Bio

Dr. Krist was an Assistant Professor of science education in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign before joining the Stanford faculty. Her work focuses on supporting meaningful student participation in science practices, teacher professional learning, and designing for more humanizing forms of science learning. Her current projects focus on bringing together various configurations of community organizations, teachers, families, and scientists to develop science learning experiences that promote communities’ visions for thriving. She received her PhD in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University in 2016 and was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Maryland from 2016-2017. Her early career work has been supported by an NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship as well as grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and was recently recognized with NARST’s Early Career Research Award.

Academic Appointments

Contact

  • Academic
    stinakri@stanford.edu
    University - Faculty Department: Graduate School of Education Position: Assoc Professor

Additional Info

Links

Research Interests

  • Curriculum and Instruction
  • Equity in Education
  • Professional Development
  • Science Education
  • Teachers and Teaching

Projects

  • Community Catalysts: Empowering Rantoul's youth and parents through a community-centered approach to educational transformation, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (7/1/2024 - 6/30/2025)

    This Community-Based Innovation project is a collaboration between UIUC's College of Education
    and Nia Inc., a nonprofit organization located in Rantoul, IL. The focus of the project is on improving
    educational and socioeconomic outcomes for minoritized youth and adults in the community. The
    project aims to enrich Nia's existing Parent Mentor initiative and summer STEAM activities by
    integrating participatory action research (PAR) into programs.
    Working with current Parent Mentor and STEAM program facilitators, we will develop customized
    PAR-based programming throughout the academic year. PAR involves engaging parent mentors and
    youth as action researchers to identify and address critical issues in their schools and community.
    The goal is to support the joint development of cultural identity and transformative agency,
    empowering participants to have a meaningful impact in their schools and communities. The project
    will also partner with university courses for middle grades teacher education students to support
    pre-service teachers' development as culturally responsive educators and leaders.
    Ultimately, the project seeks to examine the mechanisms and outcomes of these programs in order
    to develop a research-based model for interventions that utilize a community-centered approach to
    fostering educational success and community thriving.

    Location

    Rantoul, IL

    Collaborators

    • Samuel Hall, Founder and Director, Nia Inc.
    • Kevin Hall, Doctoral student research assistant, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • A professional development model for high school teachers to adapt curricula toward students' knowledges and resources, Stanford University

    In this 3-year Level II Design & Development Teacher Learning Strand project, Stanford University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst collaborate to understand effective entry points, levers, key barriers, and challenges for supporting teacher professional learning in the context of the EMPOWER program. EMPOWER engages teachers, researchers, and community-based organizations (CBOs) in partnership around critically evaluating, enacting, and adapting curriculum materials to meaningfully integrate community-based knowledge and resources. We are working within an existing curriculum development partnership with one high school science department in Illinois and are establishing a new partnership in the Bay Area to engage in participatory curricular co-design. These sites were strategically selected because of contextual variation in the levers and entry points for teacher professional learning relevant for each site. This intentional structure allows for a comparative cases research design that will simultaneously provide empirical support for the effectiveness of EMPOWER’s core elements and illuminate variant and invariant elements of a scalable professional learning model for our key learning outcomes. These outcomes include: (a) teachers’ frequency of use of NGSS-aligned science pedagogies; (b) the development of teachers’ critical consciousness; (c) teachers’ self-efficacy for culturally sustaining pedagogies in science; and (d) students’ epistemologies for science and critical science agency.

    The project brings together existing scholarship from two relatively unrelated areas: one on critical sociopolitical and justice-oriented pedagogies in science (e.g., Madkins & McKinney de Royston, 2019; Morales-Doyle, 2017; 2019; Rodriguez, 2015), and another on teacher learning with and from curriculum materials to support students’ participation in science practices (e.g., Davis & Krajcik, 2005; Schneider & Krajcik, 2002). This synthesis, manifested in the design of our professional learning intervention (EMPOWER), will enable us to produce an empirically-grounded framework that characterizes how teachers (learn to) adapt curriculum resources in ways that promote rigorous science teaching that addresses and responds to issues of sociopolitical relevance. Due to the comparative cases design of our study, this framework will have a theoretical generalizability: the diversity of high school sites both informs and strengthens our claims about how curriculum use and design can be better grounded in students’ lived realities and contexts. The variation in case sites also allows us to add to the knowledge base about how the school, district, and community contexts impact what and how teachers learn.

    Location

    California and Illinois

    Collaborators

    • Mon-Lin Monica Ko, Associate research professor, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado Boulder
    • Barbara Hug, Teaching professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
    • Enrique Suarez, Associate professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • Primary and secondary programs at Yew Chung Secondary School Hong Kong, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

    This study is an evaluation of primary and secondary teaching practices at Yew Chung International School Hong Kong (YCIS). The PI has conducted research over the past 6 years focused on the YCIS ealry childhood program. This project will extend that work through primary and secondary to better understand and define pedagogic practices in those sections. This program was solicited by the Yew Chung Foundation, who will also be providing funding. We will collect data in primary and secondary classrooms and (in the case of secondary) school-funded programs external to classrooms. Data will be coded using qualitative analysis software.

