Projects

The Colorado Learning Assistant (LA) model, recognized nationally as a hallmark teacher recruitment and preparation program, has run a national workshop annually for four years to disseminate and scale the program. This project expands the existing annual workshop to address changing needs of participants and to prepare eight additional faculty members to lead new regional workshops.

As part of a SAVI, researchers from the U.S. and from Finland will collaborate on investigating the relationships between engagement and learning in STEM transmedia games. The project involves two intensive, 5 day workshops to identify new measurement instruments to be integrated into each other's research and development work. The major research question is to what degree learners in the two cultures respond similarly or differently to the STEM learning games.

This project will plan, implement, and evaluate the outcomes of an invitational conference on the role of equity in whole-school STEM education models, particularly Inclusive STEM Schools (ISS), at the high school level.

This project is designing digital games for middle school students that will help them prepare for success in Algebra. The games are intended to help students gain a deep understanding of measurement and fraction concepts that are critical as they begin to learn algebra. The project studies students' development of fraction concepts, their engagement in the tasks, and the use of hand-held devices as a useful platform for games.

This project provides partial support for the First North American GeoGebra Conference, GeoGebra-NA2010, to be held July 27-28, 2010 at Ithaca College. The global mission of this conference is to build a community of mathematicians, mathematics educators, and classroom teachers who can develop the potential of GeoGebra and other similar software for transformation of mathematics instruction and curricula through creative development, practical experimentation, and research.

Geometry Assessments for Secondary Teachers (GAST) represents a collaborative partnership among faculty and staff at the University of Louisville, the University of Kentucky, Florida State University, Alpine Testing Solutions, and Horizon Research, Inc. to develop a knowledge framework and assessments for secondary mathematics teachers' geometry knowledge for teaching. The framework for the assessments will be designed to collect validity evidence for predicting effective geometry teaching and improving student achievement.

A long-standing challenge for education and learning sciences is sharing the distinct knowledge bases of researchers and teachers with each other. The goal of this project is to support teachers, STEM coaches, and researchers in sharing that knowledge so that they can learn from one another.

A long-standing challenge for education and learning sciences is sharing the distinct knowledge bases of researchers and teachers with each other. The goal of this project is to support teachers, STEM coaches, and researchers in sharing that knowledge so that they can learn from one another.

This project involves holding a conference, Helping Teachers Become Culturally Relevant Teachers: Developing New Tools for a New Generation, where the goals are to bring together the very best researchers/practitioners in this field to present a clear theoretical underpinning of Culturally Relevant Teaching (CRT), present the most recent rigorous research to support the theory, and show clearly how CRT theory translates directly into classroom action.

Several small-scale experimental classroom studies Star and Rittle-Johnson demonstrate the value of comparison in mathematics learning: Students who learned by comparing and contrasting alternative solution methods made greater gains in conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and flexibility than those who studied the same solution methods one at a time. This study will extend that prior work by developing, piloting, and then evaluating the impact of comparison on students' learning of mathematics in a full-year algebra course.

This exploratory study aims to design, implement, and test climate science and history professional learning materials and experiences for high school teachers. By leveraging existing science and history/social science materials, the program will develop curricular planning tools and lessons to help teachers integrate climate literacy into their instructional units. The goal is to provide students with the knowledge to understand and respond to the social and environmental issues associated with the climate crisis.

This project uses a mixed-methods design to test the hypothesis that key approaches to high school reform grease the mathematics and science pipelines for all students in reforming high schools. This study is intended to provide understanding of pipeline progression in reforming high schools and strategies successful schools employ to ensure timely pipeline progress for all students, particularly those historically underrepresented and underserved in mathematics and science and post-secondary education.

This project will study the impact and effect of the use of induction for first year middle grades mathematics teachers in three districts in Tennessee and Kentucky, including rural and urban settings. The purpose of this project is to study the links of components of induction to improved instruction and student achievement.

This project seeks to understand how children learn about place value by studying different representations of multi-digit numbers (written number symbols, heard number names) and how prior knowledge of number influences children’s’ learning. Knowing more about multi-digit number learning will help to create teaching and curriculum resources that better support children’s learning.

This project is preparing teams to bring together research mathematicians and middle school teachers of mathematics through the use of Teacher's Circles. These Circles are groups of mathematicians and school mathematics teachers that meet regularly to do mathematics. Such Circles have been shown to be mathematically stimulating for both the teachers and the mathematicians and the students of both benefit from the relationship.

The conference will attract thought leaders, policy makers, supervisors of practice and scholars of measurement science to be informed of emerging thought and developments and to discuss selected models for the implementation of new ways of generating and utilizing data from education tests.

This project investigates the variation in teachers' practice of lesson study to identify effective and scalable design features of lesson study associated with student mathematics achievement growth in Florida. Lesson study is a teacher professional development model in which a group of teachers works collaboratively to plan a lesson, observe the lesson in a classroom with students, and analyze and discuss the student work and understanding in response to the lesson.

This project examines the nature of adaptive expertise in mathematics education, exploring relationships between this concept from cognitive psychology and effective middle school mathematics instruction. One goal of the project is to operationalize adaptive expertise in mathematics classroom using three dimensions: cognitive models of professional competence, instructional practices, and professional learning. Then, researchers seek to determine whether teachers who are more effective at raising student achievement are more or less adaptive.

The goal of this Transforming STEM Learning project is to comprehensively describe models of 20 inclusive STEM high schools in five states (California, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, and Texas), measure the factors that affect their implementation; and examine the relationships between these, the model components, and a range of student outcomes. The project is grounded in theoretical frameworks and research related to learning conditions and fidelity of implementation.

This project will define and synthesize effective feedback strategies that can be linked to specific features of daily classroom assessment practices. It will develop a framework, including a conceptual strand (will conceptualize feedback practice considering intrinsic and contextual dimensions) and a methodological strand (used to describe and evaluate the feedback studies and findings to be synthesized). The framework will provide a shared language within and across multiple forms of research in various disciplines.

This project seeks to identify teaching practices that can be linked to students' early algebra learning in grades three, four and five. The goal of the project is to use assessment data and videos of classroom teaching in order to create a tool that can be used to document effective instructional practices. This observation tool can then be used to support teacher professional development in early algebra and research about how teachers' actions can be linked to students' learning.

This project uses learning analytics and educational data mining methods to examine how elementary students learn in an online game designed to teach fractions using the splitting model. The project uses data to examine the following questions: 1) Is splitting an effective way to learn fractions?; 2) How do students learn by splitting?; 3) Are there common pathways students follow as they learn by splitting?; and 4) Are there optimal pathways for diverse learners?

This project explores how teachers can use activities with young children to develop their knowledge of numbers and patterns. Part of the study examines how much guidance teachers should provide to students. The project also explores the design of resources that are the most likely to be used by preschool teachers and that can be easily incorporated into their teaching of young children.

This is a four-year project that is producing materials designed to help teachers see how the mathematical practices described in the Common Core State Standards for mathematics can be implemented in mathematics instruction. The goal of the improved instruction is to help students adopt and value these critical mathematical practices.

The primary goal of this set of workshops is to provide STEM education researchers with the framework, skills, and community they need to implement new developments in causal inference methods into their research.