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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 core epistemic commitments of the Next-Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Purpose: The main purpose of this study is to inform theory about students' early attempts to engage in the complex kinds of sensemaking experiences inherent in the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the NGSS. Sample: Data for this study was collected from 74 10th grade students in a high school in the Northwest region of the New England state. Design and Methods: An explanatory sequential mixed-method research design was used to examine students' learning outcomes, and to better understand these outcomes in connection to their experiences engaging in modeling in the MBL curriculum unit. Results: The results indicated that students' model scores, the number of concepts in models, and the coherence and sophistication of models improved between their initial and final models. Additionally, the following patterns emerged related to ways in which students engaged in the practice of modeling: (1) students attempted to directly represent what they observed, (2) they struggled to pictorially express complex patterns or mechanisms, and (3) students experienced difficulties representing models from a diverse range of perspectives. Conclusion: The patterns identified across student models, as well as their reports of experiences related to the MBL unit implementation, provided insight into student experiences with models, while also providing meaningful implications for the refinement of the MBL curriculum unit investigated in this research specifically, while informing approaches MBL curricular units aimed at supporting NGSS implementation efforts more generally.

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 central research purpose of exploring how the intersecting experiences of family members explain emerging family cultural learning pathways. Intergenerational family teams shared narratives which were then analyzed using the cultural learning pathways framework [Bell, P., Tzou, C., Bricker, L., & Baines, A. D. (2012). Learning in diversities of structures of social practice: Accounting for how, why and where people learn science. Human Development, 55(5-6), 269-284. doi:10.1159/000345315] that we subsequently used to create family cultural learning pathways for each participating family. Family interactions are powerful influences on the identity development of children, not only in their academic development, but also in their moral, ethical, and social development.

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, resources, timeline, and methods used to accomplish their negotiated pursuits at the two-day workshop and throughout their subsequent community project as a form of public engagement. To better understand the ways in which intergenerational teams located or positioned themselves and their partners, the ways in which teens and adults engaged in STEM identity authoring, and the interplay between positioning and STEM identity authoring a two-case study was completed. In this, field observations, interviews, and project artifacts were collected as the primary data sources. Findings emerging from the qualitative analysis of the data collected revealed how positioning and STEM identity authoring were found to be entangled and concurrently reinforcing even at the outset of the intergenerational teams' work. Additionally, positioning and STEM identity authoring in intergenerational teams were influenced by societal and cultural norms. These findings as well as recommendations emerging from the findings are further elaborated with the aim of supporting future intergenerational work of teens and adults in informal STEM learning contexts.

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-aged youths for a 2-day hands-on training that leads to community-based conservation projects. The program creates synergistic project teams that combine the adult partners' community and conservation knowledge with the youth partners' technological facility. This innovative intergenerational approach holds promise for Extension professionals in improving technology-based trainings and projects.