This project is working with all teachers in grades three through five in the Portland, OR Public Schools in order to test the feasibility and efficacy of the Mathematics Studio Model of professional development. The model requires professional development to occur at the school level involving both teachers and principals. The goal of the project is to improve students' engagement and learning in mathematics by fostering effective instruction.
Projects
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.
Early childhood educators (ECEs) understand that effective science teaching and learning requires content knowledge related to science concepts and practices and pedagogical knowledge. However, ECEs, especially in rural communities, express a lack of science content knowledge and confidence in incorporating science-related conversations in their early care and education settings, and they believe this might be a result of limited professional training relevant to science content. This project aims to strengthen key capabilities in ECEs, including the ability to (1) build science content knowledge and confidence in guiding young children's scientific investigation, (2) closely observe children's interactions with science materials, and (3) use those observations in the reflection, planning, and practice of science teaching.
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 creates, tests and revises two-six week prototypical modules for middle school technology education classes, using the unifying themes and important social contexts of food and water. The modules employ engineering design as the core pedagogy and integrate content and practices from the standards for college and career readiness.
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.
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in the technologies used by both students and teachers, it is essential for them to understand how to be safe while using AI. Furthermore, AI and cybersecurity technology together are better at detecting malicious activities than conventional security systems. The need to blend the two disciplines into a single, integrated curriculum for K-8 education is highlighted by the interconnectedness of AI and cybersecurity as complementary systems. This project will "plant the seeds" of these literacies by spiraling content on topics from computer programming, internet fundamentals, and introduction to data and AI along with cybersecurity topics in small doses throughout students' K-8 education. This project will lay the foundation for the students to eventually develop a comprehensive understanding of how different technologies work and interact.
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in the technologies used by both students and teachers, it is essential for them to understand how to be safe while using AI. Furthermore, AI and cybersecurity technology together are better at detecting malicious activities than conventional security systems. The need to blend the two disciplines into a single, integrated curriculum for K-8 education is highlighted by the interconnectedness of AI and cybersecurity as complementary systems. This project will "plant the seeds" of these literacies by spiraling content on topics from computer programming, internet fundamentals, and introduction to data and AI along with cybersecurity topics in small doses throughout students' K-8 education. This project will lay the foundation for the students to eventually develop a comprehensive understanding of how different technologies work and interact.
Navigating complex societal issues such as water shortages, forest fires, and other phenomena-based problems requires understanding the social, technological, and scientific dimensions surrounding the issues and they ways these dimensions interact, shift, and change. Despite its importance, however, developing students’ socioscientific literacy has received limited attention in elementary science teaching and learning contexts. This project begins to address this problem of practice by focusing first on developing elementary teachers’ socioscientific literacy and their capacity to integrate socioscientific issues and local phenomena in their science teaching practice.
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.
The project focuses on the development of formative assessment tools that highlight assets of students’ use of crosscutting concepts (CCCs) while engaged in science and engineering practices in grades 9-12 Life Sciences.
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 will develop a video recording and analysis system called VideoReView (VRV) that allows grade four science teachers to record, tag, and analyze video in their classroom in real time. The investigators will then study and enhance the system in the context of professional learning communities of teachers.
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.
The project will design, develop, and test a research-based professional development (PD) approach that will ensure that teachers, and ultimately their middle-school students, have the knowledge to act in a way that promotes zero net loss of biodiversity in their communities. Through their participation in the PD, teachers will be equipped to plan for and implement NGSS-aligned instruction, facilitate student identification and understanding of biodiversity and environmental justice issues in their local community, and foster student capacity to take action. Students will come to understand that biodiversity is a global issue that they can influence at the local level, and will become empowered, in both their knowledge and their agency, to be leaders in solving biodiversity problems in their communities.
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.
This exploratory project builds on twelve years of successful experience with the summer program for secondary mathematics teachers at PCMI. It addresses the following two needs in the field of professional development for secondary mathematics teachers: increase content knowledge and understanding of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics; and investigate and develop alternative models to conduct content-based professional development that meets the recommendations of the MET-II report.
This is an efficacy study to determine if partnerships among formal and informal organizations demonstrate an appropriate infrastructure for improving science literacy among urban middle school science students. The study aims to answer the following questions: How does participation in the program affect students' science knowledge, skills, and attitudes toward science; teachers' science knowledge, skills, and abilities; and families engagement in and support for their children's science learning and aspirations?
Effective Science Teaching for English Language Learners (ESTELL): A Pre-Service Teacher Professional Development Research Project project is funded by the National Science Foundation DR-K-12 Discovery Research Program. The ESTELL project focuses on improving the science teaching and learning of K-6 linguistic minority students who are currently underserved in K-6 education through improving the pre-service education of elementary school teachers.
In this project, over 500 elementary education majors will team with engineering majors to teach engineering design to over 1,600 students from underrepresented groups. These standards-based lessons will emphasize student questioning, constructive student-to-student interactions, and engineering design processes, and they will be tailored to build from students' interests and strengths.
This exploratory research and development project addresses the question, "Can students develop an understanding of the ecological nature of science (ENOS) in high school biology and environmental science classes that is useful and productive in environmental citizenship?" To address this question, the project will identify the essential elements of ENOS, investigate how these can be taught and learned, and explore how ENOS skills and understandings are used to enhance environmental citizenship.
This project will study the influence on positive student achievement and engagement (particularly among populations traditionally under-represented in computer science) of an intervention that integrates a computational music remixing tool -EarSketch- with the Computer Science Principles, a view of computing literacy that is emerging as a new standard for Advanced Placement and other high school computer science courses.