Projects

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.

There have been prominent and widespread calls for high school science students to work with data in more complex ways that better align with and support the work of professional scientists and engineers. However, high school students' analysis and interpretation of scientific data is often limited in scope, complexity, and authentic purpose. This project aims to support and advance students' work with ecological data in high school biology classrooms by embracing a new approach: Bayesian data analysis methods. Such methods involve expressing initial ideas or beliefs and updating them quantitatively with data that students access or record. This project will empower 20 high school teachers and their approximately 1,200 students to make sense of data within and beyond classroom contexts. It also will involve sharing research findings, an educational technology tool for Bayesian data analysis, and curricular resources in open and accessible ways.

Environmental issues like wildfires can serve as effective science learning contexts to promote scientific literacy and citizenship. This project will partner with teachers, teacher educators, and disciplinary experts in data science, fire ecology, public health, and environmental communication to co-design a data-driven, justice-oriented, and issue-based unit on wildfires. In the unit, student will engage in various data practices to gain insights into the issue of wildfires and how it affects their lives and communities. The project seeks to theorize how learners can leverage disciplinary knowledge and practices in environmental and data science as a foundation for making data-informed actions towards a more just and sustainable society.

This project will study ways to improve classroom instruction grounded in science practices to address inequities in science education for emerging bilingual students. The project will create research-based resources for teacher educators that focus on developing preservice elementary teachers' understanding and abilities to support emerging bilingual students' engagement in science practices.

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 involves a longitudinal, ethnographic study of children's mathematical performances from preschool to first grade in both formal classroom settings and informal settings at school and home. The study seeks to identify opportunities for mathematical learning, to map varied performances of mathematical competence, to chart changes in mathematical performance over time, and to design and assess the impact of case studies for teacher education.

This project will address the need to educate teachers and students to engage in asking questions, collecting and interpreting data, making claims, and constructing explanations about real-world problems that matter to them. The study will explore ways to enhance youths' learning experiences in secondary school classrooms (grades 6-12) by building a sustainable partnership between researchers and practitioners.

This project investigates and expands teachers' learning to notice in two important ways. First, the research expands beyond teachers' noticing of written and verbal thinking to attend to gesture and other aspects of embodied and multimodal thinking. Second, the project focuses on algebraic thinking and seeks specifically to understand how teacher noticing relates to the content of algebra. Bringing together multimodal thinking and the mathematical ideas in algebra has the potential to support teachers in providing broader access to algebraic thinking for more students.

This project will support teacher capacity for implementing mathematical modeling lessons by engaging teachers in co-planning and co-teaching with researchers skilled in Emergent Bilingual (EB) mathematics instruction. The outcomes of this project will be a framework for teaching mathematical modeling to EB students, teacher professional development materials that can be used widely to support EB mathematics teachers, and a massive open online course (MOOC) for teachers to support their continued learning about teaching mathematics modeling to EB students.

Research has shown that engaging students, including students from underrepresented groups, in appropriately structured reasoning activities, including argumentation, may lead to enhanced learning. This project will provide information about how teachers learn to support collective argumentation and will allow for the development of professional development materials for prospective and practicing teachers that will enhance their support for productive collective argumentation.

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.

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.

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 study the effect of integrating computing into preservice teacher programs. The project will use design-based research to explore how to connect computing concepts and integration activities to teachers' subject area knowledge and teaching practice, and which computing concepts are most valuable for general computational literacy.

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.

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.

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 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 project aims to engage students in meaningful scientific data collection, analysis, visualization, modeling, and interpretation. It targets grades 9-12 science instruction. The proposed research poses the question "How do learners conceive of and interact with empirical data, particularly when it has a hierarchical structure in which parameters and results are at one level and raw data at another?"

The goal of this project is to study how the integration of an online curriculum, scientist mentoring of students, and professional development for both teachers and scientist mentors can improve student outcomes. In this project, teachers and scientist mentors will engage collaboratively in a professional development module which focuses on photosynthesis and cellular respiration and is an example of a student-teacher-scientist partnership. Teachers will use their training to teach the curriculum to their students with students receiving mentoring from the scientists through an online platform. Evaluation will examine whether this curriculum, professional development, and mentoring by scientists will improve student achievement on science content and attitudes toward scientists. The project will use mixed-methods approaches to explore potential factors underlying efficacy differences between in-person and online professional development. An important component of this project is comparing in-person professional development to an online delivery of professional development, which can be more cost-effective and accessible by teachers, especially those in rural and underserved areas.

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 design, develop, and examine the learning outcomes of a new curriculum unit for biology that embodies the conceptual framework of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The curriculum materials to be developed by this project will focus on two areas of study that are central to the life sciences: genetics and the processes of evolution by natural selection.

This project is developing Earth and Space Science multimedia educative curriculum materials (MECMs) and a system to facilitate teachers' learning and beliefs of scientific argumentation. The project is investigating the impact of the MECMs on teachers' beliefs about scientific argumentation and their related pedagogical content knowledge. The overarching research question focuses on how can multimedia educative curriculum materials provide support to middle school science teachers in implementing standards for constructing and critiquing arguments.

This five-year project investigates how to provide continuous assessment and feedback to guide students' understanding during science inquiry-learning experiences, as well as detailed guidance to teachers and administrators through a technology-enhanced system. The assessment system integrates validated automated scorings for students' written responses to open-ended assessment items into the "Web-based Inquiry Science Environment" (WISE) program.

In COVID Connects Us, the project team investigates the challenges of learning how to support justice-centered ambitious science teaching (JuST). The project team will partner with networks of secondary science teachers as they first implement a common unit aimed at engaging youth in science and engineering practices in ways that are culturally sustaining, focused on explanation-construction and intentionally anti-oppressive. The teachers will then use their shared experiences to revise future instruction in ways that are justice-centered and that engage students in the ways research suggests is important for their learning.