Exploring Early Childhood Teachers’ Abilities to Identify Computational Thinking Precursors to Strengthen Computer Science in Classrooms

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EPK-2 is designing and testing a model of PreK-2nd grade teacher professional learning to address computational thinking. The focus is teachers’ generative development in CT as informed by collaborative, inquiry-based learning. The goal is to help teachers and schools build computational thinking pathways beginning with students’ earliest years. Research questions explore factors mediating PreK-2nd grade teachers’ learning and implementation of computational thinking in their classrooms.

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Exploring Changes in Teachers' Engineering Design Self-efficacy and Practice Through Collaborative and Culturally Relevant Professional Development

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Project ExCEED is a three-year project to help upper elementary and middle school teachers create and implement engineering design tasks in their classrooms that are relevant to the cultures and communities of their Native American and rural student populations. The interdisciplinary research team is studying the effectiveness of the professional development program at increasing teachers’ confidence and ability to incorporate culturally relevant engineering design into their classrooms.

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Examining an On-line, International Exchange Professional Development Program for High School Teachers

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This project explores the potential of lesson-centered collaboration on lessons for supporting teachers’ professional growth. Specifically, the project examines how the exchange between both domestic and international teams of teachers centered on teacher-generated lesson artifacts—in the form of storyboarded lessons and annotations of those lessons—can serve as a powerful tool for supporting teachers’ ongoing professional learning and growth through collaboration.

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Evaluating Effects of Automatic Feedback Aligned to a Learning Progression to Promote Knowledge-In-Use

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This project builds on existing work on three-dimensional learning progressions in high school physical sciences to develop an artificial intelligence supported scoring system for student text and models. These tools will be used to support learning of electrical forces in an integrated curriculum with real-time feedback on formative assessment items. We report on early attempts to design coding rubrics for automatic scoring of explanations and modeling responses and outcomes of developing text classification models.

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Enhancing the Teacher-Curriculum Relationship in Problem-based Mathematics Classrooms by Connecting Teacher and Student Digital Collaborative Environments

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The project is extending a digital collaborative platform for networks of teachers to create, use, and share resources for planning, teaching, and reflecting. The resources online include problem-based curriculum, classroom artifacts from students, and resources created by teachers. We report on how teachers use the resources, collaborate with each other, and make instructional decisions. With more classroom resources being created online, the project will help understand how mathematics teaching can be best supported.

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Engineering for Students with Extensive Support Needs

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This project involves four strands of work: (a) investigating teachers’ engineering instruction, (b) developing a framework of conceptual understanding of engineering education for students with ESN, (c) conducting research to support universally designed engineering instruction and materials, and (d) producing and disseminating the instructional support framework and materials. Insights from project research will be used to further refine professional learning materials to better support teachers' ability to support engineering focused behaviors of students with ESN.

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Empowering Teachers to See and Support Student Use of Crosscutting Concepts in the Life Sciences

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In this project, we are developing strengths-based formative assessment tools to support students’ use of the crosscutting concepts (CCCs) in phenomenon-based science learning. We have used the practice of Developing and Using Models as a window into student use of the CCCs, co-developing instructional supports with participating teachers. We are now connecting these supports to aspects of the formative assessment process (e.g., visualizing success, eliciting evidence of student thinking, providing feedback, and cultivating student self-assessment).

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Empowering Students with Choice Through Equitable and Interactive Mathematical Modeling (EIM2)

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In this session, we share our conceptualization of an Equitable and Interactive Mathematical Modeling (EIM2) program that positions students as decision-makers in their own learning. Students engage in equitable mathematical modeling, a process of using mathematics to analyze and quantify scenarios through a lens of equity. The program involves collaborations with middle school students, a professional learning community series with their mathematics teachers, and the creation of a free online platform that hosts EIM2 modules.

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Empowering Educators to Create Customized, Culturally Responsive Instructional Materials from Scratch Encore Harmonized with the Interest of Students (Collaborative Research: Weintrop)

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This poster will present the NSF funded project entitled CAREER: Situating Computational Learning Opportunities in the Digital Lives of High School Students. This project explores ways to use the data that high school students create and consume daily to situate foundational data science ideas.

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Doing the Math with Paraeducators: Enhancing and Expanding and Sustaining a Professional Development Model in PreK to Grade 3 Math Classrooms

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Working in two high-needs urban school districts, Doing the Math refines and researches a mathematics professional development model for paraeducators in grades PK-3 through ongoing PD designed to enhance pedagogical content knowledge and mathematics teaching self-efficacy. This work also provides opportunities to support pathways to teaching, address the critical teacher shortage and diversify the teaching pool. Program sustainability is supported through integration in PD of classroom teachers, mathematics coaches, and use of PD graduated paraeducators.

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