In this project, we investigate haptic systems that are readily available for rendering visual STEM content through sight, sound, and touch. We use combinations of visual display, text-to-speech, vibrations, and the movement of one’s hands for interacting with STEM content (such as charts and graphs in math and science-based simulations) multimodally on touchscreens. Our investigations extend into "smart" tangible manipulatives that pair with interactive PhET simulations and enable rich kinesthetic manipulation of on-screen content through touch.

Through critical community-engaged scholarship with ten Black and Latinx families and two community organizations, the PI is co-designing and co-studying an educational program aimed at advancing racial justice in elementary mathematics. Specifically, the program seeks to build parents’ capacity to catalyze change across classrooms and schools within their local communities. I share preliminary findings from the program’s initial year and the development of parent-community-university partnerships that promote a shared vision for racial justice in mathematics.

Over the last five years, the Responsive Math Teaching Project has developed and refined a sustainable model for the development of mathematics instructional leadership through a research-practice partnership with a network of 14 urban under-resourced K-8 schools. Teacher instructional capacity is built through developing new visions of mathematics teaching and learning, practice-based pedagogies of enactment and reflection, and mentored engagement in collaborative lesson design and enactment.

The “Genes, Traits & Change over Time” middle school curriculum unit integrates core ideas in genetics, heredity, and natural selection. This 4-5 week, NGSS-friendly unit includes scaffolded practice in working with models, crafting explanations, and identifying cause and effect relationships. We will report findings from a nation-wide efficacy test of the unit as well as case studies of classroom implementation and individual students’ learning.

Building Insights through Observation is an early stage design and development project that is studying the application of arts-based approaches to support students in observing and analyzing visual information, and to improve teachers’ knowledge and practice related to teaching with scientific data. This design-based research, conducted over four years, will iteratively develop, test, and refine a cross-disciplinary instructional framework and professional development model with two cohorts of middle school science teachers.

Our work focuses on developing teacher knowledge within a PLC that uses the AIM-TRU learning cycle to support teachers’ engagement with mathematical tasks and video cases. The learning cycle is grounded in the Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) framework (Schoenfeld, 2014) and utilizes Charles’s (2005) Big Mathematical Ideas within Formative Assessment Lesson (FAL) content. Teacher conversations were analyzed with respect to congenial and collegial characteristics with the latter resulting in greater alignment with TRU.

Young children naturally engage in science and engineering practices (SEPs) through play in sophisticated ways. We are developing professional learning modules for early childhood and elementary educators to recognize and deepen children's engagement with SEPs while leveraging SciEPOP, as a professional online learning tool. This poster explores the design of these modules to engage educators in recognizing when children are engaging in SEPs through play and consider approaches to deepening and extending such engagements.

Boosting Data Science Teaching and Learning in STEM (aka “Data Fluency”) is a project that seeks to improve teachers’ and students’ “data fluency,” which includes understanding sources of data, structuring data for analysis, interpreting representations of data, inferring meaning from data, and explaining data and findings to diverse audiences. We will accomplish this goal by iteratively developing research-based professional learning that prepares teachers to offer next generation data-rich learning.

Young children engaged in observation, experimentation, exploration, and conversations about their natural world can synergistically develop science and language skills (Lee, 2018). In this poster presentation we discuss the iterative development and results from the initial pilot of Bilingualtek’s instructional approach. This project integrates cultural-linguistically-responsive science-language instruction designed for classroom implementation by monolingual Head Start preschool teachers of Latino/a dual-language-learners.

This project aims to examine how teachers' beliefs about the origins of mathematical excellence, which might be attributed to genetic, social, or personal characteristics, affect racial and gender equity in their classrooms. A three-part study will create, validate, and apply the Attributions of Mathematical Excellence Scale (AMES), correlating scores with race, gender, and achievement equity.