Nicole Wong

Overview

Nicole Wong is a researcher committed to improving STEM education by developing more equitable, robust, and sustainable learning opportunities for teachers and students. Her expertise lies in qualitative and mixed-method research, which she uses to explore the intersection of professional learning, technology, curricula, and culturally sustaining teaching strategies. Wong strives to elevate the perspectives of often-marginalized teachers, students, and community members to understand the impact of educational advancements. She seeks to understand how, why, and for whom pedagogical and curricular innovations result in improved learning. Her insights are instrumental in shaping educational tools and experiences that meet the needs of a wide range of learners.

Boosting Data Science Teaching and Learning in STEM project, which focuses on professional learning in data fluency for middle school STEM teachers. In this role, she has developed the Data Fluency Framework for Teaching, a conceptual framework describing teacher knowledge for data fluency instruction, and a new instrument for measuring pedagogical content knowledge for data fluency. She also serves as the research lead for the NASA-funded Broadening Data Fluency Through the Integration of NASA Assets and Place-Based Learning Project, where she has completed a nationwide landscape analysis of science teachers’ strengths and needs related to integrating data into their classroom instruction.

Prior to joining WestEd, Wong served as the Co-Director of Heller Research Associates, where she led research and evaluation for a variety of STEM projects. These studies have informed the development of educational innovations such as Making Sense of SCIENCE, Math Pathways and Pitfalls, SimScientists, and the Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP). As a former early childhood educator and science teacher educator in UC Berkeley’s Developmental Teacher Education program, Wong combines her perspectives as teacher, teacher educator, and researcher to develop investigative approaches that are inclusive of multiple perspectives

Education

• Postdoctoral Fellow in science education, University of California, Berkeley
• PhD in human development and education, University of California, Berkeley
• MA in human development and education, University of California, Berkeley
• AMS Teacher Certification in Early Childhood, Midwest Montessori Teacher Training Center
• BA in cognitive science, Northwestern University

Select Publications

Wong, N., Elsayed, R., Nilsen, K., Perez, L. R., & Daehler, K. R. (2024). Centering educators’ voices in the development of professional learning for data-rich, place-based science instruction. Education Sciences, 14(4), 356. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14040356

Wong, N., Elsayed, R., Daehler, K. R., Nilsen, K., & Darche, S. (2024, March 17–20). Data fluency landscape analysis: Identifying strengths, needs, and resources for data-rich instruction in Earth science [Conference presentation]. Ninety-Seventh Annual International Conference of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Denver, CO, United States.

Wong N., Elsayed, R., Perez, L. R., Daehler, K. R., & Chen, P. (2024, March 17–21). Toward a theoretical framework for data fluency teaching and learning in middle school STEM [Poster presentation]. Ninety-Seventh Annual International Conference of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Denver, CO, United States.

Daehler, K. R., Wong, N., & Heller, J. I. (2019). The applications and implications of the Refined Consensus Model of pedagogical content knowledge to research about Making Sense of SCIENCE professional learning. In A. Hume, R. Cooper, & A. Borowski (Eds.), Repositioning pedagogical content knowledge in teachers’ professional knowledge. Pp 95–115, Springer.

Metz, K. E., Cardace, A., Berson, E., Ly, U., Wong, N., Sisk-Hilton, S., Metz, S. E., & Wilson, M. (2019). Primary grade children’s capacity to understand microevolution: The power of leveraging their fruitful intuitions and engagement in scientific practices. Journal of the Learning Sciences, pp 556-615.

Haldar, L. C., Wong, N., Heller, J. I., & Konold, C. (2018). Students making sense of multi-level data. Technology Innovations in Statistics Education, 11(1). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7x28z96b

Daehler, K. R., Heller, J. I., & Wong, N. (2015). Supporting growth of pedagogical content knowledge in science. In A. Berry, P. Friedrichsen, & J. Loughran (Eds.), Reexamining pedagogical content knowledge in science education (pp. 45–59). Routledge Press.

Heller, J. I., Daehler, K. R., Wong, N., Shinohara, M., & Miratrix, L. (2012). Differential effects of three professional development models on teacher knowledge and student achievement in elementary science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 49(3), 333–362.