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Technological tools, like virtual assistants (aka chatbots), have been ubiquitous in people's day to day. The challenge becomes how educators leverage digital omnipresence to benefit the learning environment. Using a curated chatbot allows educators to reach more students with instructor-approved information, particularly in large classrooms. Students can receive direct responses and guidance toward course materials, and educators may have less to manage by automating routine queries to a chatbot. Data from the 293 collected logs from 232 unique student users provide insight into the information students are interested in when tasked to complete an essay assignment contextualizing chemistry through a sustainability lens. Using process mining to show how students seek information, 5185 events were extracted from the logs which created 204 unique pathways from students' actions in the curated chatbot. Additional text mining was done on the 116 freeform queries students typed into the curated chatbot. Results from both analyses showed that students were primarily sought information on the sustainability context of the writing assignment in their queries and that the curated chatbot can provide personalized assistance, responding to students' unique pathways of seeking help. A selection of subsets of student users' chatbot interactions, limitations of the study, and extension of the curated chatbot use in other classroom tasks and settings were discussed.

"Research Findings": Early childhood workers (ECW's) play a pivotal role in shaping children's emotional competence. This study examined the efficacy of Tuning in to Kids for Kindergarten Teachers (TIK-KT) used with CLASS observations to improve ECW's emotion socialization, kindergarten emotional climate and children's functioning. Five hundred and forty-eight ECW's and leaders from 49 Norwegian kindergartens (children 1-5?years) were cluster randomized into intervention or control. Senior employees from intervention kindergartens received a two-day TIK-KT training, ECW's participated in a one-day training to learn emotion socialization skills and then ECW's received supervision to use emotion coaching with the children. Baseline and 10-month follow-up measures included questionnaires with ECW's and parents, and observations of kindergartens. Compared to controls, intervention ECW's reported a significant decrease in emotion dismissing and distraction, and a significant increase in emotion coaching. Intervention but not control kindergartens were observed to have significantly increased positive climate, teacher sensitivity, regard for student/child perspective, and behavior guidance. There was no change in parent reported child behavior; however, floor effects at baseline and a short follow-up during the COVID pandemic may have made change difficult to detect. "Practice or Policy": These findings provide preliminary support for use of TIK-KT as a universal intervention.

This study is based around Education Scotland's ambition to create a coherent learning framework for pupils aged 3-18, with particular focus on the technologies curricular area, and more specifically the subject of design and technology (D&T). The study investigates the views, definitions, and approaches adopted by primary and secondary educators applied to the D&T curricular area. Furthermore, the research explores curricular understanding and pedagogical approaches in addition to individual teacher's understanding of technology education. A mixed method research approach was utilised and applied within one local authority region in Scotland. Data was collected from primary teachers and secondary design and technology teachers using online questionnaires and interviews. Findings reveal that there is a varied approach to teaching design and technology across primary and secondary schools with educators recognising different definitions and pedagogical approaches in the subject. This indicates that pupils transitioning from primary to secondary learning will have to cope with these differing teaching approaches when studying design and technology. However, participants agree on the importance of the design element and application of the subject to real world scenarios. It is recommended that school communities find opportunities to collaborate further with the aim of creating a more continuous, coherent learning journey for young people in the design and technology curriculum area. These findings provide a basis for future professional discussion and critical reflection for practitioners in both primary and secondary sectors, and for leaders and administrators across Scotland, the UK and around the world.

In a technology-centric world, leveraging digital tools such as chatbots allows educators to engage students in ways that may be more accessible for both parties, particularly in large lecture classrooms. This report details the development of an interactive web-based chatbot to curate content for writing about chemistry in context. Students were assigned a 500-word paper where they discuss general chemistry concepts through the lens of a timely, sustainability-related topic, i.e., water footprint, carbon footprint, or embodied carbon. Discussed herein are the development of the decision tree, the chatbot's components, and results from the initial implementation in a large lecture general chemistry classroom. Over 78% of the 347 enrolled students (271) used the chatbot over 350 times in the 3 weeks leading up to the assigned due date of the paper. Eighty-three percent of the interactions were captured for further analysis, which showed that 22% of students used the chatbot more than once. Forty-six percent of recorded interactions were used to aid students in developing or refining their idea for the assignment. The curated chatbot technology reported here for writing assignments in chemistry can be readily adapted to other aspects of coursework in chemistry.

