Projects

We are analyzing the intended algebra curriculum as represented in a variety of high-school mathematics textbooks – Core Plus Mathematics Project (CPMP), Discovering Mathematics (Key Curriculum Press), EDC's Center for Mathematics Education, Glencoe, Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP), and University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP). The textbook analysis is based on two dimensions frequently used for curriculum analysis: a content dimension and a cognitive dimension.

Adopting a teaching and curricular approach that will be novel in its integration of custom explanatory storybook materials with hands-on investigations, this project seeks to promote third grade students' understanding of small- and large-scale evolution by natural selection. By studying students across multiple school districts, this research will shed light on the benefits to diverse students of instruction that focuses on supporting children's capacities to cogently explain aspects of the biological world rather than learn disparate facts about it.

This project uses computer-based models of interacting organisms and their environments to support a learning progression leading to an appreciation of the theory of evolution and evidence that supports it. The project has created a research-based curriculum centered on progressively complex models that exhibit emergent behavior. The project will help improve the teaching of complex scientific topics and provide a reliable means of directly assessing students' conceptual understanding and inquiry skills.

This study examines the impact of the newly revised Advanced Placement (AP) Biology and Chemistry courses on students' understanding of and ability to utilize scientific inquiry, on students' confidence in engaging in college-level material, and on students’ enrollment and persistence in college STEM majors. The project provides estimates of the impact of students' AP-course taking on their progress into postsecondary educational experiences and their intent to continue to prepare to be future engineers and scientists.

This project’s overarching goal is to evaluate the assessment components embedded within two NSF-supported mathematics curricula: Everyday Mathematics and Math Trailblazers. The investigators will apply a comprehensive validity perspective that integrates a variety of empirical evidence regarding the cognitive, psychometric, and instructional affordances of multiple assessments embedded in these curricula as part of their overall instructional design.

The purpose of this project is to leverage ongoing efforts related to science education and the current emergency and disaster recovery landscape in Puerto Rico. It will develop culturally relevant project-based science lesson plans that incorporate the disaster context that can be implemented both inside and outside of the traditional classroom. The project will allow displaced students to continue learning under the guidance of teachers, parents or social workers. The project will train educators in the use of disaster-related problem-based lessons and assess project implementation and the impact of the lessons. The final outcome of this aim will be a lesson plan template and implementation guidelines for other jurisdictions faced by natural disasters.

This project will engage in a community-wide effort to synthesize the literature from a broad range of fields and to use the findings to create frameworks that will guide the planning, implementation, and scale-up of efforts to improve geographic education over the next decade. This will result in a set of publicly reviewed, consensus reports that will guide collaborative efforts and broaden awareness of the acute need for geographic literacy and geographic science education.

This exploratory proposal is researching and developing professional learning activities to help high school teachers use available and emerging social media to teach scientific argumentation. The project responds to the growing emphasis on scientific argumentation in new standards.

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 development and research project designs, develops, and tests a digital game-based learning environment for supporting, assessing and analyzing middle school students' conceptual knowledge in learning physics, specifically Newtonian mechanics. This research integrates work from prior findings to develop a new methodology to engage students in deep learning while diagnosing and scaffolding the learning of Newtonian mechanics.

This project investigates the educational value of computer technologies for learning engineering. The project engages high school students to design, build, and evaluate an energy-efficient model house with the aid of computer simulation and design tools. 

This exploratory project will design, pilot, and evaluate a 10-week, energy literacy curriculum unit for a program called Energy and Your Environment (EYE). In the EYE curriculum, students will study energy use and transfer in their own school buildings. They will explore how Earth systems supply renewable and nonrenewable energy, and how these energy sources are transformed and transferred from Earth systems to a school building to meet its daily energy requirements.

The ReaL Earth Inquiry project empowers teachers to employ real-world local and regional Earth system science in the classroom. Earth systems science teachers need the pedagogic background, the content, and the support that enables them to engage students in asking real questions about their own communities. The project is developing online "Teacher-Friendly Guides" (resources), professional development involving fieldwork, and inquiry-focused approaches using "virtual fieldwork experiences."  

This Engineering Teacher Pedagogy project implements and assesses the promise of an extended professional development model coupled with curriculum enactment to develop teacher pedagogical skills for integrating engineering design into high school biology and technology education classrooms. 

