This comprehensive resource for STEM teachers and students, outlines the various stages of large-scale research projects, enabling teachers to coach their students through the research process. This handbook provides enough detail to embolden all teachers— even those who have never designed an experiment on their own— to support student-researchers through the entire process of conducting experiments. Early chapters— research design, background research, hypothesis writing, and proposal writing— help students design and implement their research projects. Later chapters on descriptive and inferential statistics, as well as graphical representations, help them correctly interpret their data. Finally, the last chapters enable students to effectively communicate their results by writing and documenting a STEM research paper, as well as by preparing for oral and poster presentations. Included are student handouts, checklists, presentation observation sheets, and sample assessment rubrics.

Darci J. Harland, PhD, a former biology and English teacher, is the assistant director of research at the Center for Mathematics, Science, and Technology (CeMaST) at Illinois State University. Her educational experiences range from undergraduate and graduate education and biology courses, to high school and middle school science and English courses. Her research interests include the long-term impact of scientific research performed by high school and undergraduate students, the influence of personality on online and face-toface classroom participation, the use of digital media as a tool for reflection, and the level of inquiry in one-to-one laptop classrooms.