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Recent behavior analytic studies have examined behavioral skills training to teach adults to arrange safe infant sleeping environments. These studies were conducted in an analogue environment and with all training components delivered by an expert staff trainer. The purpose of the current study was to replicate and extend this literature by substituting video-based training for behavioral skills training. We assessed whether expectant caregivers could arrange safe infant sleeping environments following video-based training. The results suggested that video-based training alone resulted in positive outcomes for a portion of participants, whereas a subset of participants required feedback to reach mastery criteria. The social validity data suggest that the participants found the training procedures favorable.

Allergic reactions to allergenic foods can pose a lethal threat to children with food allergies. Previous research has demonstrated the effectiveness of using behavioral skills training (BST) plus in situ training (IST) to teach safety responses to children. However, there has not been an evaluation of using BST to teach food safety to children with food allergies. Three elementary-school children of neurotypical development with food allergies participated. We evaluated the efficacy of BST with IST in teaching participants to identify and respond to allergenic foods by (a) asking to see the food packaging, (b) scanning the food label for the allergenic food, and (c) reporting the safety threat to an adult while not consuming the food. Trials without allergenic foods were also presented to ensure discriminated responding. All participants demonstrated the three correct safety responses after BST and responded differentially across allergenic and nonallergenic foods, with two participants requiring feedback (IST).

Sleep-related infant deaths are one of the top causes of infant mortality in the United States. A few behavior analytic studies have examined behavioral skills training to teach adults to arrange safe infant sleeping environments. These studies were conducted in an analogue environment, and no data were collected outside the training setting. The purpose of the current study was to replicate and extend the extant literature. We taught caregivers to arrange safe infant sleeping environments in a community-based organization. Thereafter, we assessed the feasibility and effectiveness of a technology-based contingency management procedure to examine caregivers' adherence with arrangement of a safe sleeping environment for their newborns across a 2-week period. As in previous studies, behavioral skills training resulted in positive outcomes, and follow-up data suggested that the technology-based contingency management procedure may be a promising approach to promoting adherence with infant sleeping environment recommendations.

Teachers can play critical roles in challenging or reinscribing dominant narratives about what counts as STEM, who is seen within STEM disciplines, and how these disciplines should be taught. However, teachers have often experienced STEM in limited ways in their own education and are thereby provided with few resources for re-imagining these disciplines. While teacher educators have designed learning environments that engage teachers in new forms of disciplinary activities, there have been few accounts that describe how teachers make connections between these experiences and dominant narratives that impact their own and their students' learning. In this study, I report on the experiences of Alma, a white, working-class, female elementary teacher in an online graduate certificate program for K-12 engineering educators. Through her engagement in engineering design in the program, Alma appropriated--transformed and made her own--discourse of the engineering design process in ways that trouble some of the narratives that restrict her, her family, and her students in STEM and in school. Alma's experiences emphasize the need to consider not just what teachers learn about disciplinary tools and discourses, but how they transform these for their own purposes and contexts.

Science education researchers have highlighted how uncertainty can foster meaningful scientific sense-making, supporting students to re-evaluate their understandings of scientific phenomena and pursue deeper causal accounts. However, facilitating whole-class conversations motivated by uncertainty is complex and challenging, calling for further descriptions of the pedagogical work involved for teachers. In this study, we consider recurring pedagogical decision points as a way to get a handle on how teachers orchestrate classroom conversations and improvise to respond to students' reasoning. To examine these decision points, we analyzed five classroom episodes where classroom communities transformed a student's expression of uncertainty into an episode of collective, scientific sense-making. Across these episodes, we found that teachers needed to make decisions around (1) whether to make space for an uncertainty, (2) how to transform an uncertainty into a collective problem, (3) which elements to fix and which to leave open, (4) when and how to support the class to evaluate their accounts, (5) whether to make space for and/or mark new goals. Using detailed analyses of two episodes, along with short descriptions of the others, we illustrate how these decision points emerged, the different choices teachers made, and how these decisions shaped the trajectories of the classroom conversations.

