Middle

Barbara Chamberlin, with the NMSU Learning Games Lab, shares their user testing processes and strategies. The educational development studio involves content experts and game developers in their game design process, also employing a rigorous user testing process throughout development. The Games Lab developers host learners in their target audience for 2-week sessions during the summer, and on holidays throughout the schoolyear. They train their "game lab consultants" in giving feedback, and have access for frequent testing. Barbara shared the underlying principles that guides their user testing, with recommendations on how they could be amended by others for testing, even in shorter sessions.

Presenters share outcomes of a research-based, tool-supported system of induction created to advance novice teachers’ capacity to scaffold students’ construction of evidence and explanation.

Thinking with Data (TWD) is an Instructional Materials Design (IMD) project which developed and tested a cross-curricular unit designed to cultivate middle school students’ deep understanding of data literacy. The TWD unit consists of four, 2-week replacement modules for interdisciplinary implementation in 7th grade Social Studies, Mathematics, Science, and English Language Arts. The modules address issues of data representation, proportional reasoning, and data-based argumentation using real data in discipline-specific, problem-solving contexts aligned with relevant subject area standards.

Three DR-K12 projects report findings on aspects of the institutional setting of teaching that affects teachers’ development of ambitious instructional practices in middle-school mathematics.

Three DR-K12 projects report findings on aspects of the institutional setting of teaching that affects teachers’ development of ambitious instructional practices in middle-school mathematics.

Poster presented at the DRK-12 Principal Investigators Meeting in Washington, DC.

Presenters share outcomes of a research-based, tool-supported system of induction created to advance novice teachers’ capacity to scaffold students’ construction of evidence and explanation.

This session considers teachers’ transitions from teacher-centered mathematics to student-centered mathematics, including issues of meaning, coherence, and learnability, as well as the importance of working with colleagues.