Curriculum

PBS News Hour Student Reporting Labs StoryMaker: STEM-Integrated Student Journalism

Principal Investigator:
Sneak peek at StoryMaker, a video storytelling platform /educator co-learning community supporting students to produce videos about STEM projects.
PI: Leah Clapman, PBS NewsHour
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Target Audience:

Online Practice Suite: Practice Spaces, Simulations and Virtual Reality Environments for Preservice Teachers to Learn to Facilitate Argumentation Discussions in Math and Science

Principal Investigator:

This poster provides an overview of our three-year project where researchers are using a design-based research approach to develop, pilot, and refine a set of coordinated and complementary practice-based activities that teacher education programs can deploy to provide practice-based learning opportunities for preservice teachers. The goal is to help the preservice teachers to engage in authentic, purposeful, and scaffolded approximations of practice as they develop their ability to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions in mathematics and science.

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Learning Trajectories as a Complete Early Mathematics Intervention: Achieving Efficacies of Economies at Scale

Principal Investigator:
The ULTIMATE (Understanding Learning Trajectories In Math: Advancing Teacher Education) project will evaluate Learning Trajectories as a complete early mathematics intervention by supporting teachers in deepening their understanding of how children learn mathematics and how to incorporate this understanding. Drs. Clements and Sarama have built a professional development tool, called Learning and Teaching with Learning Trajectories, or [LT]2. The team will investigate the positive impacts both in supporting teachers and on students' learning of mathematics.
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Fostering Equitable Groupwork to Promote Conceptual Mathematics Learning

Principal Investigator:
This project will document how middle grades mathematics students learn equitable collaboration through an ongoing effort to implement groupwork using the model of Complex Instruction. The primary purpose of this study is to describe how 6th-7th grade students learn to collaborate with one another to make sense of mathematics, and how students and their teacher negotiate what constitutes equitable collaboration.
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Developing an Online Game to Teach Middle School Students Science Research Practices in the Life Sciences (Collaborative Research: Gagnon, Baker, and Metcalf)

Principal Investigator:

Aqualab is an online video game to teach scientific practices in the context of life sciences for middle school. Students use science practices of experimentation, modeling, and argumentation to investigate questions related to aquatic ecosystems. The project is developing and scaffolding layers of science practices within the gameplay, and exploring how learning progressions can be empirically derived from game data. The findings will be used to create personalized interventions to improve student learning outcomes.

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Target Audience:

Developing an Online Game to Teach Middle School Students Science Research Practices in the Life Sciences (Collaborative Research: Gagnon, Baker, and Metcalf)

Principal Investigator:

Aqualab is an online video game to teach scientific practices in the context of life sciences for middle school. Students use science practices of experimentation, modeling, and argumentation to investigate questions related to aquatic ecosystems. The project is developing and scaffolding layers of science practices within the gameplay, and exploring how learning progressions can be empirically derived from game data. The findings will be used to create personalized interventions to improve student learning outcomes.

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Target Audience:

Developing an Online Game to Teach Middle School Students Science Research Practices in the Life Sciences (Collaborative Research: Gagnon, Baker, and Metcalf)

Principal Investigator:

Aqualab is an online video game to teach scientific practices in the context of life sciences for middle school. Students use science practices of experimentation, modeling, and argumentation to investigate questions related to aquatic ecosystems. The project is developing and scaffolding layers of science practices within the gameplay, and exploring how learning progressions can be empirically derived from game data. The findings will be used to create personalized interventions to improve student learning outcomes.

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Target Audience:

Design Research on the Teaching and Learning of Conceptual Understanding in High School Chemistry Though the Use of Dynamic Visualizations of Physical and Chemical Changes

Principal Investigator:
To move from an emphasis on description of phenomena to deep understanding consistent with the NGSS, this project develops new teaching and research scholars with expertise in building conceptual understanding through the effective use of visualization to help their students build accurate molecular-level mental models to explain phenomena. VisChem Institutes employ carefully produced animations with teaching strategies informed by a cognitive learning model. Research thus far has explored early teacher chemistry and pedagogical learning.
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CAREER: Fraction Activities and Assessments for Conceptual Teaching (FAACT) for Students with Learning Disabilities

Principal Investigator:

This poster describes the outcomes, dissemination, and scaling of project work from "Fraction Activities and Assessment for Conceptual Teaching (FAACT)." We describe the results of a pilot study for FAACT, free curriculum materials, and how the work has been translated to a new game based project, Model Mathematics Education (ModelME). A link to an intro video for ModelMe's game based curriculum will be shared.

Co-PI(s): Matthew Marino and Michelle Taub, University of Central Florida

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

Principal Investigator:

This project explores how secondary mathematics teachers can design mathematically captivating learning experiences using the mathematical story framework to improve aesthetic opportunities with complex mathematical content. This study has developed and tested 28 MCLEs. By comparing captivating lessons with those that students describe as dull or boring, we have identified multiple characteristics of captivating mathematics lessons. Also, in addition to raising student interest, MCLEs positively impact teacher and student questioning.

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