Large introductory science courses are a particularly important and challenging target for creating inclusive learning environments. In this study, we examined the impact of incorporating learning assistants (LAs) on the learning environment in an introductory biology course taught with two different structures: an in-person lecture with intermittent active-learning components and an online setting taught with a flipped instructional approach. Using a survey that measured sense of belonging in a single class, we found that students in sections with LAs reported greater sense of belonging than students in sections without LAs in both class structures. Further, student focus groups revealed that LAs promoted learning and engagement in the class by answering questions and providing clarity; allowing more use of active- and interactive-learning structures; and serving as accessible, approachable, and immediate sources of help. Student responses also indicated that LAs promoted a sense of belonging in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by decreasing feelings of isolation, serving as inspirational role models, clarifying progression through the STEM educational system, and helping students become more engaged and confident in their STEM-related knowledge and skills. These findings indicate that LAs can support multiple elements of inclusive STEM learning environments.

Participating in discussions of classroom video can support teachers to attend to student thinking. Central to the success of these discussions is how teachers interpret the activity they are engaged in--how teachers "frame" what they are doing. In asynchronous online environments, negotiating framing poses challenges, given that interactions are not in real time and often require written text. We present findings from an online course designed to support teachers to frame video discussions as making sense of student thinking. In an engineering pedagogy course designed to emphasize responsiveness to students' thinking, we documented shifts in teachers' framing, with teachers more frequently making sense of, rather than evaluating, student thinking later in the course. These findings show that it is possible to design an asynchronous online course to productively engage teachers in video discussions and inform theory development in online teacher education.

Medical personnel play a critical role in caregiver safe infant sleep education. However, training outcomes in the safe infant sleep training literature have been mixed. Promising approaches that warrant further investigation are the use of behavioral skills training and pyramidal training. The current study consisted of two experiments. Experiment 1 extended Carrow et al. (2020) and Vladescu et al. (2020) by teaching medical students safe infant sleep practices using behavioral skills training. Discriminated responding was examined across trained and untrained environmental arrangements using a multiple-baseline design. All participants arranged safe sleep environments following behavioral skills training. In Experiment 2, we used pyramidal behavioral skills training to train medical students to teach others safe sleep practices. Results indicated high procedural integrity scores following training and generalization of skills.

Equivalence-based instruction (EBI) involves the teaching of socially relevant material (e.g., academic material) with stimulus equivalence procedures. In the research literature, training and testing of equivalence classes has been almost exclusively conducted on an individual basis. To extend the literature, the present study compared the effects of using EBI with an interdependent group contingency, individualized EBI (no group contingency), and a PowerPoint lecture on class formation with college students. The four equivalence classes taught consisted of information related to positive and negative reinforcement and punishment procedures. The members of each class were the name, definition, an example of the contingency, and the corresponding contingency table diagram. For the two EBI groups, a cloud-based student response system (SRS) application involving personal cell phones was used. To compare the effects of the different teaching protocols, three pretests and posttests were administered: (1) written fill-in, (2) written multiple-choice, and (3) card sorting. Results showed increased class-consistent responding across all three groups following training. However, written multiple-choice tests performances for the two EBI groups were significantly higher than for the lecture group, and the group-contingency EBI was significantly more effective for the fill-in written test than was lecture. Results also maintained at a 1-week follow-up. These results suggest that EBI can be effectively and efficiently implemented in more naturalistic settings, such as a classroom, while using free web-based technology. Keywords classroom instruction * group contingency * match to sample * stimulus equivalence * student response system, Stimulus equivalence refers to the establishment of stimulus-stimulus relations among a set of three or more physically disparate stimuli (Sidman & Tailby, 1982). The conditional discriminations required for the formation [...]

Background: Elementary educators are increasingly asked to teach engineering design, motivating study of how they learn to teach this discipline. In particular, there is a need to examine how teachers reason about pedagogical situations and dilemmas in engineering--how they draw on their disciplinary understandings, attention to students' thinking, and pedagogical practices to support students' learning. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of our qualitative study was to examine elementary teachers' pedagogical reasoning in an online graduate program. We asked: What stances do teachers take toward learning and teaching engineering design? How do these stances shift over the course of the program? Design/Method: We identified two teachers, Alma and Margaret, who exhibited productive shifts in their pedagogical reasoning during the program. Drawing on interviews and videos of their teaching, we developed case studies characterizing their stances toward teaching and learning engineering. Results: Alma shifted in her reasoning about teaching the design process, from treating it as linear, discrete steps to recognizing the dynamic, overlapping nature of design practices. Similarly, Margaret shifted in how she reasoned about failure and iteration, recognizing the need to help students analyze unexpected design performances to learn from and iterate on their designs. For both teachers, these shifts were dynamic and nonlinear, reflecting both context-sensitivity and growing stability in their reasoning. Conclusions: Engineering teacher educators should provide opportunities for teachers to reason about the specific pedagogical dilemmas in engineering and consider how teachers integrate disciplinary understandings with attention to students' reasoning and actions and pedagogical practices.

