Projects

This project focuses on critical needs in the preparation and long-term development of pre-service, undergraduate, K-6 teachers of science. The project investigates the impact on these students of undergraduate, standards-based, reform entry level science courses developed by faculty based on their participation in the NASA Opportunities for Visionary Academics processional development program to identify: short-term impacts on undergraduate students and long-term effects on graduated teachers; characteristics of reform courses and characteristics of effective development efforts.

This project will conduct a professional development series to improve the content knowledge of science teachers. "Across the Sciences," a ten-unit series requiring approximately 145 hours to complete, will better qualify 9th and 10th grade science teachers to teach multidisciplinary science courses. Teachers prepared in one science discipline will benefit from opportunities to increase and deepen their interdisciplinary science content knowledge and their understanding of student needs associated with learning science.

This project examines relationships among pre-service teachers' developing understanding of learning in mathematics and science, the enactment of these understandings as they begin teaching. The objectives are (1) to inform the design of teacher preparation programs, and (2) to support the development of appropriate tools to assess the impact of teacher preparation program features on elementary- and middle-school student learning.

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 focuses on scaling up the SimCalc project and emphasizes bridging mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) on proportional reasoning and argumentation as part of teachers' classroom practices. This project will test the hypothesis that professional development that helps to bridge content knowledge and classroom practice can effect positive teacher change and seeks to understand how this is accomplished.

This project produced and is testing a website with tools to help teachers identify when students’ science learning may be limited by how they construe the underlying causal structure of the concepts. It demonstrates students’ difficulties and a pedagogical approach to help them recast their explanations to align them with the causal structure in the scientifically accepted explanations. The site focuses on middle school with in-depth examples in density and ecosystems.

The primary goal of the project is to enhance secondary mathematics teacher education for pre-service teachers by developing, implementing and disseminating resources from a four-course curriculum that brings together the study of mathematics content and pedagogy. Three of the courses are problem-based technology enhanced (PBTE) courses in Algebra and Calculus, Geometry, and Probability and Statistics. A fourth course is a capstone course in Teaching and Learning Secondary School Mathematics.