Todd Campbell

• Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction-Science Education
• Professor at University of Connecticut

This article presents a model-based inquiry unit centered on the Grand Staircase of the Colorado Plateau, designed to engage middle school students in Earth science through hands-on exploration and scientific modeling. The unit uses the Grand Staircase’s unique geological formations, which span nearly 1.7 billion years of Earth’s history, as a comp...

This article introduces a high school ecosystems-focused unit exploring why cases of Lyme disease are increasing in the United States and being experienced differently among some racial and ethnic groups, an intricate phenomenon that intertwines biology, climate change, and societal issues. This unit, designed with a Model-Based Inquiry (MBI) frame...

Introduction This study was undertaken to explore the potential of developing a working theory of improvement for creating a more equitable system of science education at the level of a US state. We ask: How can tools from a long-term research-practice partnership support a state team in initiating improvement research toward promoting a more equit...

Why Community Engagement? The disproportionate and unequal risks of environmental hazards and climate change on specific communities and groups of people are becoming more evident with a growing body of studies (Clark et al., 2014; EPA, 2021). Indeed, the lack of community voice in environmental solutions will continue to prevent environmental orga...

Explicitly attending to justice in science teaching and learning is long overdue. Here, we examined the professional teacher identity development of 13 science teachers as they collaborated in networked professional learning communities (PLCs) to implement and revise a culture‐setting unit focused on the science of COVID and engaging in collaborati...

Service learning has many documented benefits for students. The benefits to the communities are less clear. This study examines the unfolding of an environmental service-learning partnership from the perspective of one participating community liaison. We examine a new model of university-community engagement, where undergraduate students are paired...

There has been little scholarship about the use of instructional practices in undergraduate environmental service-learning courses. In this study, we examined the implementation of high leverage practices (HLPs) in environmental service-learning courses (i.e. E-Corps). These HLPs included: eliciting initial ideas, informing approaches to problems,...

This commentary considered affordances and critiques of learning progressions (LPs), as well as questions about how LPs help teachers recognize and legitimize students’ plural onto-epistemological reasoning. In working beside the section contributing scholars to elevate their important contributions, I looked for patterns important to synthesize ac...

This paper illuminates how science curriculum-making can be reinvigorated to address urgent local and global socioscientific issues that centres place as an interconnected part of larger socio-ecological and socio-technical systems. Given how industrial and capitalistic extractive practices have pushed the planet beyond its complex life-sustaining...

As a result of more recent events connected to the ongoing and lasting legacy of systemic racism in our society and the sparsity of research focused on both disciplinary teacher leadership (TL) and centering social justice and equity in teacher leadership literature reviews, this research investigated the ways in which science teacher leadership (S...

This research sought to investigate teacher leadership in a districtwide STEM professional network using a previously developed community of practice teacher leadership identity model (CoPTLM). A qualitative research design with semi-structured interviews was used for the identified teacher leaders, teacher collaborators , and network staff members...

Food, energy, and water (FEW) are often taught in isolation, but they are all components of interconnected systems at local, regional, and global levels. Further, exploration of FEW in STEM classrooms typically decouples human and natural systems, which ignores how economic, social, environmental and ethical decision-making are entangled. Engaging...

Learning and teaching in and for the Anthropocene requires a new set of frameworks and practices in science education, as well as questioning universalizing ontologies or powered and industrialized ways of worldmaking that have given rise to the Anthropocene. Traditional siloed approaches to disciplinary learning, while consistent with Western dual...

Applied pedagogy, and specifically service learning, bridges the university educational experience with hands-on training. Such pedagogies in STEM are nuanced in unique ways in comparison to more classroom-based STEM learning and applied teaching outside of STEM contexts. As STEM service learning may be especially vulnerable during system shocks, w...

Background It is crucial to support students in better understanding water and sustainability issues because water plays a vital role in maintaining global ecosystems, including human life. A wide range of curricular and instructional supports like those embodied in model-based learning (MBL) are necessary for teachers to engage students in the cor...

This book is your chance to shift the emphasis of your high school biology curriculum away from “we need to learn about this topic in order to do well in class” to “we need to figure out why or how things happen in the world.” Using the book’s model-based inquiry (MBI) framework lets you create meaningful learning experiences for your students as t...

