Brian Drayton

• Ph.D.
• Technical Education Research Center

High-impact practices (HIPs), such as undergraduate research, first-year seminars, and learning communities, have been shown to generally advance college student success. However, there are often disparities in access, participation, and outcomes between white and racially/ethnically minoritized students. While scholars have critiqued HIPs and prov...

There exists within many communities of interest in our society an invisible fabric of vernacular science activity. This fabric may play an important part in the reception, interpretation, and evaluation or filtering of the results of mainstream science. As illuminated in an ethnographic study, this fabric is seen to be both the result, and the ena...

Based on an ethnographic study of a parent support group, this paper will present data showing how the existence of alternative epistemologies, rather than political identities, shaped parents' responses to childhood vaccinations in a rural New Hampshire community. This framing is distinct in important ways from accounts of science attitudes within...

This qualitative case study examined how a multimodal professional network environment (STEM for all Video Showcase) affected five STEM educational researchers’ capacity to engage in grant funded research at U.S. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Guided by the social capital and professional network literature as a conceptual fr...

The Innovate to Mitigate project adapts crowdsourcing to support project-based STEM education, posing design challenges for secondary-school students to design feasible innovative strategies to mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. The paper presents evidence that the web-mediated communities of practice support learning of STEM concepts...

The Innovate to Mitigate project adapts crowdsourcing to support project-based STEM education, posing design challenges for secondary-school students to design feasible innovative strategies to mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. The paper presents evidence that the web-mediated communities of practice support learning of STEM concepts...

The Innovate to Mitigate project adapts crowdsourcing to support project-based STEM education, posing design challenges for secondary-school students. Students are charged with designing feasible innovative strategies to mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. The paper draws on data from 3 project teams. The paper presents evidence that a...

The Innovate to Mitigate project adapts crowdsourcing to support project-based STEM education, posing design challenges for secondary-school students to design feasible innovative strategies to mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. The paper presents evidence that the web-mediated communities of practice support learning of STEM concepts...

Old and Middle Irish nature poetry has long been appreciated for the vividness of its description of the natural world. In this paper, we will show that the inventory of trees and bushes upon which poets drew was based less upon direct observation of nature than upon a traditional taxonomy found in a completely different genre, the law tracts datin...

Educative curricula support teacher learning as well as the learning of students. High quality educative curricula contain features that help teachers customize learning opportunities and environments in ways that meet the needs of their learners. Designing these features requires expertise related to subject matter content, pedagogy, teacher and s...

This study examines and compares how developers designed two primary science curricula to support teacher adaptation and enable use of innovative materials at scale. The two cases—Literacy Science (a science and literacy curriculum for grades 2–5) and Science as Inquiry (a curriculum focused on matter for grades 3–5)—were selected because the curri...

Around the globe, science education during compulsory schooling is envisioned for all learners regardless of their educational and career aspirations, including learners bound to the workforce upon secondary school completion. Yet, a major barrier in attaining this vision is low learner participation in secondary school science. Because curricula p...

The Innovate to Mitigate project designed and conducted a competition for students aged 13-18 to propose and test strategies for mitigating rising levels of greenhouse gases. This paper explores the scientific inquiry and interdisciplinary learning of a 12th grade high school team over 6 months of participation. We used an activity-theoretic approa...

T hese are areas where the implementation of science-based policy is seen as having an ethical or moral component. The list is familiar-vaccination, climate change, GMOs, water quality, or chemical safety standards. Public understanding and attitudes towards such topics are fragmented and contentious. As a result, the development and implementation...

em>In this exploratory study, we report results from hosting two rounds of an open innovation competition challenging young people age 13-18 to develop a method for carbon mitigation. In both challenges, teams worked within the classroom and extensively on their own time out-of-school. The challenges were structured to engage participants to work c...

Until new materials are available that reflect the conceptual shift in teaching required by the Next Generation Science Standards, teachers will need to evaluate existing materials and consider strategies for adaptation. In this article, we demonstrate one strategy for evaluating pre-NGSS curricula to bring them into alignment with the NGSS Framewo...

This paper describes a sequence of design decisions made while transforming a high-school capstone course from print to electronic form. Because complex images used as data for student investigations were central to the curriculum, the project sought to make use of affordances of the digital environment to scaffold students' interpretation of these...

