Projects

This project leverages an existing game by embedding tools for studying patterns of students' decision-making and problem solving in the environment. This allows researchers to understand how students learn about computational thinking within a tool that bridges informal and formal learning settings to engage a wide variety of students. The project will also develop tools and resources for classroom teachers.

This project addresses a critical need, developing professional development materials to address the teachers of ELLs. The project will create resources to help teachers build ELLs' mathematical proficiency through the design and development of professional development materials building on visual representations (VRs) for mathematical reasoning across a range of mathematical topics.

The infrastructure to improve mathematics education in the US requires building human resources in mathematics and mathematics education into a professional community that can respond to the critical needs in the field. This project seeks to build a professional community with shared understanding of the specialized content knowledge (SCK) - the special forms and ways of reasoning about mathematical knowledge used in teaching (MKT). 

This project will develop games to build conceptual understanding of key early algebra topics. The materials will be freely accessible on the web in both English and Spanish. The project will develop 4-5 games. Each game will include supporting materials for use by students in inquiry-based classroom lessons, and web-based professional development tools for teachers.

The project will use a quasi-experimental design to explore students' knowledge of core algebraic concepts in middle grades (grade 6), one year after their completion of 3-year, grades 3-5 early algebra intervention. The research questions are: (1) how well students who received a specific intervention retain their understanding of algebraic concepts in future years; and (2) whether and how the intervening year of regular classroom instruction in grade 6 influences the algebra understanding of both intervention and comparison students.

The Elementary Mathematical Writing (EMW) Task Force was made up of educators with unique perspectives about elementary mathematical writing and with the goal to reach a consensus about and priorities for the types of and purposes for elementary mathematical writing. The EMW Task Force met in October 2015, analyzed elementary writing prompts and samples, standards documents, and recommendations, and identified four types of mathematical writing and their associated purposes: Exploratory, Informative/Explanatory, Argumentative, and Mathematically Creative.

This project addresses three central challenges: 1) the tendency for students to not engage in real mathematical thinking as they use technologies; 2) the tendency for teachers to not enact pedagogically-effective approaches; and 3) the lack of adoption of effective technologies by teachers due to a variety of barriers. This project will use rich, exploratory, interactive simulations and associated instructional materials as a pathway for making rapid progress and focusing on advancing algebraic thinking in Grades 6-9.

Ensuring that beginning teachers are "classroom-ready" requires assessments that efficiently and validly evaluate proficiency in teaching. This project explores assessments involving simulated students as a way to assess teaching practice, which could provide an important complement, or alternative, to directly assessing teaching practice in classrooms.

This project will develop a cross-platform mathematics tutoring program that addresses the problem-solving skill difficulties of second- and third-grade students with learning disabilities in mathematics (LDM). COMPS-A is a computer-generated instructional program focusing on additive word problem solving; it will provide tutoring specifically tailored to each individual student's learning profile in real time. 

This project will adapt and study a promising and replicable teacher professional development (PD) intervention, called Collaborative Math (CM), for use in early childhood programs. Prepared as generalists, preschool teachers typically acquire less math knowledge in pre-service training than their colleagues in upper grades, which reduces their effectiveness in teaching math. To address teacher PD needs, the project will simultaneously develop teacher content knowledge, confidence, and classroom practice by using a whole teacher approach.

This conference will combine the annual meetings of three North Dakota organizations that focus on the development of a STEM-literate workforce to foster positive interaction and support for math and science educators in preparing their students for the workforce of tomorrow. The program will involve a statewide collaboration of higher education faculty and staff, state government and local community leaders, K-12 administrators and teachers, informal educators, and representatives of local STEM-related business and industry.

This project will design and develop specialized instructional materials and guidelines for teaching secondary algebra in linguistically diverse classrooms. These materials will incorporate current research on student learning in mathematics and research on the role of language in students' mathematical thinking and learning. The work will connect research on mathematics learning generally with research on the mathematics learning of ELLs, and will contribute practical resources and guidance for mathematics teachers who teach ELLs.

This project will investigate whether six urban middle schools are implementing highly effective science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs based on factors identified through relevant research and national reports on what constitutes exemplary practices in 21st century-focused schools.

This project will investigate the effectiveness of a teacher academy resident model to recruit, license, induct, employ, and retain middle school and secondary teachers for high-need schools in the South. It will prepare new, highly-qualified science and mathematics teachers from historically Black universities in high-needs urban and rural schools with the goal of increasing teacher retention and diversity rates.

The project will develop, pilot, and validate eight discussion-oriented performance tasks that will be embedded in an online simulated classroom environment. The resulting research and development products could be used nationwide in teacher preparation and professional development settings to assess and develop teachers' ability to support classroom discussion in science and mathematics.

This project will study five elementary STEM schools from across the U.S. that are inclusive of students from underrepresented groups in order to determine what defines these schools and will use an iterative case study replication design to study the design and implementation of five exemplary eSTEM schools with the goal of developing a logic model that highlights the commonalities in core components and target outcomes across the schools, despite the different school contexts.

The purpose of this project is to investigate issues in the design and implementation of effective virtual learning communities (VLCs) for teachers and to examine the relation between teachers' reflective engagement with VLCs and their students' mathematics learning outcomes. Findings from this project will be used to build and share effective ways to support teacher learning online.

This project will test new instructional approaches designed to help K-1 students comprehend place value. The project will emphasize the underlying relational structure of place value symbols, and target this structure with instructional materials and techniques drawn from the structure mapping literature. Its theory of action is that instruction which scaffolds structure mapping for place value will better prepare children to face the challenges of advanced operations, such as multi-digit calculation.

This project addresses the fundamental challenge of how to support teachers to improve their practice. The approach uses a "live mathematics classroom" as a common text for working on practice, where participants are not only watching and discussing but are engaged in developing and learning practice. The project will generate new knowledge regarding ways in which elementary teachers of mathematics can be supported to learn effective teaching practice.

This project will develop and test a digital platform for middle school mathematics classrooms to help students deepen and communicate their understanding of mathematics. The digital platform will allow students to collaboratively create representations of their mathematics thinking, incorporate ideas from other students, and share their work with the class.

This project will develop a comprehensive framework to inform and guide the analytic design of teacher professional development studies in mathematics. An essential goal of the research is to advance a science of teaching and learning in ways that traverse both research and education.

This project focuses on the creation of the initial functionality for a dynamic microworld, Proportions Playground, designed to support teachers in developing a coherent understanding of proportional reasoning. The Proportions Playground project seeks to both develop a unique pilot software application for the iPad and explore how it supports teachers in developing a coherent, robust definition of proportions.

This project will conduct a study to identify instructional practices and professional development approaches for teachers and the policies needed to support ELLs' accomplishments in science and math. The study will synthesize research relevant to improving ELLs' STEM learning, offer insight into how to support both English language development and science and math learning, and provide a framework for future research to help identify the most relevant and pressing questions for the field.

This design and development project is an expansion of the Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP), an established model for research-based formative assessment in grades 3-8, to the early elementary grades. The project will translate findings from research on student learning of early number, addition, and subtraction into tools and routines that teachers can use to formatively assess their students' understanding on a regular basis and develop targeted instructional responses.

This project will develop and implement an innovative online mathematics professional development model designed to provide growth opportunities for teachers in rural districts who normally lack access to such opportunities. The project will focus on developing teacher capacity to enact ambitious, responsive instruction aligned with the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM), and thus will be sustained, interactive, and of sufficient duration to help teachers transform their practices.