Humans are a part of the natural world, and human health is intrinsically tied to ecosystem health. However, access to healthy ecosystems is not equally distributed. The way communities are planned and constructed determines how viable these areas are for humans and other species. Historic urban planning practices such as redlining and the use of e...

The environment, science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics fields (a collection of fields we call E-STEAM) continue to grow and remain economically and ecologically important. However, historically excluded groups remain underrepresented in science and technology professions, particularly in environmental and digital media fields. Con...

Background In the context of recent research in science education and continued struggles to understand how best to support science teachers, epistemological frames, made up of sets of epistemological resources teachers activate, have emerged as an important focus of research. However, at the time of this writing no research was available to identi...

Our multiple case study addresses the lack of opportunities many people have developing positive identification with STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields by investigating STEM identity authoring in three intergenerational collaborative partnerships. Adult and teen partners participated in two-day workshops learning conservation scie...

Families create contexts for learning to enhance and support the interests of their children, while simultaneously teaching language, morals, and culture. This research examines intergenerational family teams engaged in a long-term conservation project in their community. Participants were interviewed during and after project completion with the ce...

It has been over two years since the world came to a shuddering halt due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this time people have confronted the uncertainties and stresses created by the pandemic in relation to their health and well-being, educational and employment opportunities, and social, emotional, and physical isolation. Now, even...

High Leverage Practices (HLPs), as a core set of teaching practices, represent important instructional priorities and provide instructional guidance for students’ engagement in practice-based instruction. The goals of this research were to 1) understand how an epistemic community (the people designing and leading courses and programs) viewed the HL...

The integration of STEM and environmental education can be a powerful strategy to engage and motivate diverse learners, as it encourages participation that prioritizes application of scientific disciplinary knowledge and practices to address relevant and current environmental solutions. Benefits of environmental experiential learning are well-docum...

Purpose: Drawing upon research into standards reform, and theorizing of pro- fessional and political capital, this article seeks to understand the development of and advocacy for the Next Generation Science Standards in the United States. As well as revealing how professional capital exists in three dimensions—human, social, and decisional—the rese...

When students are given opportunities to address problems important to them, the engineering design process (EDP) helps show the way. In this article, we describe a unit that was implemented in second grade to demonstrate how the engineering design process (EDP) afforded agency to one teacher’s elementary students (this unit was adapted for use wi...

This chapter draws on theoretical and empirical research internationally to report what we know about initial secondary science teacher preparation. We focus on the characteristics of secondary pre-service science teachers within and across pre-service programs, secondary pre-service science teachers' facility with science teaching practices, and t...

Our research analyzed two years of data from a 5-year NSF-funded informal STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) program. Our program aims to support the development and maintenance of STEM identities in intergenerational teams learning geospatial technologies and conservation science to develop and implement community land-use pr...

Students use science and engineering practices (SEPs) alongside disciplinary core ideas (DCIs) to engage in the engineering design process (EDP) around a problem they see in their local community. Then they propose design solutions for addressing this problem, present their ideas to peers, and receive feedback from their peers and teacher. Teachin...

In today’s task, students answer the following questions: What are the causes of the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on racial and ethnic minority groups? Why is the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention guidance for how to slow the spread of COVID-19 necessary, but insufficient? What kinds of system-level solutions can our society i...

Background: Environmental sustainability-focused service-learning programs can aid communities in addressing environmental problems and provide students with hands-on training. Understanding the implementation of such programs can inform research and application. Purpose: We investigate the implementation of an environmental sustainability -focused...

Researchers and practitioners have identified numerous outcomes of place-based environmental action (PBEA) programs at both individual and community levels (e.g., promoting positive youth development, fostering science identity, building social capital, and contributing to environmental quality improvement). In many cases, the primary audience of P...

This paper discusses how recent developments related to secondary science education focused on engaging students in both science and engineering in the United States (U.S.) can be appropriated in China. The discussion begins by describing important features of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) related to science and engineering practices...

An extensive faculty partnership at the University of Connecticut (UConn) that reaches across college and departmental lines is engaged in a project that seeks to enhance, expand, institutionalize, and study a new model for community engagement. The model, called the Environment Corps (E-Corps), combines the familiar elements of classroom instructi...

