Access to high quality STEM education is highly variable depending on where one lives. In addition, early career teachers need support during their first years of teaching to be successful and help them stay in the profession. This project aims to provide in-service and beginning elementary school teachers increased opportunities to refine their mathematics teaching to support minoritized youth in racially diverse rural communities in Georgia that have less access to elementary mathematics specialists. This project follows and supports both beginning teachers (BTs) and elementary mathematics coaches (EMCs) over 5 years to develop and refine their mathematics teaching and coaching, respectively, using equity-based tools to guide reflection and conversations about both the BTs’ instructional practices and the EMCs’ coaching practices.
Projects
This project is investigating the learning that can take place when elementary school students are directly involved in the collection, sense-making, and analysis of real, personally-meaningful data sets. The hypotheses of this work are that by organizing elementary statistics instruction around the study of physical activities, students will have greater personal engagement in data analysis processes and that students will also develop more robust understandings of statistical ideas.
This project examines the development of statistical literacy that combines statistical reasoning and thinking. The project will use professional learning communities for teachers to learn about statistical literacy and develop learning experiences for their students. The project will engage students and teachers in finding meaningful ways to use statistical reasoning to make data-based arguments and reason about patterns they observe in society.
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 explores how secondary mathematics teachers can plan and enact learning experiences that spur student curiosity, captivate students with complex mathematical content, and compel students to engage and persevere (referred to as "mathematically captivating learning experiences" or "MCLEs"). The study will examine how high school teachers can design lessons so that mathematical content itself is the source of student intrigue, pursuit, and passion. To do this, the content within mathematical lessons (both planned and enacted) is framed as mathematical stories and the felt tension between how information is revealed and withheld from students as the mathematical story unfolds is framed as its mathematical plot.
This CAREER award aims to study the construct of "epistemic empathy" and examine how it can be cultivated in science and mathematics teacher education, how it functions to promote responsive teaching, and how it shapes learners' engagement in the classroom. In the context of this project, epistemic empathy is defined as the act of understanding and appreciating another's cognitive and emotional experience within an epistemic activity aimed at the construction, communication, and critique of knowledge.
Covariational reasoning, or the ability to reason about relationships as quantities change together, is one way of thinking that can provide a foundation for students to build their more abstract algebraic knowledge. This research builds a foundation for integrating education and research at the intersection of students’ developing algebraic knowledge, covariational reasoning, and new educational technologies to create a new path into algebra. This path can help remove barriers that have historically restricted access to mathematics and STEM coursework and careers.
This project studies teaching practices in a year-long high school algebra course that integrates hand-held and other electronic devices. Of particular interest is how these technologies can support learners' capacity to efficiently and effectively draw on the distributed intelligences that technical and social networks make available. The investigation focuses on collaborative learning tasks centered on collective mathematical objects, such as functions, expressions, and coordinates that participants in a group must jointly manipulate through networked computers.
This research study expands on the characteristics of mathematical discourse and examines and specifies relationships between descriptive elements across multiple content foci in mathematics. The micro-genetic study is based on examination of video data from multiple routine classroom settings with teachers who demonstrate varying levels of discourse across three curricular topics in mathematics. The resulting framework and redesigned teacher education courses will provide models on which other teacher education programs might build.
This project investigates how to use new touch technologies, like touchscreens, to create graphics and simulations that can be felt, heard, and seen. Using readily available, low-cost systems, the principal investigator will investigate how to map visual information to touch and sound for students with visual impairments.
This study seeks to describe trajectories that describe the ways in which Black learners develop as particular kinds of mathematical learners. The study takes place in the context of an established, multi-year college bridge program that has as its goals to increase the representation of historically marginalized groups in the university community.
This project explores possibilities for localized change led by parents and caregivers. By making explicit how to foster and increase Black and Latinx parents’ engagement in solidarity with community organizations and teachers, this project could provide a model for other communities and schools seeking to advance racial justice in mathematics education. Through critical community-engaged scholarship and in collaboration with ten Black and Latinx families, ten teachers, and two community organizations, the research team will co-design and co-study two educational programs aimed at advancing racial justice in elementary mathematics.
