Middle School

Broadening participation in STEM requires a change in how K-12 teachers engage and educate students who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. The CRAFT project provides a field-based science and mathematics teacher education program that supports teaching focused on students’ affective development through culturally responsive practices.

This novel project draws upon teachers to contribute or modify existing test items, then immediately pilots them using crowdsourced subjects. Psychometric analysis generates measures of item quality and then “recycles” items to participating teachers for improvement. In this way, a large test item bank is constructed utilizing teacher input with each item possessing: appropriate reading levels, NGSS alignment, scientific accuracy, appropriate difficulty, high statistical discrimination, and minimal difference by gender, race, or ethnicity.

In this project we are studying a sustained implementation of ambitious mathematics teaching (AMT) in a high need setting. Our goal is to articulate the demands of AMT, the resources necessary to address those demands, and the tensions between AMT and other internal and external initiatives. We collaboratively developed the model with instructional leaders, students, parents, and teachers. We operate from a definition of AMT that incorporates disciplinary practices as well as asset-based practices.

This project enhances two interdisciplinary project-based learning (PBL) modules from EL Education with authentic data experiences co-designed with science, math, and social studies middle school teachers. Applying “messy” datasets to relevant societal issues within their existing curriculum and subject matter, we used CODAP to introduce data science education skills and ways of thinking and we examined how engaging and empowering students and teachers can help them develop acumen with data and agency as learners.

We designed a learning approach and associated curricular program that builds from the 5Es (Bybee) model to harness STEM learning toward the engineered design of solutions (phases: Engage, Explore, Explain. Engineer, and Educate). Curricular activities emphasized design features that promote interest and motivation (e.g., choice, appropriately challenging, personal relevance). Research results demonstrated significant learning gains overall and on subparts (e.g., arguments). Teacher and student interviews articulated sustained engagement and motivation.

This poster will share the development of a framework around adaptive expertise and mathematics language routines. Our larger project aims to understand how teachers’ learning communities, teachers, and students develop adaptive expertise in their use of mathematics language routines. Hatano and Inagaki (1984) defined an adaptive expert as someone who can perform procedural skills with flexibility and has developed a conceptual understanding of those skills—they can apply them flexibly in multiple situations.

This project explores how to cultivate novel disciplinary spaces for secondary teachers to experience science. We are designing a content-focused education course for preservice secondary science teachers to engage in expansive and connective sensemaking, incorporating heterogeneity, power, and historicity in pursuits of explanatory accounts of the natural world. We examine how this space supports teachers to expand what counts in science and to attune to their (and their future students’) sociopolitical identities, histories, and future-making.

In our project we design and study opportunities for mathematics and science teachers to coordinate their instruction to support a more coherent approach to teaching statistical model-based inference in middle school. We aim to help more students develop a deeper understanding of ideas and practices related to measurement, data, variability, and inference.

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.

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.