This research aimed to better understand the interaction between positioning and STEM identity authoring as intergenerational teams collaborated to complete community conservation projects, following a two-day conservation and geospatial technology workshop. Scientists and science educators supported these learners as they developed the focus, reso...

This design‐based research project reports on three multilevel networks that were focused on implementing the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Given the recent attention to understanding infrastructure to craft coherence in NGSS implementation, this research investigated how these networks iteratively re‐designed infrastructure as they eng...

In this task, students answer this question: Are there differences in how people are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States? If so, why are there differences, and what should we do about the disproportionate impact of COVID-19? Students use science and engineering practices alongside disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concept...

As science teacher educators committed to making science relevant to students’ lives and consequential in the pursuit of justice, we highlight how science intersects with society, especially how science is represented and made accessible through the media. A most prominent case of how science and society intersect is currently affecting our daily l...

Understanding factors that influence teacher use of professional development learning is critical if we are to maximise the educational and financial investment in teacher development. This study used a multi-case mixed methodology to investigate the factors that influence teacher adoption, adaption, and abandonment of teacher-directed learning. Th...

In the United States and internationally, there has been an increased emphasis on the practice turn or a focus on engaging students in more authentic representations of how science is practiced. In this article, we describe the development of a student questionnaire to investigate the extent to which students report being engaged in learning experi...

Grounded on the tenets of informal learning this research took place in a STEM-focused summer youth program at a state science center. We used a research-practice partnership to iteratively improve the triggering and development of minoritized learners’ STEM identification and interests. Informed by our previous qualitative research that revealed t...

An in-depth curricular unit exploring the effects of human land use on local water resources was created as part of a Teacher Professional Learning Program at the University of Connecticut’s Natural Resources Conservation Academy. This unit was designed to connect high school students to water resources in their community, both in the field and thr...

Set in the context of modeling-based learning (MBL), this research investigated the potential of epistemic frames as a theoretical and analytical framework for understanding teaching and learning practices used in classroom communities of practice. Epistemic frames are conceptualized as an orienting lens for a classroom community of practice that e...

In today's task – How can we make informed decisions to keep ourselves and our communities safe during the COVID-19 pandemic?– students and their families use science and engineering practices alongside disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts to explain differences found when comparing COVID-19 data in their local county to those in anoth...

As university science educators, we seek to support preservice teachers in taking up the Ambitious Science Teaching core practices; the unique and influential roles mentor teachers play in this pursuit is apparent. Within our courses, before initiating the partnerships with mentor teachers described in this chapter, preservice teachers were distres...

The COVID-19 pandemic is a historic global event that has extended to all parts of society and shaken the core of what we know and how we live. During this pandemic, the work of STEM professionals has taken center stage. Through our close observations of how the events of the pandemic have been unfolding across the globe, we propose an instructiona...

Our research centered on developing the Conservation Science and Technology Identity (CSTI) instruments as an empirical way to measure STEM identities and the intersection of identity constructs such as competence, performance, recognition, and ways of seeing and being. The surveys were used in a large funded multi‐year project for teens and adults...

A Framework for K–12 Science Education, NGSS writers, and assessment experts have put forth a vision focused on developing a “bottom up” system of assessments starting at the classroom level when integrated into instructional units. This helps teachers make ongoing instructional adjustments, and it would promote vertically coherent assessments at s...

Drawing upon interviews with key actors involved in the development of and support for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in the United States, this article shows how a potentially controversial reform came to be actively supported by senior educators. We utilize Kingdon's (2003, Agendas, alternatives, and public policies, 2nd ed.) concep...

This research explores how explaining an anchoring phenomena and engaging students in investigations, as central designs of a model‐based inquiry (MBI) unit, afforded or constrained the representation of scientific activity in the science classroom. This research is considered timely as recent standards documents and scholars in the field have high...

Comprehensive reviews of empirical research on teacher leadership have revealed that this body of research remains grounded in what might be described as, at best, a weak theoretical base. This article seeks to address this by proposing a theoretical framework based on social learning theory, communities of practice, and identity and iterated throu...

