This project supports ELs in STEM through making classroom discussions more accessible. We know from prior research that when students engage in classroom discussions, they can learn important mathematical concepts and develop a positive identity as a mathematics student. At the same time, we also know that many bilingual students who are classified as English learners, especially at the high school level, experience mathematics classes characterized by low-level mathematical and linguistic demands. Our goal is to transform this reality through a program of design research, done in collaboration with local teachers at a linguistically diverse school and student researchers from San Diego State University.

Our specific strategy is to research and develop design principles for high school classroom learning environments in which ELs participate in robust discussions. We started by observing mathematics classes during a "business as usual" phase and interviewing a linguistically diverse group of students about mathematics and about their experiences in school mathematics. We have taken what we learned from those observations and we are working with teachers to redesign the classroom learning environment to ensure all students can participate in classroom discussions. Three specific foci of our work are: 1) maintaining a consistent conceptual focus across the units we design, 2) integrating mathematical and language-related goals in each lesson, and 3) incorporating language supports in each lesson to make discussions available and fruitful for all students.

Despite that fact that proof is considered a central mathematical process, and policy documents have consistently recommended that proof be taught in school mathematics, success with proof remains elusive. A preponderance of evidence suggests that proof is challenging for teachers to teach (e.g., Cirillo, 2011; Knuth, 2002) and for students to learn (e.g., Chazan, 1993; Senk, 1985). Factors identified as contributing to these challenges include: impoverished curricula (Otten et al., 2014); teachers’ content and pedagogical knowledge (Knuth, 2002); and the lack of recommendations about how to scaffold proof so that students can be successful (Cirillo et al, 2017).

PISC draws on pilot study data and findings that suggest a promising approach to scaffolding the introduction to proof in geometry. Based on these findings, we developed the Geometry Proof Scaffold (GPS)⁠—a pedagogical framework that outlines eight sub-goals and corresponding competencies that can be taught one at a time. For example, prior to being asked to work on a proof, students learn to draw valid conclusions from given information or assumptions. The eight sub-goals in the GPS are: Understanding Geometric Concepts, Defining, Coordinating Geometric Modalities, Conjecturing, Drawing Conclusions, Using Common Sub-Arguments, Understanding Theorems, and Understanding the Nature of Proof.       

The project broadens participation in computer science and computational thinking by preparing all preservice teachers at Georgia State University to integrate computing activities into their courses. The impact of preparing all teachers to use computing activities is that students receive exposure to multiple computing activities throughout preK-12 and understand how computing is used in all disciplines. Even if students do not pursue a job in computer science, they are better prepared to use computing solutions in their chosen profession and in their personal lives. Integrating computing activities also gives teachers new tools to teach within their discipline, and the computing activities are co-designed with teacher preparation faculty to ensure that they are authentic to the primary discipline. This project is unique because it is integrating computing activities across disciplines and grade bands simultaneously. In this context, researchers can explore which computing concepts and practices are universal and should be considered part of a general computational literacy, a topic that is debated on computing education researchers.

The project addresses three fundamental problems in professional development.  One problem is the lack of a centralized curriculum that affects teachers’ discussions pedagogical issues around specific content. The animations anchor teachers’ discussions of pedagogical issues by showing examples of problem-based lessons and promoting teachers’ development of an inquiry stance for understanding student thinking during problem-solving. A second problem involves teachers’ difficulties focusing their observations on student thinking. The video clubs allow for showcasing examples from various classrooms and provide opportunities for a deep analysis of student thinking when solving complex tasks. A third problem is that of providing opportunities for practice-based professional development. By having all teachers teach the lesson in their classrooms, the adaptation to lesson study supported teachers in applying what they learned in professional development sessions. Overall, the project enhances lesson study implementation in the U.S. by producing a viable model that engages teachers across school districts who teach the same content area, thus helping to overcome teachers’ sense of isolation by building a professional community.

