The Science Communities of Practice Partnership (SCOPP), a four-year $3.4 million National Science Foundation grant. The project is developing and studying a comprehensive teacher professional development model to transform science teaching and learning in elementary schools serving predominantly minoritized students.

Although science is increasingly recognized as a key dimension of early learning, findings to date indicate that young children, especially those enrolled in public preschool programs serving historically excluded communities, have limited opportunities to engage in high quality science investigations. This four-year design and development project brings together public preschool teachers, families from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, early learning and STEM researchers, and designers of media to co-design a Professional Learning Hub for Early Science.

The Math Partners intervention is informed by the concepts of Funds of Knowledge and Community Cultural Wealth that inform our growing understanding of how to help teachers partner with families to support early math learning. Teachers receive Practice-Based Coaching in small groups with other teachers and will form design teams in each Math Partners classroom. The design teams of teachers and families will inform how the teachers provide math activities, materials, and instruction.

We explored the impacts of enhanced Integrated Math I exit tickets that support students in determining how well they know material compared to typical exit tickets. We hypothesized that these enhancements would improve students' confidence calibration, mathematics self-efficacy, mastery-approach goals, and mathematics performance more than typical exit tickets. We used a pretest-intervention-posttest design, with students randomly assigned to one of two conditions within their classroom: 1) enhanced exit tickets or 2) typical exit tickets.

The goal of the actLocal project is to develop and test iPlan 2.0, an online platform for K–12 teachers, students, and the public to easily create localized climate change adaptation simulations for any location in the contiguous United States. These simulations will enable high school students and others to implement and evaluate strategies to address the impacts of climate change in their own communities.

We are investigating factors that influence elementary teachers’ professional learning (PL) in science and engineering. The intervention and ongoing supports are offered at a distance to participants teaching grades 3-5 in rural school districts. Overarching research objectives include examining: (1) the impacts of online science and engineering PL; (2) the effectiveness of modest supports on the sustainability of PL outcomes; and (3) the changes to teachers’ engineering instructional practices.

The purpose of our project is to develop, test, and refine children’s computational thinking (CT) learning progressions. This research will provide early elementary educators and curriculum designers with a framework for understanding children’s development of CT and will inform future CT instruction efforts for standards, curricula, teaching practices, and assessment. This project will also provide valuable information about how to integrate CT into early mathematics education in feasible and accessible ways for classrooms.

Data science is transforming science and industry, with a strong demand for skilled professionals. The LogicDataScience (LogicDS) curriculum at Florida Virtual Schools (FLVS) introduces high school students to this field and related careers, aiming to overcome educational barriers, particularly for rural students lacking access to STEM courses and qualified teachers.

Data science is transforming science and industry, with a strong demand for skilled professionals. The LogicDataScience (LogicDS) curriculum at Florida Virtual Schools (FLVS) introduces high school students to this field and related careers, aiming to overcome educational barriers, particularly for rural students lacking access to STEM courses and qualified teachers.

Our project explores simulations focused on eliciting and interpreting elementary students’ mathematics thinking provide preservice teachers with formative assessment opportunities. They have been used with preservice teacher educators and their students three partner programs, and administered for data collection in fourteen other programs. Our studies (1) examine how feedback from the simulations strengthens preservice teachers' abilities to elicit and interpret student thinking, and (2) establish the reliability and validity of the simulations as assessment tools.