Each year, the federal government provides billions of dollars in support for low-income families in their acquisition of housing. In this analysis, we examine how several of these subsidized housing programs, public housing and Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) financed housing, relate to patterns of school segregation for children. We use GIS to examine the location of subsidized housing vis-à-vis district boundaries and school attendance boundaries in four Texas counties. We then examine patterns of segregation between schools with and without subsidized housing in their attendance zones, as well as the extent of economic and racial isolation experienced by students in those schools. Our results illustrate that public housing and LIHTC housing developments are zoned to racially and economically isolated schools, and that developments are associated with especially high levels of economic and racial isolation for Black and Latinx students. We conclude by discussing implications for housing and education policy to ameliorate these patterns.

Spatial reasoning ability is key to an individual's understanding of geology and geosciences more broadly. One reason why is because spatial ability allows individuals to use multiple external representations (MERs) to understand information that they cannot normally interact with directly, such as the Earth. This article presents results from two studies that investigate the relationship between students' understanding of plate tectonics and their use of MERs along with spatial ability more broadly. Students' spatial ability was measured using the Perspective Taking Spatial Orientation Test, Water Level Task, and Purdue Spatial Visualization Tests: Visualization of Rotations. Students' understanding of plate tectonics was measured using a variable representation assessment. This type of assessment lets students actively use different MERs as answer options. The results of the two studies suggest that spatial ability did not have a direct relationship with students' scores on the plate tectonics assessment. Instead, students' understanding of plate tectonics may be better understood through their prior knowledge of the subject and their use of MERs. Specifically, their collective increased attention in using one particular type of representation. More research should be conducted to further understand what scenarios spatial ability aids students' understanding of plate tectonics and other areas of geosciences.

Over the past several decades, housing costs have risen sharply, and as a result, an increasing number of families have become "housing cost burdened," paying more than one third of their income toward rent and utilities. This integrative literature synthesis considers the known and potential impacts of families' housing affordability problems on child development and schooling outcomes through a review of 64 studies published between 2000 and 2020. The synthesis proceeds in three sections: the first section examines research on the direct connection between affordability and child outcomes. The second section considers the empirical evidence on four pathways through which affordability problems are theorized to affect child outcomes: the residential mobility pathway (by causing residential mobility, school mobility, eviction, or homelessness), the living environment pathway (by reducing the quality of housing or living conditions), the neighborhood and school opportunity pathway (by restricting access to high-opportunity neighborhoods and schools), and the parental resources pathway (by reducing financial resources that could be invested in children and increasing parental stress). The third section of the synthesis considers affordability's impact on children through an examination of the research literature on the impact of federal housing assistance. Future directions for policy are considered, including the expansion of housing assistance for families, and additional research is urged on the impacts of housing affordability on children by scholars within the field of education.

This paper considers the under researched area relating to defining and conceptualising non-formal teacher professional development. It makes the case for adopting the general term grassroots professional development, specifically when this is self-directed activity led by educators. The article serves the purpose of being a position paper for this term and associated activities and continues by exploring three examples of grassroots professional development, specifically events organised by educators (TeachMeets, EdCamps and BrewEd). The history of each example is discussed, drawing on the limited body of published research literature, plus grey sources and personal experiences of the lead author. This paper is intended to provide a definitive start point for further research on the general topic of grassroots teacher professional development, and these examples in particular. The commonalties of each example are also considered, along with some criticisms and considerations for practitioners. In doing so this paper also proposes the next steps for research in this area, namely investigation of the effectiveness of grassroots professional development.

Outreach activities have been an ongoing commitment of the American Chemical Society and other scientific organizations, yet formal assessment of outcomes has been infrequent. We have designed a simple, reliable, and robust format for assessing attitudinal and motivational characteristics of participants attending informal public events that promote interest in and understanding of chemistry. In its final form, this 6-item survey can be distributed on the front and back of an 8.5 × 5.5 card (for pre- and postassessment). The form is provided in the Supporting Information and is available via ChemRxiv preprint draft (DOI: 10.26434/chemrxiv-2022-2zp5p) for noncommercial community use. Challenges in design included construct selection and independence, adjusting language for the grade 3-12 populations, physical form and distribution, efficiency and reliability of completion, and item performance and symmetry. Along with a description of the design process, psychometric characteristics and results of field testing at outreach events are described.