    Location

    Hong Kong

    Collaborators

    • Stephanie Smith, Associate professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • Designing integrated structural support for epistemology, growth mindset, and sense of belonging in introductory physics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

    This project aims to serve the national interest by establishing practices to improve student mindset and persistence in physics. This project plans to investigate new methods for designing introductory physics courses to develop productive student beliefs about their own learning. The target beliefs are correlated with students' learning, academic achievement, and well-being. This project hopes to advance the science of instructional design through the goal of producing clear design principles for developing these target beliefs. Design efforts will focus on how course curriculum and policies can tacitly communicate and reinforce productive beliefs and promote student engagement. Because introductory physics is an early core course in many undergraduate STEM majors, the improvements developed through this project can improve early undergraduate persistence in STEM and seed future success of STEM students.

    This project will iteratively design the course structures of a large-enrollment introductory physics course to promote positive development of three key aspects of students' beliefs about their own learning: physics epistemology, growth mindset, and sense of belonging. Though approaches for positively impacting these educationally relevant beliefs have been developed in other projects, prior approaches often consider one kind of belief in isolation, providing little insight into how these beliefs and their development may be related. To investigate and improve students' beliefs about their own learning, this project uses a design-based research approach. The project will iteratively develop instructional design principles centered on how these three beliefs can be coherently integrated with course activities and instructor messaging through three classroom practices: (i) valuing learning over time, (ii) talking about and resolving wrong ideas, and (iii) eliciting, sharing, and engaging with others' ideas. Design iterations will be informed by a mixed methods approach using student reflections, classroom observations, interviews, and survey data. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through its Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

    Location

    Urbana, IL

    Collaborators

    • Eric Kuo, Assistant professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
    • Morton Lundsgaard, Teaching Associate Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • EMPOWER: Enacting Materials to Promote Ownership, Engagement and Relevance, University of Colorado Boulder

    EMPOWER: Enacting Materials to Promote OWnership, Engagement and Relevance EMPOWER (Enacting Materials to Promote OWnership, Engagement and Relevance) is an ambitious program that empowers students to enact change in their local community. The introduction of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) across the United States has spurred numerous efforts to design and disseminate NGSS-aligned curriculum materials. NGSS-aligned curriculum materials aim to shift science instruction away from rote memorization and toward the active co-construction of ideas by teachers and students. However, these curriculum materials often do not address the persistent, and problematic relationships between race, class, and health and environmental factors that minoritized students of color face in their communities. The goal of the EMPOWER program is to prepare teachers to adapt and enact curriculum materials to address and respond to issues of sociopolitical relevance, so that students will be engaged, interested, and empowered to enact change in their local community. In the EMPOWER program, we will work with a cohort of teachers (~40) in 3 core partner school districts who have committed to using NGSS-aligned units as part of their middle school science curriculum. Our theory of action is that supporting teachers’ understanding of their students, their local teaching contexts, and the curriculum materials will result in shifts in 1) teachers’ views of effective science teaching, 2) teachers’ capacity to adapt curriculum materials to address local issues, and 3) students’ sense of ownership and engagement in science learning. These shifts are mediated by 2 years of professional learning (PL) activities across two contexts: participation in 1) week-long summer workshops, and 2) ongoing cycles of enactment and reflection during the academic year. In the summer workshops, teachers will investigate the environmental and health issues in students’ local community and use this knowledge to adapt the curriculum to directly connect science learning to these issues. During the academic year, teachers will engage in multiple cycles of enactment and reflection on the adapted lesson with researchers and their district colleagues. Across these two contexts, artifacts, surveys and video recordings will be used to study shifts in teacher’s beliefs and adaptive expertise with curriculum materials, as well as students’ participation in science learning. In Year 3, we will work with a subset of teachers in each cohort (~20) to co-develop an open source video case library of curricular adaptations that promote students’ ownership, engagement, and participation. The research activities of the EMPOWER program will result in the development of an open source video case library that documents how curriculum enactments empower students to address human and environmental health issues in their community.

    Location

    Colorado and Illinois

    Collaborators

    • Mon-Lin Monica Ko, Associate Research Professor, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado Boulder
    • Barbara Hug, Teaching Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

2024-25 Courses

All Publications

  • EMPOWER: Enacting Materials to Promote Ownership, Engagement, and Relevance. International Conference on the Learning Sciences ... Ko, M. M., Krist, C., Hug, B., Wingert, K., Suarez, E., Lauren, L. H., Leonardi, N., Hall, K., Light, E. 2024; 2024: 2303-2304

    Abstract

    Fostering locally relevant and community-centered forms of science learning that develop students' critical science agency problematizes a "one-size-fits-all" model of teacher learning; teachers must examine how community needs and resources, local inequities and justice issues, and curriculum materials can converge to design novel learning opportunities for science learners. This paper presents the core commitments of EMPOWER, a cross-institutional effort that aims to support teachers' sensemaking and adaptations of curriculum materials to promote student ownership, engagement, and relevance at multiple sites across the U.S.