Given the widespread adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards in the United States, there is a need to study new models of professional development to prepare teachers to enact practice-based visions of science learning and to address problems of access to reach teachers nationwide. While studies of online professional development offer promise in addressing both of these challenges, there is still much to be learned about how to design and orchestrate these learning environments. In particular, researchers have highlighted instructor facilitation as critical for teacher learning and reflection, yet there is a need for greater specification of online facilitation and how it can achieve targeted professional development goals. In this paper we explore responsive teaching as an approach to facilitating upper elementary and middle school teachers' scientific engagement in asynchronous online learning environments. Using a case study approach, we examine instructors' facilitation and teachers' participation over four weeks in an online threaded discussion forum. This episode was situated within a 12-month hybrid-online professional development program, which had an explicit goal of supporting teachers to experience "doing science" themselves. Building on our prior work showing that the program was successful in fostering teachers' engagement in scientific practices online, we characterize the responsive nature of instructors' facilitation and how it supported teachers' individual and collective inquiry. Our analysis provides an existence proof of a responsive approach to facilitating scientific engagement online and offers insights into the design of online professional development that supports teachers in "doing science."

Annually, thousands of infant deaths are classified as sudden unexpected infant deaths (SUIDs). In an effort to reduce the risk of SUIDs, the American Academy of Pediatrics has made a number of recommendations to educate caregivers, childcare providers, and healthcare professionals on safe infant sleep practices. The purpose of the current study was to extend the literature on safe infant sleep practices by teaching caregivers to arrange safe infant sleep environments using a mannequin and common infant items. We partnered with community-based agencies to evaluate the effectiveness of behavioral skills training delivered in a single training session as part of the ongoing pre- or postnatal care these agencies provided. Following training, all participants demonstrated a substantial change in responding and returned favorable social validity ratings. We discuss these outcomes in light of previous studies, limitations, and future directions.

The Next Generation Science Standards states that "science begins with a question." (NGSS Lead States [2013] "Next generation science standards: For states, by states". Washington, DC: National Academies Press). Yet scientific inquiry among students and scientists alike often begins without a clear question. In this article, we describe "problematizing" as the intellectual work to identify, articulate, and motivate a gap or inconsistency in a community's or one's own current understanding. We describe problematizing in professional science to show how it is central to disciplinary practices of science. We then present an episode of fifth-grade students' problematizing, as a detailed illustration of the construct and as an example of evidence that students can engage in this work. Through these two approaches, we show problematizing is central to the disciplinary practice of science and that it is a part of students' engagement. We further show that it is missing from the description of practices in the Next Generation Science Standards. Lastly, we make recommendations for research on student problematizing, for revisions to the Standards, and for instruction.

The national efforts underway to include engineering in K-12 science education present a variety of new challenges, including how to prepare teachers to teach a new discipline. In this paper, we focus on elementary teachers and how they enter into "responsive teaching," in which they closely attend and meaningfully respond to students' thinking. This pedagogical approach is particularly critical for teaching engineering design in ways that support students in developing original solutions to complex, dynamic problems. Drawing on 3 years of professional development that helped teachers incorporate engineering in literacy contexts, we investigated the knowledge and abilities teachers displayed for responsive teaching and how features of instructional design and classroom dynamics impacted their teaching. Throughout the project, we observed and videotaped professional development workshops and teachers' classrooms, and interviewed teachers about their classroom experiences. We then conducted a thematic analysis across these data sources, presenting common themes as conjectures for how teachers enter into responsive teaching in engineering. We discuss how these conjectures can inform teacher research and the design of teacher preparation programs in engineering.

