For the last three years, we have been creating an app called CHALK (Coaching to Help Activate Learning for Kids) that guides instructional coaches to collect observation data in PreK classrooms, view instant results, engage in data-driven coaching conversations, co-create an action plan with the teacher, and track progress over time through continued observations and goal-setting.  CHALK focuses on specific classroom practices that are predictive of students' gains (Christopher & Farran, 2020).

While new standards call for elementary students to learn engineering, many teachers do not receive any training in engineering and feel underprepared to teach it. Ed+gineering partners preservice teachers with engineering undergraduate students at three points during their respective preparation programs to develop and teach engineering lessons to elementary students. These three collaborations help engineering students develop interdisciplinary collaboration skills while helping preservice teachers develop the competence and confidence to integrate engineering.

To lower the barriers in STEM disciplines for students, using evidence-based research, we designed and conducted a professional development program that built middle school teachers' capacity to use hands-on robotics and engineering design as the curriculum focus. Through summer workshops, teachers learned to: build and program LEGO robots; create and implement standards-aligned robotics-based STEM lessons; and develop, practice, and examine optimal pedagogical approaches for STEM learning using robotics.
 

This project investigates learning as students, supported by social media and crowdsourcing, design and test innovations focused on reducing carbon emissions. Our hypothesis is: Competitive Challenges supported by social media and crowdsourcing will engage a diverse array of students in sustained and meaningful scientific inquiry. We anticipate that team members will engage with each other and other teams, using such science practices as modeling, experimentation, error-analysis, argumentation, representation and communication.

Co-PI(s): Brian Drayton, TERC

The Video in the Middle (VIM) project is creating forty asynchronous two-hour modules in which a video clip is at the center as teachers take part in an online experience involving mathematical problem solving, video analysis of classroom practice, and pedagogical reflection. A RCT study was conducted in February/March 2020 with 68 teachers randomly assigned across the three delivery formats Self-paced: 29, Locally facilitated: 19, VIM facilitated: 20) to examine the VIM PD impact.

Co-PI(s): Catherine Carroll and Bob Montgomery, WestEd

EPIC Bioscience engages middle school students in authentic scientific practices via NGSS-aligned investigations of museum specimens. Students complete interactive activities to build prior knowledge and context, then use digitized specimens to collect and analyze relevant data. Findings are applied to pressing global issues such as biodiversity loss, geographic range changes in populations, and diminishing resources. Key challenges in the development of online, specimen-based science investigations are addressed using example interactions and analyses from EPIC investigations.

Integrating Chemistry and Earth science (ICE) has developed innovative units bringing Earth science concepts and practices into the high school chemistry curriculum to address NGSS expectations in the absence of high school Earth science courses. ICE features 3D teaching about local phenomena with student-designed investigations in the schoolyard and labs, exploration of BES datasets and conceptual modeling. ICE built a community of practice with teachers, school leaders, education researchers and scientists supporting rigorous, responsive teaching.