High School

CAREER: Investigating Changes in Students' Prior Mathematical Reasoning: An Exploration of Backward Transfer Effects in School Algebra

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This project examines how instructional activities involving quadratic functions influence students’ prior ways of reasoning about linear functions, and develops and refines instructional products for teaching quadratic functions in ways that influence students’ prior ways of reasoning about linear functions in predictable and productive ways.

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CAREER: From Research to Meta-Research to Practice - The Development of an Educational Learning Environment Framework for School Algebra

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This project advances the understanding of teaching and learning of algebra in grades K through 12 by using a methodology that leverages the cumulative power of an analysis of many studies on a topic. This work will synthesize results aggregated from 40 years of research in the field of mathematics education and develop a unified framework to inform parents, students, teachers, other educators, and researchers.

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CAREER: Expanding Latinxs' Opportunities to Develop Complex Thinking in Secondary Science Classrooms Through a Research-Practice Partnership

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One goal of this project is to improve Latinx and multilingual students’ opportunities to engage in complex thinking in secondary science classrooms through a district and university partnership. In this poster, we present the success and challenges of co-designing and enacting equity/justice centered units that promote civic engagement with five teams of secondary science teachers (n=20) and teacher leaders (n=3) in one school district.

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CAREER: Designing and Enacting Mathematically Captivating Learning Experiences for High School Mathematics

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We will share the results of our designed based research project on how to design secondary mathematics lessons which shift the aesthetic opportunities of students. We worked with a group of six high school math teachers and used mathematical story framework to explore how mathematics lessons on topics that are typically described as boring or dull by students can instead be described as surprising or intriguing.

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CAREER: Cultivating Teachers' Epistemic Empathy to Promote Responsive Teaching

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This design-based research project investigates ways to understand and cultivate science and mathematics teachers’ “epistemic empathy”—their capacity for tuning into and valuing students’ intellectual and emotional experiences in constructing, communicating, and critiquing knowledge. The project team develops educative experiences aimed at cultivating teachers’ epistemic empathy, examines the role of such empathy in facilitating responsive teaching, and explores how epistemic empathy can promote more equitable and humanizing learning environments.

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CAREER: Bridging the Digital Accessibility Gap in STEM Using Multisensory Haptic Platforms

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In this project, we investigate haptic systems that are readily available for rendering visual STEM content through sight, sound, and touch. We use combinations of visual display, text-to-speech, vibrations, and the movement of one’s hands for interacting with STEM content (such as charts and graphs in math and science-based simulations) multimodally on touchscreens. Our investigations extend into "smart" tangible manipulatives that pair with interactive PhET simulations and enable rich kinesthetic manipulation of on-screen content through touch.

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Building a Teacher Knowledge Base for the Implementation of High-Quality Instructional Resources Through the Collaborative Investigation of Video Cases (Collaborative Research: Wilson)

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Our work focuses on developing teacher knowledge within a PLC that uses the AIM-TRU learning cycle to support teachers’ engagement with mathematical tasks and video cases. The learning cycle is grounded in the Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) framework (Schoenfeld, 2014) and utilizes Charles’s (2005) Big Mathematical Ideas within Formative Assessment Lesson (FAL) content. Teacher conversations were analyzed with respect to congenial and collegial characteristics with the latter resulting in greater alignment with TRU.

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Boosting Data Science Teaching and Learning in STEM

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Boosting Data Science Teaching and Learning in STEM (aka “Data Fluency”) is a project that seeks to improve teachers’ and students’ “data fluency,” which includes understanding sources of data, structuring data for analysis, interpreting representations of data, inferring meaning from data, and explaining data and findings to diverse audiences. We will accomplish this goal by iteratively developing research-based professional learning that prepares teachers to offer next generation data-rich learning.

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Assessing College-Ready Computational Thinking (Collaborative Research: Brown)

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Wright maps can provide psychometricians with information about validity based on internal structure, by allowing us to look for banding based on score levels across items. We recently interviewed teachers and trainers about the use of these maps, along with learning progressions and sample student responses to find what was more and less useful, and what features should be added. In this presentation, we will discuss these methods and feedback from teachers.

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Anchoring High School Students in Real-Life Issues that Integrate STEM Content and Literacy

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We present a framework for using scenario-based assessments (SBAs) to measure middle school students' ability to formulate written arguments around socio-scientific issues. We present data showing both the current strengths and limitations of these SBAs. We also present data which shows that, through the process of writing over a 2-week time span, the students showed significant improvements in their ability to make a claim, locate evidence, use reasoning, and use scientific vocabulary in their arguments.

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