The goal of this CAREER program of research is to identify, from a cross-cultural perspective, essential Algebraic Knowledge for Teaching (AKT) that will enable elementary teachers to better develop students' algebraic thinking. This study explores AKT based on integrated insights of the U.S. and Chinese expert teachers' classroom performance.
This project will contribute new knowledge on two aspects of participation in mathematics education. First, this research aims to understand how perceptions of race influence how teachers, future teachers, and researchers assess how bilingual children use their languages and movement to participate in mathematical activity. Second, it will explore ways to counter deficit views that influence teachers’, preservice teachers’, and researchers’ perceptions of these multiple ways of participating as inferior to what is traditionally considered as meaningful participation.
This project seeks to investigate the possibilities and challenges of using a participatory approach to research and design, centering Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Hmong students and their families in imagining and creating change. The project will generate new knowledge about the possibilities and limitations of participatory design research (PDR) as a method for advancing equity in mathematics education through PDR cycles at three middle schools over the five years of the project. This approach has the potential to disrupt inequitable practices of mathematics education as well as undemocratic processes for making decisions about mathematics education. Further, it will be a catalyst for developing racially just practices and processes in mathematics education.
The ACCLIME project investigates teachers' uses and adaptations of CMP, an NSF-funded middle school curriculum. The study seeks to better articulate: (1) the ways that teachers adapt CMP over time and how they develop professionally as a result of using the curriculum materials; (2) the connection between district policy, resource development, and teachers' curriculum processes; and (3) the dynamic nature of districts' long-term curriculum implementations.
Three-dimensional figures can now be represented as diagrams that appear to extend into space in ways that are free of material or physical constraints. They can be rendered at any size, in any orientation, and at any position in space, and can thereby realize a far more varied set of mathematical concepts than what is possible with physical models. The goal of this project is to investigate the transformative educational potential of these representations and to generate a knowledge base that teachers, teacher educators, and researchers can use to reimagine the learning and teaching of geometry.
The project aims to: (1) study resources and strategies for teachers that will facilitate participation of 3rd grade Latino English Language Learners (ELLs) in the mathematics classrooms; (2) develop related teacher professional development (PD) materials; and (3) integrate research and teaching activities. The basic research question is: How can 3rd grade teachers facilitate better mathematics instruction for 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 is developing an 8th-grade assessment for proportional reasoning from a cognitive diagnosis model (CDM) framework. CDMs are psychometric models developed specifically for diagnosing the presence or absence of fine-grained skills or processes required in solving problems on a test. Assessments based on CDMs can provide information deemed more diagnostic and descriptive, and therefore, more relevant in applied instructional settings.
Advancing Reasoning addresses the lack of materials for teacher education by investigating pre-service secondary mathematics teachers' quantitative reasoning in the context of secondary mathematics concepts including function and algebra. The project extends prior research in quantitative reasoning to develop differentiated instructional experiences and curriculum that support prospective teachers' quantitative reasoning and produce shifts in their knowledge.
The primary purpose of this international conference was for participants in the US to exchange views and discuss the latest research findings on (primary) science assessment. The conference focused on research around building assessment systems that help teachers diagnose student learning in the classroom but also link meaningfully to large-scale accountability systems (in districts or national levels). The project resulted in a report, proceedings, journal publications.
This grant is also known as The Responsive Math Teaching Project: Developing Instructional Leadership in a Network of Elementary Schools.
The goal of this project is to build instructional leadership capacity in teachers and school-based leaders in a network of underperforming elementary schools with limited resources. Through design-based improvement research, the project is designed to enhance the knowledge, skills, and competencies of elementary teacher leaders and principals to develop a shared vision and provide ongoing support of high-quality math instruction.
The aim of this project is to enact and study a process in which middle school teachers of mathematics and visual arts co-design and teach activities that combine math and art to teach data science.
The aim of this project is to enact and study a process in which middle school teachers of mathematics and visual arts co-design and teach activities that combine math and art to teach data science.