Grand Challenges
The “Restructuring Middle School Science around Grand Challenges” project is funded through the National Science Foundation Discovery Research K-12 program. This project focuses on restructuring middle school science education around Grand Challenges (GCs)—multi-faceted, complex issues that are shaping the world such as climate change, pandemics, and diminishing biodiversity. Recent evidence suggests that students are interested in these issues and motivated to contribute to solutions; this project creates opportunities in middle school science for students to tap into this interest and motivation. Despite the potential of issues-based science teaching and learning, several challenges have limited widescale uptake of the approach: limited curriculum materials, limited teacher preparedness and comfort teaching with issues, and a lack of alignment between issues-based teaching and national assessments. The project addresses these challenges by creating new curriculum, providing teacher professional learning opportunities, and exploring the ways in which standardized testing impacts implementation by studying GC-oriented learning experiences in traditional testing contexts and contexts in which these testing constraints have been removed. The project will pursue the following three goals: 1) Develop four GC units (each lasting 3-4 weeks) with associated assessments to be interspersed throughout 7th grade science. 2) Collaborate with middle school science teachers to enact, study, and revise the GC units. 3) Conduct research on student outcomes associated with the GC units and factors that impact the feasibility and quality of GC-oriented learning experiences in middle school science.
The Grand Challenges project is a collaborative effort between researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill and the Weizmann Institute in Israel.