This poster is not about disagreement, but about surfacing different “takes” on using longitudinal data sets for student learning, and a strategy for addressing the difference. We describe how we used the data sets as “boundary objects”: artifacts which carry both shared and disparate values to the two “communities” exchanging them. Using “boundary...

With greater online access and greater use of computers and tablets, educational materials are increasingly available digitally, and are soon predicted to become the standard for science classrooms. However, researchers have found that institutionalized structures and cultural factors in schools affect teacher uptake and integration of technology....

We analyzed the practitioner literature on lab-based instruction in biology in the American Biology Teacher between 2007 and 2012. We investigated what laboratory learning looks like in biology classrooms, what topics are addressed, what instructional methods and activities are described, and what is being learned about student outcomes. The practi...

Interactive whiteboard (IWB) use has been associated with increased student motivation, engagement, and achievement, though many studies ignore the role of the teacher in effecting those positive changes. The current study followed the practice of 28 high school science teachers as they integrated the IWB into their regular classroom activities. Th...

The creation of new populations of rare and endangered plant species has become well-established as a standard technique in conservation and restoration ecology. However , much remains unknown about the actual rates of success or failure of such reintroductions. Recent research suggests that in part this reflects under-reporting of failures. In 200...

There are few studies of the impact of ubiquitous computing on high school science, and the majority of studies of ubiquitous computing report on the first period of implementation. The present study presents data on 3 high schools with carefully elaborated ubiquitous computing systems, who have gone through at least one "obsolescence cycle" and ar...

This work describes the behind the work behind the scenes building successful online communities.

Partnerships of teachers with scientists are thought to be important for many aspects of science education reform, but it is not always clear how to make such partnerships productive. Between 1994 and 1997, high school teachers were partnered with scientists, to design yearlong ecological research projects in which the teachers were learning for th...

Eyes to the Future (ETF) is a year-long, multi-age mentoring program that supports middle-school girls as they make the transition to high school and make informed choices about the opportunities available to them in high school and beyond, particularly in the field of science and technology. In this study, we explore the tension between fidelity a...

The effect of district strategies for improving high-stakes test scores on science teachers’ practice is explored in case studies of six middle schools in six Massachusetts districts. At each school, science teachers, curriculum coordinators, principals, and superintendents shared their strategies for raising scores, their attitudes towards the tes...

The article analyzes data from two small web-based communities created as part of the educational project 'Eyes to the Future.' This telementoring program for girls and women creates teams of three middle school students, one high school student, and one woman scientist. Teams last for 10-15 weeks, and explore issues of transition to high school, t...

The rapid expansion of knowledge in all science domains, and the provi sional nature of much new knowledge, present the science curriculum with several important challenges. The inquiry-based classroom approach is designed to struggle with the difficulties of the subject in a way that reflects best current understanding about teaching and learning....

To prevent species from going extinct and to restore locally extinct species to conservation areas, conservationists have been attempting to create new populations of rare and endangered species. Such efforts are still at an early stage, with the basic methodology still being developed and many efforts resulting in failures or only modest success....

An assumption of weed science and conservation biology is that small populations are more vulnerable to elimination and extinction than large populations. We tested this with the invasive biennial garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata). We compared 61 experimental populations from which every flowering plant was removed for 4 years, with 56 control po...

Explains TEECH (Teacher Enhancement Electronic Communications Hall) funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and discusses its goal to promote collaboration and communication among leaders in teacher professional development. Examines challenges and successes that TEECH has encountered in attempting to forge a virtual community of leaders in...

This paper addresses the emerging relationship between teams of high school science teachers and ecologists who were paired in a year-long collaborative endeavor. The specific focus is on the benefits reported by the teachers and the ecologists participating in the Teacher Enhancement through Pedagogy and Ecology Project (TEPE). The teachers and ec...

A recensus was undertaken of the Middlesex Fells (West), a 400-ha woodland park in Metropolitan Boston, to determine how species composition changed between 1894 (the time of first census) and 1993. This park is isolated by an 0.5-km-wide barrier of roads and development from the eastern half of the Fells preserve, is at least 5 km from other prote...

The paper discusses the role of telecommunication networks in supporting a community committed to enhancing teacher practice such as that explored in the LabNet project.

In the past ten years the World Wide Web has exploded from a tool used primarily by the scientific community to a resource routinely accessed by students and the general public. The effectiveness of the Web as an educational tool depends upon how it is utilized. This poster will detail the NSF-funded program Eyes to the Future whereby teams of midd...