High School

The goal of this session is to discuss possibilities, progress, and problems in using learning progression research to support improved assessment and instruction in middle school and high school classrooms.

In this session, several learning progression-related DR K–12 projects share findings and discuss questions around two issues:

Digital, large-scale scientific data have become broadly available in recent decades, and analyzing data, identifying patterns, and extracting useful information have become gateway skills to full participation in the 21st century workforce. Yet, pre-college classrooms are falling short in preparing students for this world and are missing opportunities to harness the power of Big Data to engage students in scientific learning. To address this issue, scientists, educators, and researchers at Education Development Center, Inc.

The three panelists in this session are in the last one or two years of their game-based learning projects, and all have done extensive work in supporting use of their games in classroom learning. As their work has progressed, each has discovered valuable ways to support teachers as well as encountered surprises in what teachers wanted (and didn’t want), and now recognize things they wished they had learned in the beginning of their projects. Session participants leave with recommendations they can use in their current projects, including:

In Assessing Secondary Teachers’ Algebraic Habits of Mind, the project team is developing tools to study the following questions: What are the mathematical habits of mind (MHoM) that secondary teachers use, how do they use them, and how can we measure them?

In this session, presenters share a paper-and-pencil assessment being developed to measure how teachers use MHoM when they do mathematics for themselves. The presenters also share classroom video and a preliminary framework for examining MHoM in teaching practice.