William Sandoval

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Bio

William (Bill) Sandoval is a Professor and Head of the Department of STEM Education. Before arriving at NC State, he spent 25 years in the School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA. Dr. Sandoval is interested in how science education can be most useful to people in their everyday lives, especially in helping them make sound judgments about both private concerns and public policy. He conducts his research in collaboration with teachers and their students, and is particularly driven to improve science learning for historically underserved communities.

Dr. Sandoval has published widely in science education, the learning sciences, and educational psychology. He is most widely known for the process of conjecture mapping to organize educational design research. He has held a number of leadership roles in STEM education, serving as the President of the International Society of the Learning Sciences. He has contributed to two consensus reports on STEM education for the National Academies, the most recent focused on elementary science and engineering education.

Publications

• Exploring science teachers' efforts to frame phenomena in the community , Journal of Research in Science Teaching (2024)
• Epistemic cognition , International Encyclopedia of Education(Fourth Edition) (2023)
• Using Argument to Reason AboutScience Practice , Science and Children (2023)
• Science and Engineering in Preschool Through Elementary Grades: The Brilliance of Children and the Strengths of Educators , (2022)
• Do adolescents want more autonomy? Testing gender differences in autonomy across STEM , Journal of Adolescence (2021)
• Equity-oriented science professional development , Preparing and sustaining social justice educators (2021)
• Can autonomy play a role in causal reasoning? , Cognitive Development (2020)
• Characterizing Science Classroom Discourse Across Scales , Research in Science Education (2020)
• Examining teachers’ classroom strategies to understand their goals for student learning around the science practices in the Next Generation Science Standards , Journal of Science Teacher Education (2020)
• Teachers’ uptake of problematic assumptions of climate change in the NGSS , Environmental Education Research (2020)

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