Projects

This RAPID project responds to the Buffalo blizzard of 2022 (Buffalo, NY) by developing, with and for the community, a science education curriculum framework focused on disaster justice and resilience. This project will document the science education human and social impact of the blizzard by capturing the experiences, reflections, and needs of science teachers, Black and Brown community leaders, and families who were directly affected.

This project integrates the informal and formal science education sectors, bringing their combined resources to bear on the critical need for well-prepared and diverse urban science teachers. The study is designed to examine and document the effect of this integrated program on the production of urban science teachers. This study will also research the impact of internships in science centers on improving classroom science teaching in urban high schools.

This project integrates the informal and formal science education sectors, bringing their combined resources to bear on the critical need for well-prepared and diverse urban science teachers. The study is designed to examine and document the effect of this integrated program on the production of urban science teachers. This study will also research the impact of internships in science centers on improving classroom science teaching in urban high schools.

The research goal of this project is to evaluate whether an early childhood science education program, implemented in low-income preschool settings produces measurable impacts for children, teachers, and parents. The study is determining the efficacy of the program on Science curriculum in two models, one in which teachers participate in professional development activities (the intervention), and another in which teachers receive the curriculum and teachers' guide but no professional development (the control).

This exploratory project helps high school students learn complex Global Climate Change (GCC) science by making it personally relevant and understandable. CHANGE creates a prototype curriculum, and integrates it into elective Marine Sciences high school courses. Research will examine the project's impact on student learning of climate science, student attitude toward science, and teacher instruction of climate science.

This project implemented a facets-of-thinking perspective to design tools and practices to improve high school chemistry teachers' formative assessment practices. Goals are to identify and develop clusters of facets related to key chemistry concepts; develop assessment items; enhance the assessment system for administering items, reporting results, and providing teacher resource materials; develop teacher professional development and resource materials; and examine whether student learning in chemistry improves in classes that incorporate a facet-based assessment system.

Computational and algorithmic thinking are new basic skills for the 21st century. Unfortunately few K-12 schools in the United States offer significant courses that address learning these skills. However many schools do offer robotics courses. These courses can incorporate computational thinking instruction but frequently do not. This research project aims to address this problem by developing a comprehensive set of resources designed to address teacher preparation, course content, and access to resources.

This study brings together researchers from education, psychology and the sciences and scholar-practitioners to examine the factors that can be addressed in the preparation of both pre-service and in-service teachers to guide elementary children in exploratory and inquiry-based science lessons. The goal is to develop models that describe the interconnections among key constructs in order to reexamine the content of elementary science methods courses, mentoring for early career teachers, professional development opportunities and coaching.

To successfully understand and address complex and important questions in the field of environmental science, many kinds of communities’ knowledge about their local environment need to be engaged. This one-year partnership development project involves a collaboration to design an approach that would yield opportunities for K-12 students to learn about environmental science in ways that honor both traditional STEM knowledge and Native ways of knowing among the Pomo community in California.

In its first five years, this project established a durable and vibrant learning community of high school teachers, high school students, university students, scientists, faculty, and associated stake-holders that continues to attract science and math students, using the project’s cutting-edge science and advanced cyberinfrastructure as compelling elements of study. This project continues by providing an education and research partnership derived from basic research in particle physics, grid computing, and advanced networking.

This project performs integrated research on emergent materials and phenomena in magnetoelectronics. The aim of the research activities is to advance understanding of the emergent materials and phenomena and to develop highly sophisticated experimental and theoretical tools required to study them. Project activities include an innovative education research program aimed at cognition of materials science concepts, K-12 outreach and visitation programs, undergraduate research programs, and graduate-education enhancement programs.

This project provides middle school students and teachers access to live scientific data from the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, and curriculum modules built around sensor networks that target core life science content and inquiry standards. This Web-based architecture allows students from ethnically diverse urban schools, typically underserved by technological innovation, to explore the same data that scientists use, and develops and evaluates fading technological and pedagogical scaffolds for inquiry as students gain competence.

