Jacqueline Miller

Professional Title
Senior Research Scientist
Organization/Institution
About Me (Bio)
Jacqueline S. Miller has decades of experience designing innovative, rigorous science curricula that align with national standards, engage and motivate students to learn science, and prepare them for college and careers. In the over 20 years that she has worked at EDC she has led the development of a wide array of highly acclaimed online and print instructional materials and resources.

Her most recent project involves the development of online instructional materials and resources that use the recent Ebola and measles outbreaks as the overarching narrative for educating middle and high school students about emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases; the causative agents, the spread of these diseases, and how epidemics can be prevented and controlled.

Miller led a team in designing the Foundation Science curricula—four introductory courses in physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science that build Grade 9–12 students' science knowledge and literacy skills through challenging inquiry-investigations, reading of primary and secondary resources, writing assignments, and rich discussions. In the Electronic Teacher Guide project, the team developed a prototype digital teacher guide using the genetics unit of Foundation Science. In the Taking Foundation Science to Scale Digitally project, she worked with a publisher to redesign the print version of Foundation Science: Biology and Chemistry for the digital environment. The two curricula are being published under the titles Biology: Concepts and Practices and Chemistry: Concepts and Practices. The earth science curriculum appears under the title EDC Earth Science.

Miller, with colleagues at EDC, CAST, and the University of Michigan, developed the UDL Curriculum Toolkit—the first open-source Web application that supports the creation of interactive, multimedia curricula according to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. She served as co-PI on Exploring Bioethics, a National Institutes of Health (NIH)–funded curriculum project to develop instructional materials for teaching bioethics in high school biology classrooms and was PI and lead writer in the development of Insights in Biology, an NSF-funded introductory biology curriculum for high school. She also was the co-PI of the DR–K12 Learning Resource Network, CADRE.

Miller served on the Mathematics and Science Education Advisory Council for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and was a member of the Steering Committee for the NAEP Science Framework in 2009.

In an attempt to engage a broader audience in the wonders of science she posts blogs describing the science behind the influenza virus, microbes that naturally exist in the human body, averting the ravages of aging, and the forgotten women of science and writes on science education for WBUR public radio’s Cognoscenti website. Roy Gould of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Miller discuss the use of story in science learning in a podcast “The Power of Story in STEM Education” posted on the CADRE website.


Before joining EDC, Miller was an instructor in the Department of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School, where she carried out research on the molecular biology of tumor viruses and parasites and taught courses in virology, parasitology, and the molecular basis of disease. As a Senior Scientist at Matritech, Inc., a small biotechnology company, she directed research on human papilloma virus and cervical cancer.

Miller received a PhD in oncology from the University of Wisconsin and attained her MA and BA in biology from Wellesley College.

Keywords
Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC)
09/15/2009

This project is developing and testing a prototype electronic teacher's guide for a 12-week genetics unit in the NSF-funded curriculum titled Foundation Science: Biology to determine how it impacts high school teachers' learning and practice. The electronic guide, which is based on an existing print guide, has a flexible design so that it anticipates and meets the curriculum planning and support needs of teachers with different knowledge/skills profiles.

Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC)
12/15/2004

This project is developing a comprehensive science curriculum for grades 9-11 and related professional development materials. The curriculum prepares students for high stakes testing, accommodates a new understanding about how students learn, updates teacher content and pedagogical knowledge and serves an increasingly diverse student population. The curriculum consists of eight one-semester modules -- two each in biology, chemistry, Earth science, and physics.

Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC)
02/01/2015

This project will develop a Web-based set of instructional materials and resources that will use the recent Ebola outbreak as the overarching narrative for educating middle and high school students about the disease, its causative agent, how it is spread, and approaches for responding to it and controlling the epidemic.

Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC)
04/01/2011

This project provides a model of how existing, tested digital enhancements can increase student learning. Increasing the quality of science education requires careful coupling of effective, research-based curricula with innovative digital features that deepen and enhance science learning and teaching. This RAPID is to ensure that the content and pedagogical expertise is present during the development of the digital version of Foundation science.

University of Michigan (UM), Center for Applied Special Technology, Inc. (CAST), Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC)
09/15/2007

This project is developing and testing comprehensive science curricula for the middle school and high school. Project partners are creating heuristics for universally designed materials; building an open source UDL Inquiry Science System (ISS) that enables science curricula to be transformed into digitally supported versions incorporating UDL features; and using the ISS to produce exemplars of units from tested instructional materials and evaluate the benefits of these exemplars for students with and without learning disabilities.