This project is revising and field testing six existing modules and developing, pilot testing, and field testing two engineering modules for required middle school science and mathematics classes: Catch Me if You Can! with a focus on seventh grade life science; and Creating Bioplastics targeting eighth grade physical science. Each module addresses an engineering design challenge of relevance to industries in the region and fosters the development of engineering habits of mind.

Geometry instruction offers unique opportunities for students to apply design thinking to authentic problems. This project supports teachers in designing and implementing lessons using a human-centered design (HCD) approach. Geometry teachers will participate in lesson study for two years to plan problem-based geometry lessons and to observe student thinking during those lessons. The project investigates how teachers learn about and apply a human-centered framework for teaching geometry.

The goal of this project is to study how secondary students come to understand better an underlying logic of natural sciences—the relation between construction of new ideas and critique of them. Science education has traditionally focused mostly on how students construct models of natural phenomena. However, critique is crucial for iterative refinement of models because in professional science, peer critique of explanatory models motivates and guides progress toward better understanding. This project engages students in this process and helps them understand the relation of critique to better explanations, by focusing students on the criteria by which critique and understanding develop together through classroom discussions.

The goal of this project is to study how secondary students come to understand better an underlying logic of natural sciences—the relation between construction of new ideas and critique of them. Science education has traditionally focused mostly on how students construct models of natural phenomena. However, critique is crucial for iterative refinement of models because in professional science, peer critique of explanatory models motivates and guides progress toward better understanding. This project engages students in this process and helps them understand the relation of critique to better explanations, by focusing students on the criteria by which critique and understanding develop together through classroom discussions.

This research investigates how state-of-the-art creative and pedagogical agents can improve students' learning, attitudes, and engagement with computer science. The project will be conducted in high school classrooms using EarSketch, an online computer science learning environments that engages learners in making music with JavaScript or Python code. The researchers will build the first co-creative learning companion, Cai, that will scaffold students with pedagogical strategies that include making use of learner code to illustrate abstraction and modularity, suggesting new code to scaffold new concepts, providing help and hints, and explaining its decisions.

This project will iteratively design, develop, field test, refine, and rigorously study a six-unit, facilitated, online professional development (PD) course focusing on energy-related concepts in the context of alternative energy. The primary audience is high school science teachers teaching out of their field of endorsement and serving students underrepresented in the sciences. The project will investigate whether the PD will precipitate changes in teacher knowledge and practice that result in higher student achievement.

Providing students with exposure to high quality computational thinking (CT) activities within science classes has the possibility to create transformative educational experiences that will prepare students to harness the power of CT for authentic problems. By building upon foundational research in human-AI partnership for classroom support and effective practices for integrating CT in science, this collaborative research project will advance understanding of how to empower teachers to lead computationally enriched science activities with adaptive pedagogical tools.

Providing students with exposure to high quality computational thinking (CT) activities within science classes has the possibility to create transformative educational experiences that will prepare students to harness the power of CT for authentic problems. By building upon foundational research in human-AI partnership for classroom support and effective practices for integrating CT in science, this collaborative research project will advance understanding of how to empower teachers to lead computationally enriched science activities with adaptive pedagogical tools.

This project builds on a successful introductory computer science curriculum, called Scratch Encore, to explore ways to support teachers in bringing together—or harmonizing—existing Scratch Encore instructional materials with themes that reflect the interests, cultures, and experiences of their students, schools, and communities. In designing these harmonized lessons, teachers create customized activities that resonate with their students while retaining the structure and content of the original Scratch Encore lesson.

This project builds on a successful introductory computer science curriculum, called Scratch Encore, to explore ways to support teachers in bringing together—or harmonizing—existing Scratch Encore instructional materials with themes that reflect the interests, cultures, and experiences of their students, schools, and communities. In designing these harmonized lessons, teachers create customized activities that resonate with their students while retaining the structure and content of the original Scratch Encore lesson.

This project will develop a standards-aligned engineering professional learning model for elementary teachers of multilingual learners. This interdisciplinary approach is innovative in its effort to provide teachers with sustained time to reflect on what they believe about language, their teaching of linguistically and racially minoritized students, and their interactions with multilingual students around engineering content. Using a participatory and collaborative approach, experts in literacy, language, and engineering will work with elementary teachers to develop strategies for how teachers can view students’ multilingualism as an asset to engineering.