The community school concept has become a popular school reform model that has gained traction in urban school systems. To date, however, few studies have looked across contexts to see how various communities are conceptualizing the reform: the aims that are articulated, the partnerships that are being created, or sustainability plans. In this study, we explore these questions through an analysis of 32 funded proposals from the federal Full-Service Community Schools grant program. We examine the goals, aims, and plans of reformers and ask questions about governance, inclusion, and sustainability, situating our analysis in the policy implementation literature.

This report showcases a new type of online homework system that provides students with a free-form interface and dynamic feedback. The ORCCA Tutor (Open-Response Chemistry Cognitive Assistance Tutor) is a production rules-based online tutoring system utilizing the Cognitive Tutoring Authoring Tools (CTAT) developed by Carnegie Mellon University. In this report, we discuss the interface design and the production rules that allow for a multitude of chemistry calculations to be solved in a wide variety of ways by students. We discuss improvements of the software, already implemented or planned for the future, based on think aloud/interviews with students.

Scientific instruments have long been a vital part of science, paving pathways to remarkable scientific advancements. Such advancements have changed the world both socially and culturally, especially in the past few decades. Students can be introduced to this idea through the concepts of nature of science (NOS): scientific observations are often filtered through apparatus, inferences can be made through observations, and science is a socially and culturally embedded practice. The curriculum often fails to emphasize the role of instruments in scientific practices, even in teaching laboratories. This study uses semistructured interviews to investigate the cognitive (thoughts) and affective (feelings) domains of first-year university students as they relate to scientific instrumentation, including students' ideas of instruments. First, the study probed how general chemistry students conceptualize scientific instruments in relation to the three NOS notions. Second, students' practices related to experimental data evaluation were investigated as data collection is a large part of psychomotor learning in laboratory. Third, students' affective states toward learning about instruments were queried. The interview results suggested that a majority of participants acknowledge some ideas of NOS, while a few students displayed an advanced understanding when discussing scientific instruments and also tended to have higher interest and motivation toward learning about instruments.

Linguistic interactions between parents and their children are frequently studied to investigate how children acquire language. From observations, researchers have identified interaction strategies that foster children's language development. In turn, interventions to support children's early language skills employ styles of interaction derived from these observations. However, researchers have not often considered how the activity context selected for observation may affect the language used, or whether these contexts reflect children's diverse experiences. The aim of this scoping review was to explore the breadth of literature about language use across a range of activities. Included studies described linguistic outputs of parents and typically developing children (aged 1;0-5;11 years) and activity context(s). Searches were conducted in PsycInfo, Medline, CINAHL, ERIC-ProQuest and Google Scholar. From 16,718 records, 59 studies were retained. Studies were charted according to the population included, linguistic outputs recorded, activity contexts studied and the methodological design. To allow for comparison of results across activity contexts, five thematic categories were identified: play activities, book reading, naturalistic routines, media and methodological implications. Challenges for future research are discussed, including ways to ensure the ecological validity of findings by coupling naturalistic language recordings with data collected during diverse everyday activity contexts.

Incorporation of previously reported AR technology (ARiEL) for a general chemistry laboratory was attempted for the second time, a replication effort designed to provide students with an option to read about the nature of instruments used in an experiment. Students' app usage was tracked to understand the type and amount of information accessed, and the original Attitudes toward the Subject of Chemistry(ASCI) was modified and validated using confirmatory factor analysis(CFA) to measure students' attitudes toward instrumentation. The results of these assessments indicated that students preferred information directly related to the target experiment, and the amount of time spent accessing information deemed less essential to the task at hand was not substantial. Nevertheless, the modified ASCI measurements suggested positive changes in both cognitive and affective domains of students' attitudes, overall. These results were in agreement with the initial study of ARiEL, implying that an additional system such as ARiEL could be helpful for general chemistry students in making instrumentation more approachable.

The American Chemical Society, Division of Chemical Education, Examinations Institute has been developing content maps for the undergraduate program based on subdiscipline specifications since 2008. The Anchoring Concepts Content Maps (or ACCM) have been published in four subdisciplines (general, organic, physical, and inorganic chemistry) with the latest work presented here in a fifth subdiscipline: analytical chemistry. As with the development of the other maps, an alignment process of identifying key components of exam items including content, complexity, and other item characteristics was conducted with both analytical chemistry and instrumental analysis items. The results of the alignments as well as an evaluation of the newest ACCM in relation to the other published maps are presented.