    View details for DOI 10.22318/icls2024.997270

    View details for PubMedID 39015814

  • Striving for Relationality: Teacher Responsiveness to Relational Cues When Eliciting Students' Science Ideas COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION Krist, C. 2024; 42 (2): 207-242

    View details for DOI 10.1080/07370008.2024.2308303

    View details for Web of Science ID 001153850000001

  • Understanding Joint Exploration: the Epistemic Positioning Underlying Collaborative Activity in a Secondary Mathematics Classroom CANADIAN JOURNAL OF SCIENCE MATHEMATICS AND TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION Parr, E., Dyer, E. B., Machaka, N., Krist, C. 2023; 23 (3): 479-496

    View details for DOI 10.1007/s42330-023-00295-w

    View details for Web of Science ID 001105520700001

  • Which ideas, when, and why? An experienced teacher's in-the-moment pedagogical reasoning about facilitating student sense-making discussions JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING Krist, C., Shim, S. 2024; 61 (2): 255-288

    View details for DOI 10.1002/tea.21908

    View details for Web of Science ID 001081487000001

  • Teacher Noticing for Supporting Students' Epistemic Agency in Science Sensemaking Discussions JOURNAL OF SCIENCE TEACHER EDUCATION Krist, C., Machaka, N., Voss, D., Mathayas, N., Kelly, S., Shim, S. 2023; 34 (8): 799-819

    View details for DOI 10.1080/1046560X.2022.2155355

    View details for Web of Science ID 000935481800001

  • Alignment between student epistemological views and experiences with course structures in introductory physics: A case study Ouellette, E., Lewsirirat, S., Sebastian, R., Lundsgaard, M., Krist, C., Kuo, E., Jones, D., Ryan, Q., Pawl, A. AMER ASSOC PHYSICS TEACHERS. 2023: 260-265

    View details for DOI 10.1119/perc.2023.pr.Ouellette

    View details for Web of Science ID 001237836500042

  • Expanding the interpretive functions of framing for understanding marginalized students' participation in collaboration and learning (vol 17, pg 937, 2022) CULTURAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE EDUCATION Shim, S., Krist, C. 2022; 17 (4): 1193

    View details for DOI 10.1007/s11422-022-10139-y

    View details for Web of Science ID 000857897900001

  • Distributing epistemic functions and tasks-A framework for augmenting human analytic power with machine learning in science education research JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING Kubsch, M., Krist, C., Rosenberg, J. M. 2023; 60 (2): 423-447

    View details for DOI 10.1002/tea.21803

    View details for Web of Science ID 000834797800001

  • Expanding the interpretive functions of framing for understanding marginalized students' participation in collaboration and learning CULTURAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE EDUCATION Shim, S., Krist, C. 2022; 17 (3): 937-944

    View details for DOI 10.1007/s11422-022-10122-7

    View details for Web of Science ID 000798101100001

  • Combining Machine Learning and Qualitative Methods to Elaborate Students' Ideas About the Generality of their Model-Based Explanations (November 10.1007/s10956-020-09862-4, 2020) JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION AND TECHNOLOGY Rosenberg, J. M., Krist, C. 2021; 30 (2): 268

    View details for DOI 10.1007/s10956-020-09883-z

    View details for Web of Science ID 000591116000001

  • Combining Machine Learning and Qualitative Methods to Elaborate Students' Ideas About the Generality of their Model-Based Explanations JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION AND TECHNOLOGY Rosenberg, J. M., Krist, C. 2021; 30 (2): 255-267

    View details for DOI 10.1007/s10956-020-09862-4

    View details for Web of Science ID 000569275700001

  • Examining How Classroom Communities Developed Practice-Based Epistemologies for Science Through Analysis of Longitudinal Video Data JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Krist, C. 2020; 112 (3): 420-443

    View details for DOI 10.1037/edu0000417

    View details for Web of Science ID 000519968800002

  • Opening up curricula to redistribute epistemic agency: A framework for supporting science teaching SCIENCE EDUCATION Ko, M., Krist, C. 2019; 103 (4): 979-1010

    View details for DOI 10.1002/sce.21511

    View details for Web of Science ID 000474139400013

  • Identifying Essential Epistemic Heuristics for Guiding Mechanistic Reasoning in Science Learning JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES Krist, C., Schwarz, C. V., Reiser, B. J. 2019; 28 (2): 160-205

    View details for DOI 10.1080/10508406.2018.1510404

    View details for Web of Science ID 000466402700002

  • Computational thinking in elementary classrooms: measuring teacher understanding of computational ideas for teaching science COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION Yadav, A., Krist, C., Good, J., Caeli, E. 2018; 28 (4): 371-400

    View details for DOI 10.1080/08993408.2018.1560550

    View details for Web of Science ID 000456127800004

  • Epistemologies in practice: Making scientific practices meaningful for students JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING Berland, L. K., Schwarz, C. V., Krist, C., Kenyon, L., Lo, A. S., Reiser, B. J. 2016; 53 (7): 1082-1112

    View details for DOI 10.1002/tea.21257

    View details for Web of Science ID 000380947100006

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9738-4308