Not understanding is central to scientific work: what scientists do is learn about the natural world, which involves seeking out what they do not know. In classrooms, however, the position of not-understanding is generally a liability; confusion is an unfortunate condition to resolve as quickly as possible, or to conceal. In this article, we argue that students' public displays of uncertainty or confusion can be pivotal contributions to the classroom dynamics in initiating and sustaining a class's science inquiry. We present this as a central finding from a cross-case analysis of eight episodes of students' scientific engagement, drawing on literature on "framing" to show how participants positioned themselves as not-understanding and how that was consequential for the class's scientific engagement. We show how participants enacted this positioning by asking questions or expressing uncertainty around a phenomenon or model. We then analyze how participants' displays of not-understanding shaped the conceptual, epistemic, and social aspects of classroom activity. We present two cases in detail: one in which a student's positioning helped initiate the class's scientific engagement and another in which it helped sustain it. We argue that this work motivates considering how to help students learn to embrace and value the role of expressing one's confusion in science.

Post-2003, the Iraqi Police Service (IPS) has undergone a series of overhauls that have prioritised building institutional capacities ('statebuilding') above socio-political cohesion ('nation-building'). Following the defeat of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), however, a community policing initiative premised on improving state–society relations has gained momentum. But while community policing is conceived in the Global North as a trust-building mechanism, how do Iraqi stakeholders locally perceive it, when the legacy of regime change has been to entrench a highly militarised police force beholden to patronage networks and heavily outnumbered by other security and justice providers? This paper considers policing in two diverse districts in Ninawa province: a rundown Sunni tribal neighbourhood in Mosul, and a predominantly Christian town in a multi-ethnic district. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 37 figures representing a spectrum of local interests, we explore how Iraqis understand three commonly touted characteristics of community policing: police–public partnerships; problem-solving; and preventing crime. Our findings suggest that while police conduct does impact how stakeholders view them, public trust in the police is at least as much a function of who the police are as of what they actually do, underscoring that police professionalism cannot substitute for political legitimacy more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of physics learners at all levels revolves around problems. Physics education research has inspired attention to the forms of these problems, whether conceptual or algorithmic, closed or open response, well or ill structured. Meanwhile, it has been the work of curriculum developers and instructors to develop these problems. Physics education research has supported these efforts with studies of students problem solving and the effects of different kinds of problems on learning. In this article we argue, first, that developing problems is central to the discipline of physics. It involves noticing a gap of understanding, identifying and articulating its precise nature, and motivating a community of its existence and significance. We refer to this activity as "problematizing," and we show its importance by drawing from writings in physics and philosophy of science. Second, we argue that students, from elementary age to adults, can problematize as part of their engaging in scientific inquiry. We present four cases, drawing from episodes vetted by a panel of collaborating faculty in science departments as clear instances of students doing science. Although neither we nor the scientists had problematizing in mind when screening cases, we found it across the episodes. We close with implications for instruction, including the value of helping students recognize and manage the situation of being confused but not yet having a clear question, and implications for research, including the need to build problematizing into our models of learning.

Engineering design places unique demands on teachers, as students are coming up with new, unanticipated ideas to problems along often unpredictable trajectories. These demands motivate a responsive approach to teaching, in which teachers attend their students' thinking and flexibly adapt their instructional plans and objectives. A great deal of literature has focused on responsive teaching in science and mathematics, but there has been little research or professional development on this approach in engineering. In this work, we conducted clinical video-based interviews with six elementary teachers experienced in teaching engineering to discuss what they noticed in their students' thinking and how they responded. Using analytical methods based on the grounded theory approach, we identified four themes in what teachers noticed in their students' engineering: how students (1) framed (or interpreted) the project; (2) engaged in the engineering design process; (3) exhibited informed designer patterns; and (4) communicated with each other in ways that supported their engineering. Although none of these teachers had a formal background in engineering, we show how these themes connect to disciplinary aspects of engineering design. We also identified challenges that teachers perceived facing when responding to students' work. By showing teachers' abilities and challenges for responsive teaching, these findings motivate a research and professional development agenda to support teachers in eliciting, noticing, and responding to their students' engineering. [This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the 2016 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, under the title "Dimensions of Experienced Responsive Teaching in Engineering."]