An important barrier to persistence in STEM fields for marginalized groups, including women and ethnic minorities, relates to cultures in many STEM organizations, such as academic institutions, that foster discrimination, harassment and prejudicial treatment. This research will contribute to understanding the STEM educational climates in high schools and will help to identify factors that promote resilience in STEM contexts, documenting how K-12 educators can structure their classrooms to foster success of all students in STEM classes. We are examining inclusive STEM classes with attention both to college preparatory STEM classes as well as specialized STEM programs that are preparing youth for immediate entry into the STEM workforce upon graduation. Further, this work will explore how to create schools where students stand-up for each other and support each other so that any interested student will feel welcome in STEM classes and programs. This work is innovative in bringing a bystander intervention lens to classroom-based exclusionary experiences. Research on aggression demonstrates how powerful bystanders can be in interrupting unacceptable behavior, but no prior work has examined whether students can be empowered to serve as active bystanders in STEM classrooms to help create inclusive spaces for all students.

When students perceive that their experiences are not relevant to their science and mathematics learning, they may view these fields as inaccessible to them. This in turn creates an obstacle to their engagement, which becomes particularly consequential for students from traditionally underrepresented populations. There is a pressing need, then, to prepare STEM teachers to be open and responsive to students’ diverse ideas and  experiences—including their linguistic, emotional, and cultural knowledge—and to leverage them as instructional resources. To address this need, this project aims to cultivate teachers’ “epistemic empathy” to promote an asset-based orientation towards all students as sense-makers, an orientation that may support teachers to be more responsive to students’ ideas and experiences. Using a design-based approach, the team designs and implements educative experiences for teachers aimed at fostering their attunement to and ways of leveraging learners’ ideas and emotions in science and mathematics. Further, the project explores how epistemic empathy shapes teachers’ views of their roles, goals, and priorities and how it influences their enactment of responsive teaching that pursues the productive beginnings in student work. Lastly, the project will investigate how teachers’ empathy shapes students’ engagement and responsiveness to each other’s experiences in the classroom.

Data models of variability inform inferences within STEM communities across disciplines. Making inferences that are informed by models of variability is an increasingly important learning goal for both science and mathematics education. For STEM professionals, though, these inferences involve interdisciplinary networks of ideas and practices that emerge from local questions and problems. But institutional boundaries in schools separate mathematics and science disciplines in ways that undermine interdisciplinarity, and students are rarely supported to develop a coherent image of how ideas and practices from different disciplinary communities inform one another.

Our project aims to support middle grades students to create, revise, and use models of variability to make inferences about ecological systems. We are developing innovative curricular infrastructures to help mathematics and science teachers coordinate their instruction and support students to use interdisciplinary networks of ideas as they make inferences about organisms in local ecological systems. We are using a design-based research approach in partnership with middle grades math and science teachers to iteratively design, implement, and study these curricular infrastructures. This project is designed to generate new knowledge about how to conceptualize and support interdisciplinary learning goals related to making inferences with data.

Today’s middle school mathematics classrooms are marked by increasing diversity (National Center of Educational Statistics, 2018; U.S. Census Bureau, 2015). Traditional responses to diversity are tracked classes that contribute to opportunity gaps (Flores, 2007) and can result in achievement gaps. Differentiating instruction (DI) is a pedagogical approach to manage classroom diversity in which teachers proactively plan to adapt curricula, teaching methods, and products of learning to address individual students’ needs in an effort to maximize learning for all (Heacox, 2002; Tomlinson, 2005). Thus, DI involves systematic forethought rather than only reactive adaptation.

In addition, broadly speaking, students enter middle school at three different levels of multiplicative reasoning that have significant implications for how they build mathematical knowledge in middle school, including their fractions knowledge (e.g., Hackenberg & Tillema, 2009; Steffe & Olive, 2010), integers (Ulrich, 2012), and aspects of their algebraic reasoning (Hackenberg, 2013; Hackenberg & Lee, 2015; Olive & Caglayan, 2008). Teaching students at all of these levels is a significant challenge and requires research into student thinking at these levels.

In our project, we are using iterative design experiment methodology to study these issues with middle school students in after school settings and classrooms. We are also creating a community of teachers engaged in these issues through a teacher study group.