How do we design small meaningful suggestions for instructional improvement that are easy to implement, rooted in teachers' existing practice, and have a high rate of uptake? That's the question we explore on this poster.
Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS) is a partnership between the University of Illinois Physics Department and 40 high school physics teachers representing 38 schools across Illinois. The holistic goal of the program is to develop a physics teaching Community of Practice that supports high school physics teachers from diverse school contexts in the design and implementation of high-quality, university-aligned instructional materials, such that their students experience fewer barriers in transitions to post-secondary STEM programs.
This project uses design-based research to develop, pilot, and refine a set of complementary online activities for preservice teachers to engage in approximations of practice to develop their ability to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions in mathematics and science. The effort has produced an integrated online practice suite (OPS) containing a coordinated and scaffolded collection of approximation of practice activities using game-based practice spaces, simulations, and virtual reality coupled with targeted feedback and support from teacher educators.
This project modifies an assessment system to provide ongoing, instructionally productive evidence to teachers about student learning and to link student work products and formative assessments with summative assessments in models that generate useful estimates of student growth. In this iteration, the assessment system is refined as we with K-5 teachers in two schools to develop a learning progression that guides our collaborative work foster student thinking about spatial measurement in the elementary grades.
In MS-GGU, we attend to middle-school students’ understandings of coordinate systems and frames of reference prior to examining their graph construction and interpretation. The project goals are to advance knowledge of students’ developing understandings of graphs “from the ground up” with attention to underlying coordinate systems and frames of reference that comprise the coordinate systems and (b) design and empirically test tasks to support students’ learning of coordinate systems and graphs to enhance graph literacy.
The primary aim of the MMaRS study is to develop a mathematics assessment system to use for grades K-2 that measure students’ abilities in two foundational and predictive constructs, numeric relational reasoning (NRR) and spatial reasoning (SR). Teachers may use results of these assessments to guide their instructional decision making to support student learning of these constructs. The objectives of the project are to develop formative assessments supporting each grade level (K-2) for each of the NRR and SR constructs and collect validity and reliability evidence.
The Taking a Deep Dive (TaDD) study examines the residual impacts of four different professional development models on teacher learning, specifically 3-4 years after the actual PD experiences. The project is conducting a rigorous cross case analysis across participants from the different projects. Additionally, a survey was given to participants in May 2019 which was 3-4 years after their PD experience. Findings contribute to the PD landscape of PD design and survey design.
This project developed a system of practical measures, and associated routines and data visualizations, to support the implementation of instructional improvement strategies (e.g., coaching) in middle-grades mathematics teaching. Classroom and professional learning measures assess students’ and teachers’ perspectives of key aspects of the learning environment, respectively. We will highlight the contributions they have made to our partner districts’ improvement efforts; and our attention to validity in the design and use of practical measures.
The Researching Order of Teaching project provides structured scaffolds for teachers to implement two sets of research-based teaching strategies hypothesized to positively impact mathematics achievement in mathematical modeling and problem solving. The poster summarizes the teaching strategies and associated research.
The aim of this project is to develop and test the efficacy of a play-based numeracy intervention for preschool classrooms. Classrooms were randomly assigned to two experimental conditions (representing different pedagogical guidance approaches) and a business-as-usual control condition. Teachers in experimental classrooms were trained to incorporate a set of numeracy games. The intervention was assessed by pre- and post-test measures of teachers and children, 11 structured observations, and focus group data.
