Middle School

Teacher Professional Learning to Support Student Motivational Competencies During Science Instruction (Collaborative Research: Linnenbrink-Garcia)

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We iteratively designed and tested a research-based professional learning (PL) approach to help middle school science teachers effectively support and sustain students’ motivational competencies during ambitious science instruction. A team of researchers and middle school science teachers co-designed a PL approach called M-PLANS (Motivation - Planning Lessons to Activate eNgagement in Science). Early testing suggests promise for impacts on teacher beliefs and behavior as well as students’ motivation, engagement, and science performance.

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Supporting Teachers to Teach Mathematics through Problem Posing

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This project aims to support teachers to engage their students in mathematical problem posing (problem-posing-based learning, or P-PBL). P-PBL is a powerful approach to the teaching and learning of mathematics, and provides students with opportunities to engage in authentic mathematical practices.

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Supporting Teachers in Responsive Instruction for Developing Expertise in Science (Collaborative Research: Linn)

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STRIDES supports science teachers to rapidly respond to the diverse students in their classrooms. Leveraging advances in natural language processing, the project analyzes student written explanations of scientific phenomena to provide fine-grained summaries to teachers about student knowledge integration across NGSS dimensions. STRIDES suggests learning science-based customizations and studies how teachers use the summaries and customization suggestions to improve student progress. The researchers study how well the customizations address the learning needs of diverse students.

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Supporting Teacher Customizations of Curriculum Materials for Equitable Student Sensemaking in Secondary Science (Collaborative Research: McNeill)

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This project includes research examining teachers’ customization processes and the development of tools to support teachers in adapting curriculum materials for their specific school context to facilitate equitable science sensemaking for all students. The research program includes: (1) Empirical study of teachers’ customization processes; (2) Theoretical model of teacher thinking that underlies customization; (3) Tools to support principled customization consistent with the goals of the reform; and (4) Empirical study of how tools influence teachers.

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Supporting Students' Language, Knowledge and Culture Through Science

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The LaCuKnoS project promotes a justice-centered approach to broadening participation in STEM by engaging teachers, students and families across Oregon in work to support language development for science meaning making, mapping cultural and community connections to science, and building knowledge for informed decision making.

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Supporting Secondary Students’ Earth Science Knowledge and Engineering Design Skills with Mobile Design Studios

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This project seeks to support students to creatively combine science, engineering and social or community knowledge to address Earth Science problems in their local communities. Through a collaborative project based learning platform with built in scaffolding and an AI design mentor, students will engage in front-end design practices to understand and frame problems and explore solutions. We examine how this impacts science conceptual knowledge, design skills and creativity for middle and high school students.

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Supporting Science Learning and Teaching in Middle School Classrooms Through Automated Analysis of Students' Writing (Collaborative Research: Puntambekar)

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Written science explanations are central to learning and practicing science. However, there are two main challenges: first, students struggle to explain their ideas and use supporting data appropriately. Second, it is not realistic for teachers to provide real-time, comprehensive feedback to each student. We will present how PyrEval, a natural language processing (NLP) technology, provided students with timely, personalized, automated feedback. We will discuss opportunities and challenges for using automated feedback in classrooms.

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Supporting Science Learning and Teaching in Middle School Classrooms Through Automated Analysis of Students' Writing (Collaborative Research: Passonneau)

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This project supports students’ writing of science explanations. One main goal is to develop novel, automated natural language processing (NLP) technology to provide middle school students and teachers with real-time feedback on their science essays, to help them reflect on the quality of their explanations, and to foster their ability to write scientific explanations grounded in scientific evidence. A science unit on roller coasters is presented to students in a web-based environment that includes a roller coaster simulation to conduct experiments.

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Supporting Instructional Decision Making: The Potential of an Automatically Scored Three-dimensional Assessment System (Collaborative Research: Zhai)

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This project studied the utility of a machine learning-based assessment system for supporting middle school science teachers in making instructional decisions based on automatically generated student reports (AutoRs).

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Strengthening STEM Teaching in Native American Serving Schools Through Long-Term, Culturally Responsive Professional Development

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Indigenous students experience persistent inequitable outcomes in schools, particularly in STEM. Since teacher quality is one of the most important school-based factors impacting K12 students’ learning and engagement in schools, our project provides long-term professional development to teachers in rural, Indigenous-serving schools to support teachers’ development of culturally responsive STEM curriculum units. We provide an overview of our professional development model, and share findings from our work with over 100 teachers during four program years.

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