Preservice secondary science teachers often experience science learning in narrow and marginalizing ways in their science preparation. These experiences cause harm, particularly for preservice teachers of color. They also limit the disciplinary resources they can develop for later teaching science in ways that value and sustain their students' ways of knowing and being in the world. Our research explores possibilities for cultivating new spaces for preservice secondary science teachers to engage in science. In a content-focused education course, we designed for and studied preservice teachers' engagement in expansive and connective sensemaking, incorporating heterogeneity, power, and historicity in pursuits of explanatory accounts of the natural world. In this article, we examined how this course design can support preservice teachers to attune to heterogeneity in ways of knowing in science and to connect to identity and historicity in scientific sensemaking. Our analysis suggests that students' final projects reflected attunements to diverse knowing, communicating, and relating in science and deep connections with their identities and future-making, yet had fewer connections to sociohistorical narratives and structures. We developed illustrative case studies of four student projects, highlighting the personal, social, and political possibilities of creating space for future educators to imagine more expansive and connective forms of science. This study contributes a novel model for preservice science teacher education to support teacher learning to value and sustain their students' ways of knowing and being in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting individuals worldwide and characterized by deficits in social interaction along with the presence of restricted interest and repetitive behaviors. Despite decades of behavioral research, little is known about the brain mechanisms that influence social behaviors among children with ASD. This, in part, is due to limitations of traditional imaging techniques specifically targeting pediatric populations. As a portable and scalable optical brain monitoring technology, functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) provides a measure of cerebral hemodynamics related to sensory, motor, or cognitive function. Here, we utilized fNIRS to investigate the prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity of young children with ASD and with typical development while they watched social and nonsocial video clips. The PFC activity of ASD children was significantly higher for social stimuli at medial PFC, which is implicated in social cognition/processing. Moreover, this activity was also consistently correlated with clinical measures, and higher activation of the same brain area only during social video viewing was associated with more ASD symptoms. This is the first study to implement a neuroergonomics approach to investigate cognitive load in response to realistic, complex, and dynamic audiovisual social stimuli for young children with and without autism. Our results further confirm that new generation of portable fNIRS neuroimaging can be used for ecologically valid measurements of the brain function of toddlers and preschool children with ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Engineering's introduction into K–12 classrooms has been purported to support meaningful and inclusive learning environments. However, teachers must contend with dominant discourses embedded in US schooling that justify inequitable distributions of resources. Purpose: Drawing on Gee's notion of discourses, we examine how teachers incorporate language legitimizing socially and culturally constructed values and beliefs. In particular, we focus on the discourse of ability hierarchy—reflecting dominant values of sorting and ranking students based on perceived academic abilities—and the discourse of individual blame—reflecting dominant framings of educational problems as solely the responsibility of individual students or families. We aim to understand how these discourses surface in teachers' reasoning about teaching engineering. Method: We interviewed 15 teachers enrolled in an online graduate program in engineering education. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, we analyzed how teachers drew on discourses of blame and ability hierarchy when reasoning about problems of practice in engineering. Results: Teachers drew on engineering education concepts to reinforce dominant discourses (echoing specific language and preserving given roles) as well as to disrupt (utilizing different language or roles that [implicitly] challenge) dominant discourses. Importantly, teachers could also retool discourses of ability hierarchy (arguing for a more equitable distribution of resources but problematically preserving the values of ranking and sorting students). Conclusions: K–12 schooling's sociohistorical context can shape how teachers make sense of engineering in ways that implicate race, gender, disability, and language, suggesting a need to grapple with how discourses from schooling—and engineering culture—maintain marginalizing environments for students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teacher-facilitated whole-class conversations can help elementary students apply the full power of the NGSS science and engineering practices to an engineering design process. In this article we describe and provide examples for five kinds of Design Talks. Each type of Design Talk centers on a different framing question and is facilitated by specific prompts that help students voice their ideas and make connections to others' ideas. Problem-Scoping Talks provide opportunities for students to identify and scope design problems (NGSS Practice 1) with multiple technical, material, and social considerations. Idea Generation Talks help a whole class collectively generate many design ideas (NGSS Practice 6). Design-in-Progress Talks help students express ideas about why a design performed as it did and consider what its performance means for their next iteration (NGSS Practices 2 and 4). Design Synthesis Talks support students to reason across these designs and synthesize common themes (NGSS Practices 2 and 4). Impact Talks invite students to consider questions like, "should we design this?", and "who might this solution benefit and who might it harm?" (NGSS Practices 1 and 8). Teachers can implement Design Talks to invite and leverage different student strengths in engineering design, with particular attention to issues of equity and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]