Projects

The goal of this project is to study the design and development of community-centered, job-embedded professional development for classroom teachers that supports bias reduction. The project team will partner with three school districts serving racially, ethnically, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse communities, for a two-year professional development program. The aim is to reduce bias through: analyzing and designing mathematics teaching with colleagues, students, and families to create classrooms and schools based on community-centered mathematics; engaging in anti-bias teaching routines; and building relationships with parents, caretakers, and community members.

This project is exploring teachers' capacity to manage student epistemic uncertainty as a pedagogical resource that supports student’s productive struggle and the development of conceptual knowledge during project-based learning instruction in middle school science classrooms.

The goal of this project is to study the design and development of community-centered, job-embedded professional development for classroom teachers that supports bias reduction. The project team will partner with three school districts serving racially, ethnically, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse communities, for a two-year professional development program. The aim is to reduce bias through: analyzing and designing mathematics teaching with colleagues, students, and families to create classrooms and schools based on community-centered mathematics; engaging in anti-bias teaching routines; and building relationships with parents, caretakers, and community members.

This project aims to support teachers to engage their students in mathematical problem posing (problem-posing-based learning, or P-PBL). P-PBL is a powerful approach to the teaching and learning of mathematics, and provides students with opportunities to engage in authentic mathematical practices.

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.

Previous research has shown that play is an important vehicle for exploration, understanding, and learning because play involves many of the same features as sophisticated disciplinary engagement in mathematics. Despite work documenting the value of play broadly, little research has directly addressed how play could be supported or the value of doing so in mathematics classrooms. The purpose of this project is to investigate play in early elementary math education through a four-year longitudinal study that documents teacher learning and connects teacher practice with in-depth qualitative analyses of children over multiple years.

The goal of this project is to study the design and development of community-centered, job-embedded professional development for classroom teachers that supports bias reduction. The project team will partner with three school districts serving racially, ethnically, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse communities, for a two-year professional development program. The aim is to reduce bias through: analyzing and designing mathematics teaching with colleagues, students, and families to create classrooms and schools based on community-centered mathematics; engaging in anti-bias teaching routines; and building relationships with parents, caretakers, and community members.

The goal of this project is to study the design and development of community-centered, job-embedded professional development for classroom teachers that supports bias reduction. The project team will partner with three school districts serving racially, ethnically, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse communities, for a two-year professional development program. The aim is to reduce bias through: analyzing and designing mathematics teaching with colleagues, students, and families to create classrooms and schools based on community-centered mathematics; engaging in anti-bias teaching routines; and building relationships with parents, caretakers, and community members.

This project builds on exploratory work engaging in mathematics professional learning with paraeducators to provide a professional learning experience focused on teaching and learning mathematics in grades PreK-3.

This project explores how to help teachers identify and support early elementary children’s emergent computational thinking. The project will engage researchers, professional development providers, and early elementary teachers (K-2) in a collaborative research and development process to design a scalable professional development experience for grade K-2 teachers. The project will field test and conduct research on the artifacts, facilitation strategies, and modes of interaction that effectively prepare K-2 teachers to learn about their students’ emergent use of computational thinking strategies.

This project will study the utility of a machine learning-based assessment system for supporting middle school science teachers in making instructional decisions based on automatically generated student reports (AutoRs). The assessments target three-dimensional (3D) science learning by requiring students to integrate scientific practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas to make sense of phenomena or solve complex problems.

The project will develop and research an innovative model for rural science teacher professional development via technology-mediated lesson study (TMLS). This approach supports translating professional learning into classroom practice by developing a technology-based, social support system among rural teachers.

High school students in many rural school districts have limited access to advanced STEM coursework and advanced technologies, including high-speed Internet. Rural school districts face difficulties in recruiting and retaining STEM teachers. In many cases, rural STEM teachers need additional training and support. The project will identify these, and other barriers rural teachers face and create professional development for teachers.

Researchers from Georgia Tech have developed a three-year middle school Engineering and Technology course sequence that introduces students to advanced manufacturing tools such as computer aided design (CAD) and 3D printing, incorporates engineering concepts such as pneumatics, robotics and aeronautics, increases student awareness of career paths, and addresses the concerns of technical employers wanting workers with problem solving, teamwork, and communication skills. This impact study project will investigate the effectiveness of STEM-Innovation and Design (STEM-ID) curricula and determine whether STEM-ID courses are equally effective across different demographic groups and school environments under normal implementation conditions and whether the courses have the potential to positively impact a vast number of students around the country, particularly students who have struggled to stay engaged with their STEM education.

This project explores the mechanisms by which teachers translate what they learn from professional development into their teaching practice. The goal of this project is to study how the knowledge and skills teachers acquire during professional development (PD) translate into more conceptually oriented mathematics teaching and, in turn, into increased student learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for supporting student learning about viral outbreaks and other complex societal issues. Given the complexity of issues like viral outbreaks, engaging learners with different types of models (e.g., mechanistic, computational and system models) is critical. However, there is little research available regarding how learners coordinate sense making across different models. This project will address the gap by studying student learning with different types of models and will use these findings to develop and study new curriculum materials that incorporate multiple models for teaching about viral epidemics in high school biology classes.

This project will develop and study a curriculum and app that support computational thinking (CT) in a high school biology unit. The project will engage students in rich data practices by gathering, manipulating, analyzing, simulating, and visualizing data of bioelectrical signals from neural sensors, and in so doing give the students opportunities to apply CT principles.

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 will support pre-service and in-service teachers in professional development that will prepare them to teach about climate change in community-specific ways. This project aims to advance elementary teachers’ development in three high-impact areas: (a) their self-efficacy toward teaching climate change science or beliefs and attitudes about teaching climate change science; (b) their science content knowledge around climate change; and (c) their climate change identity, or how they view their agency and role in climate change.

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 connects interdisciplinary researchers and experts from four tribal nation partners to develop and implement an in-service teacher professional certificate program that integrates Indigenous Knowledge into STEM teaching. This multi-sited teacher professional development model will enroll K-12 teachers in four different Native-serving regions of the rural West into a 12-month certificate program that combines Indigenous science, Coupled Human and Natural Systems, and Land education concepts into an experiential learning cycle with local and broad study of learning with the Land. The project will add knowledge about the transferability of local epistemologies and practices and national science standards within four specific Indigenous contexts and expand space for tribal-lead professional development to transform teacher classroom practice.

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.

With increased focus on STEM education for students with extensive support needs ESN, engineering practices highlight the importance of problem-solving skills (e.g., systems thinking, creativity), and engineering lessons/units may provide a viable format for systematically planned math and science instruction that naturally embeds opportunities to teach students skills promoting increased self-regulated learning. Due to lack of prior experience teaching engineering, little is known about how teachers of students with ESN scaffold instruction to build their students’ engineering practices. Thus, this project focuses on teachers’ development of engineering practices, including how teachers support their students’ development of engineering-focused behaviors and mindsets through instruction.

Students of color must have access to robust and meaningful opportunities to learn science in classrooms that center their assets and humanity. This project aims to cultivate such spaces through designing and studying teacher professional learning focused on pedagogical practices that engage students of color meaningfully in science learning. These practices leverage students’ assets to foster growth in science and scientific habits of mind. This project will support pre-service and practicing teachers in developing tools for practice and reflection that focus on equity and highlighting the assets of students of color in secondary science.

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.