In this NSDL Selection Services project the Concord Consortium is bringing hundreds of its rich interactive resources for inquiry-based science learning to the awareness of the education community by cataloging them within the NSDL and making them available and useful to K-12 and higher education teachers, students, and researchers. These resources reflect a robust research-based development cycle that has functioned over a number of years through multiple NSF-funded projects. They represent the products of important findings and notable advances in educational technology and pedagogy that have resulted from this accumulated body of work, and as such they amplify the strong intellectual merit of this current Selection Services project. The dissemination of these resources through NSDL represents an important development for the education field and makes the broader impacts of the project felt by fostering practitioners' ability to use and learn from these advances and build on them with additional work of their own.
project was to bring high-quality, NSF-funded science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) educational technology resources into the National STEM Education Distributed Learning’s (NSDL) catalog, facilitate their use and gauge their impact on teaching and learning. The project brought over 100 resources developed by the Concord Consortium to the education community by cataloging them within the NSDL and making them available to K-12 and higher education teachers, students and researchers. These resources were developed over years of research and development through multiple NSF projects, and represent the products of important findings and notable advances in technology and pedagogy that have resulted from these projects. The dissemination of these resources – through the NSDL (http://nsdl.org) and the Concord Consortium’s STEM Resource Finder (http://concord.org/stem-resources) – represents an important development for the education field by fostering practitioners’ ability to use and learn from these funded advances and build on them with additional work of their own. The project also collaborated with NSDL partners, including ComPADRE, AMSER and CLEAN, which have contributed to the dissemination of over 100 Concord Consortium resources as part of their respective collections. An embedded assessment tool was developed by the project to give teachers and researchers a means of evaluating the impact of NSDL resources. The tool, which provided a direct and simple means of embedding assessment items with technology-based resources, permitted the measurement of student understanding as the resources were being used. Four case study teachers from Randolph (MA) Middle and High Schools authored assessment activities with the tool and used them successfully with their students.