This article addresses two gaps in the literature related to science department chairs: the axiological relationship between the chair and science, the subject, and the perceptions of the chair with respect to teaching and learning within their departments. In this work, axiology is used to understand how the chair's values towards the subject infl...

The work of supporting students’ engagement in modeling is complex. Increased attention is needed for understanding the role of teachers in positioning students as epistemic agents and their ideas as resources for sensemaking within these learning environments. The focus of this chapter is on redirection, a methodological construct that teachers ca...

This research investigates the assumptions underlying the work of a research practice partnership (RPP) made up of university science teacher educators and mentoring science teachers. With increased attention to what have been described as significant shifts proposed in science teaching and learning connected to recent standards documents in the U....

Recently, there has been more focus on issues related to the professional development of teacher leaders (TLs), but there is still much to learn. Situated within a larger study, the purpose of this research was to understand the ways in which individuals participated in teacher leadership and how participation and identities shaped and were shaped...

Science students should use mathematical and computational thinking to explain phenomena (NGSS Lead States 2013), but few examples of teachers engaging students in this important scientific practice have been found (Wilkerson and Fenwick 2017). This article describes a strategy for enhancing a lesson in which students use a mechanistic model to exp...

University of Connecticut Extension educators are engaged in a new program that fosters intergenerational informal science, technology, engineering, and math learning through combining geospatial technology and conservation science. Conservation Training Partnerships (CTP) is a program that brings together adult conservation leaders and high-school...

In this article we examine how the concept of autonomy may be construed as a foundational value which underpins students' coherent sensemaking of how the physical world operates. Autonomy and science both require students to comprehend and assess the quality of evidence, claims, and alternative outcomes. Further, participation in scientific sensema...

Experiences in mentor teachers’ classrooms often provide preservice teachers with their first opportunities to spend extended periods of time in classrooms as teachers or to engage with the new vision for science education. Taking on too much too early (e,g., planning a full unit of instruction) can be stressful for both preservice and mentor teach...

How can your science department become a site for developing science teachers’ professional learning? Building the Science Department answers that question through stories from teachers who walk the sometimes rocky path of reforming science teaching and learning. Written by the authors of Reimagining the Science Department, this resource features v...

When preservice teachers receive feedback as part of their experiences in teacher education programs (for example, from clinical supervisors or mentoring teachers) the focus of this feedback is often on their actions as new teachers or their enactments of instructional practices, such as their early attempts to lead whole class discussions. However...

This research investigated teacher learning and teacher beliefs in a two-year technology professional development (TPD) for teachers and its impact on their student achievement in science in the western part of the United States. Middle school science teachers participated in TPD focused on information communication technologies (ICTs) and their ap...

While the literature is replete with studies examining teacher knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), relatively few studies have undertaken the investigation of how science teacher orientations shape classroom instruction. This research begins to address this gap in the literature by exploring the interplay between a science teacher’s...

Preservice education establishes the foundation for a successful science teaching career. However, preservice teachers often experience tension between their university and school-based experiences related to the different expectations for teaching and learning across these settings. To decrease confusion and increase preparedness, mentor teachers...

Through examining the day-to-day work of scientists, researchers in science studies have revealed how models are a central sense-making practice of scientists as they construct and critique explanations about how the universe works. Additionally, they allow predictions to be made using the tenets of the model. Given this, alongside research suggest...

This paper examines important recent developments in STEM education, especially related to science education in the United States (U.S.). This examination begins with an abbreviated introduction of the newest science standards documents in the U.S., with a specific focus on the structure and main priorities of these documents. This is followed by a...

Visions of science teaching and learning in the newest U.S. standards documents are dramatically different than those found in most classrooms. This research addresses these differences through closely examining one professional development project that connects teacher learning and teacher practice with student learning/achievement. This study exa...

In the current review, we examined teacher leadership research completed since York-Barr and Duke published the seminal review on teacher leadership in 2004. The review was undertaken to examine how teacher leadership is defined, how teacher leaders are prepared, their impact, and those factors that facilitate or inhibit teacher leaders’ work. Beyo...

In this article, we have considered the role of the chair in leading the learning necessary for a department to become effective in the teaching and learning of science from a reformed perspective. We conceptualize the phrase “leading learning” to mean the chair's constitution of influence, power, and authority to intentionally impact the conceptua...