Wayne Breslyn

University of Maryland, College Park | UMD, UMCP, University of Maryland College Park · Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership

This study investigates student and teacher use of online instructional YouTube chemistry videos in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Data were collected from a global sample of students ( n = 1147) subscribed to the first author’s popular chemistry education YouTube channel. Participants were in secondary school or college and reported having...

Publicly available, learner-generated questions were used to develop a methodology for advancing the exploratory stages of science education research. Data from four complementary online sources were collected, analyzed, and compared to the extant research literature on the science education topic of isotopes, a challenging concept for many chemist...

There is a need to approach environmental education (EE) topics, such as climate change, with a framework that productively reflects its inherent complexity. This study investigates how computational thinking (CT), specifically systems thinking (ST), may prepare educators to teach climate change. As scientists increasingly rely on computational tec...

Climate change encompasses a broad and complex set of concepts that is often challenging for students and educators. Using a learning progressions (LPs) knowledge system, we developed a conditional LP that described student learning of climate change. In this exploratory study, we present findings from written assessments of climate change (n=294)...

Climate change encompasses a broad and complex set of concepts that is often challenging for students and educators. Using a learning progressions knowledge system, we developed a learning progression that described student learning of climate change. In this exploratory study we present findings from written assessments of climate change (N=294) a...

Abstract: Climate change encompasses a broad and complex set of concepts that is often challenging for students and educators. Using a learning progressions knowledge system, we developed a learning progression that described student learning of climate change. In this exploratory study we present findings from written assessments of climate change...

In the context of a weeklong summer professional development program focused on climate change education, we conducted a qualitative case study investigating how science educators’ understandings of learning progressions (LPs) informed their ideas about climate change teaching practice. Participants (N = 27) in the Climate Academy were middle schoo...

This case study applied sociocultural theory to examine the climate change ideas communicated by one group of middle school students (N = 39) in a suburban community on the U.S. East Coast. We investigated the ways in which students’ participation in the sociocultural activities of their varied communities appeared to inform their understandings of...

We present research from an investigation on developing a learning progression (LP) for sea level rise (SLR), a major effect of global climate change. We began our research by drafting a hypothetical LP for sea level rise, informed by extant knowledge of the topic in the scientific community, in science education literature, and in science educatio...

This exploratory study investigates what science educators from differing groups (outside of higher education – informal and formal (K-12) and inside of higher education – content and pedagogy experts) believe are the roles and responsibilities (and what actions these might involve) in climate change education for: 1) their group of educators, and...

In this chapter, we report on our experiences integrating sustainability as an organizing theme in an undergraduate science methods course. The course modeled the use of sustainability as a lens for examining local and global challenges, with a particular focus on climate change. The development of the course was informed by ideas from the Next Gen...

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are the first set of U.S. national science standards to explicitly include the topic of global climate change. With this new emphasis in K-12 science education, geoscience educators will likely play a central role in shaping a nation of citizens capable of understanding and making informed decisions abou...

Teachers' use of inquiry has been studied largely without regard for the disciplines in which teachers practice. As a result, there is no theoretical understanding of the possible role of discipline in shaping teachers' conceptions and enactment of inquiry. In this mixed-methods study, conceptions and enactment of inquiry for 60 National Board Cert...

The present study investigated differences in the continuing development of National Board Certified Science Teachers' (NBCSTs) conceptions of inquiry across the disciplines of biology, chemistry, earth science, and physics. The central research question of the study was, "How does a NBCST's science discipline (biology, chemistry, earth science, or...

To meet federal and state regulatory needs, a liquid chromatographic (LC) method with ultraviolet (UV) detection was developed for determination of 7 tetracyclines at 30 ng/ml in milk. Raw milk samples are defatted, acidified, and centrifuged to remove proteins, and tetracyclines are specifically absorbed from the milk by chelation with metal ions...