This project establishes a Center to conduct research and education on the interactions of nanomaterials with living systems and with the abiotic environment. The research combines high throughput screening assays with computational and physiological modeling to predict impacts at higher levels of biological organization. It will unite the fields of engineering, chemistry, physics, materials science, cell biology, ecology, toxicology, computer modeling, and risk assessment to establish the foundations of a new scientific discipline: environmental nanotoxicology.

This project addresses a gap between vision and implementation of state science standards by designing a coordinated suite of instructional, assessment and teacher professional learning materials that attempt to enact the vision behind the Next Generation Science Standards. The study focuses on using state-of-the-art technology to create an 8-week long, immersive, life science field experience organized around three investigations.

This project supports school-based science teachers and students in conducting community-based science research on the causes and effects of extreme heat/urban islands in racially and ethnically diverse communities. Teachers will participate in professional learning experiences that support their development of content knowledge, scientific research practices, and critical pedagogies needed to design and implement research projects in their classroom. Students will identify locally-relevant issues related to this phenomenon, conduct investigations to explore the issue, share their findings through arts-based community narratives, and advocate for change. This project will broaden access to empowering youth-centered approaches that support learning and identity construction in science.

This project considers how teachers’ engagement in scientific sensemaking as an opportunity for teachers’ learning to support more expansive science learning environments. It seeks to address two ongoing challenges in science teacher education: the need for teachers to learn (1) to recognize, value, and integrate students’ diverse ways of knowing, communicating, and relating with one another and phenomena and (2) to acknowledge and disrupt restrictive narratives that shape what counts as science in schools and who is seen as a scientist. This project will provide new models for science teacher education to engage teachers in expansive scientific sensemaking, seeking to develop more humanizing relationships between teachers, students, and science. More broadly, the project will produce a new structure for professional learning and resources for supporting more heterogeneous and equitable forms of science in teacher education. 

This project will design opportunities for mathematics and science teachers to coordinate their instruction to support a more coherent approach to teaching statistical model-based inference in middle school. It will prepare teachers to help more students develop a deeper understanding of ideas and practices related to measurement, data, variability, and inference and to use these tools to generate knowledge about the natural world.

Doing science requires that students learn to create evidence-based arguments (EBAs), defined as claims connected to supporting evidence via premises. In this CAREER project, I investigate how argumentation ability can be enhanced among middle school students. The project entails theoretical work, instructional design, and empirical work, and involves 3 middle schools in northern Utah and southern Idaho.

The goal of this study is to improve elementary science teaching and learning by developing, testing, and refining a framework and set of tools for strategically incorporating forms of uncertainty central to scientists' sense-making into students' empirical learning.

Online STEM credit courses have become attractive to school leaders as a way to support students who fail STEM courses in face-to-face school year settings. However, there is little research about the processes involved in how schools make decisions regarding student credit recovery. The available research focuses solely on student results and is not definitive enough to support important policy decisions at the district level. This research brings redress to this policy dilemma.

The development of six curricular projects that integrate mathematics based on the Common Core Mathematics Standards with science concepts from the Next Generation Science Standards combined with an engineering design pedagogy is the focus of this CAREER project.

This project will explore how to promote students’ curiosity as a way of supporting science learning. The project will study how curiosity develops, the ways that classroom learning experiences influence curiosity, and how curiosity can be taught so as to support STEM learning. It will include a series of lab experiments and classroom-based studies with 2nd grade students.

This project focuses on fostering equitable and inclusive STEM contexts with attention to documenting and reducing adolescents' experiences of harassment, bias, prejudice and stereotyping. This research will contribute to understanding of the current STEM educational climates in high schools and will help to identify factors that promote resilience in the STEM contexts, documenting how K-12 educators can structure their classrooms and schools to foster success of all students in STEM classes.

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 will investigate the potential benefits of interactive, dynamic visualization technologies in supporting science learning for middle school students, including ELLs. This project will identify design principles for developing such technology, develop additional ways to support student learning, and provide guidelines for professional development that can assist teachers in better serving linguistically diverse students. The project has the potential to transform traditional science instruction for all students, and to broaden their participation in science.