Center to Advance Elementary Science through Assessment, Research, and Technology (CAESART)

It’s a Win-Win: Spending Time on Elementary Science Supports Achievement Across Subject Areas
2025-12-10 19:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | MN
In this webinar, the Lawrence Hall of Science and CAESART explored how science teaching and learning in elementary classrooms can be a powerful lever for improving student learning across subjects.
In this interactive session, participants:

Reflected on their own experiences and identify common barriers to making time for science in elementary classrooms.
Engaged in integrated literacy and science learning activities that highlight instructional strategies to support growth in both disciplines.
Learned about current research demonstrating how increased time on science instruction benefits learning across content areas.

By the end of the webinar, participants had both evidence-based research and practical instructional strategies to advocate for expanding science time in their schools and classrooms.

Measuring What Matters: Learning Together
2025-11-12 | NSTA Annual Conference, Minneapolis, MN, United States
CAESART will meet this fall for its first annual in-person Forum—a full-day event to bring together team members and partners from across our national network to reflect on our shared work. This convening is a time for us to come together to share what we’ve learned so far, to collaborate around challenges we are facing in doing the project work, and to build stronger connections so we can keep learning and growing as a team.
This year’s theme, “Measuring What Matters: Learning Together,” centers our shared commitment to deepening our understanding of three-dimensional learning and assessment in early science education. This shared understanding will help us build stronger, more coherent assessment and classroom observation tools across our groups and ensure that the design principles guiding our various research efforts are aligned and mutually reinforcing.

Together, we’ll explore how assessment design connects to instructional practice, what “three-dimensional” really means in context, and how we can advance meaningful, aligned work together.

Opportunities and Challenges in Measuring Science and Engineering Learning in Early Elementary Students
2025-10-09 12:30 - 14:00 (America/Chicago) | MN
This symposium at SREE 2025 examines new approaches to assessing how young children learn science and engineering in the early grades. Presenters will share a landscape analysis of existing assessments and introduce innovative tools, including computer-adaptive tests, game-based performance tasks, and measures of computational thinking. Together, these studies highlight both the promise and the challenges of developing developmentally appropriate assessments that capture the richness of children’s emerging skills and align with the Next Generation Science Standards.

Science and Engineering Education as a Foundational Focus for High-Quality Teaching and Learning
2025-07-14 16:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | MN
The world should be a place of wonderment and satisfaction for young students as they explore, investigate, discover, and solve problems that are meaningful to them. Young children have a natural curiosity and motivation to understand the world as budding scientists and engineers; however, more work needs to be done to understand and support preschool and elementary learning and teaching leveraging the power of science and engineering as a foundational focus.
This webinar examined national efforts to bring science and engineering to the forefront of early education. The session:

Reviewed long-term national efforts to make science and engineering a greater focus of pk-5 education
Explored the research evidence on how science and engineering can improve student-teacher interactions and support learning across multiple domains of development
Offered insights into efforts to align instruction and assessment, including the work of CAESART
