoming...

The authors examined how mothers' and fathers' feelings of competition at home and work affect their relationships with their daughters and sons using time-diary data from a national sample of 220 families. Multivariate analyses revealed 3 relationships between parents' feelings of competitiveness at work and home and feelings of competition experi...

Classic theories depict adolescence as a period of emotional storm and stress. Empirical evidence, mostly from cross-sectional studies, suggests that emotional development presents a mixture of continuity, swings, and resilience. We examined longitudinally the average grade trends in components of self-concept and experiential components of self-wo...

The authors describe the intellectual journey associated with developing the concept of relational trust, a measure of social interactions within schools that has often been associated with increased levels of achievement. After detailing the lead author's development of relational trust and its use in researching elementary schools in Chicago in t...

Although progress has been made in reducing gender inequality in postsecondary education, in the U.S. and in other countries, gender gaps remain in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields judged so critical to economic competitiveness. Using the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002, we examine the secondary school expe...

With a rising demand for a college degree and an increasingly complicated college search, application, and selection process, there are a number of interventions designed to ease the college-going process for adolescents and their families. One such intervention, the College Ambition Program (CAP), is specifically designed to be a whole-school inte...

A project at Michigan State University shows how public high schools can influence the number of students headed toward STEM careers.