Projects

Building Base Line Objectives for Children’s Knowledge Skills for Science (BLOCKS)is a 4-year project that integrates research and applied teaching to take a close look inside prekindergarten classrooms. The overall research project includes extensive classroom observation by teachers and researchers of children’s ability to learn science processes and content; intensive professional development and mentoring support for teachers to learn science; and multiple qualitative, as well as, quantitative assessment strategies.

Understanding Science provides an accurate portrayal of the nature of science and tools for teaching associated concepts. This project has at its heart a public re-engagement with science that begins with teacher preparation. To this end, its immediate goals are (1) improve teacher understanding of the nature of the scientific enterprise and (2) provide resources and strategies that encourage and enable K-16 teachers to incorporate and reinforce the nature of science throughout their science teaching.

This project will address the pressing national need to generate shared, practice-based knowledge about how to implement freely available, high-quality instructional resources (mathematics formative assessment lessons) that have been shown to produce significant gains in student learning outcomes. It will expand a professional development model (Analyzing Instruction in Mathematics using the Teaching for Robust Understanding Framework (AIM-TRU)) that supports teacher learning about effective lesson implementation.

This project will address the pressing national need to generate shared, practice-based knowledge about how to implement freely available, high-quality instructional resources (mathematics formative assessment lessons) that have been shown to produce significant gains in student learning outcomes. It will expand a professional development model (Analyzing Instruction in Mathematics using the Teaching for Robust Understanding Framework (AIM-TRU)) that supports teacher learning about effective lesson implementation.

This project will address the pressing national need to generate shared, practice-based knowledge about how to implement freely available, high-quality instructional resources (mathematics formative assessment lessons) that have been shown to produce significant gains in student learning outcomes. It will expand a professional development model (Analyzing Instruction in Mathematics using the Teaching for Robust Understanding Framework (AIM-TRU)) that supports teacher learning about effective lesson implementation.

This project will build on prior funding to design a next generation diagnostic assessment using learning progressions and other learning sciences research to support middle grades mathematics teaching and learning. The project will contribute to the nationally supported move to create, use, and apply research based open educational resources at scale.

The purpose of this project is to develop and conduct initial studies of a multi-grade program targeting critical early math concepts. The project is designed to address equitable access to mathematics and STEM learning for all students, including those with or at-risk for learning disabilities and underrepresented groups.

This conference will bring together a group of teacher educators to focus on preservice teacher education and a shared vision of instruction called ambitious science teaching. It is a critical first step toward building a community of teacher educators who can collectively share and refine strategies, tools, and practices for preparing preservice science teachers for ambitious science teaching.

Across the nation, many school districts are experiencing rapid expansion in the enrollment of multilingual learners, yet many high school teachers do not have corresponding opportunities to learn how to effectively support these students’ engagement in scientific and engineering practices. This exploratory project will address this issue by developing and testing a model of professional learning for high school teachers in which they learn how to embed the Instructional Conversation pedagogy within standards-aligned scientific and engineering practices. Under this model, high school science teachers will collaborate with high school English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers to co-develop linguistically sustaining instructional materials that provide students with intentionally scaffolded opportunities to use scientific dialogue as they collaborate to explain natural phenomena or design solutions through engineering.

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 aims to expand opportunities for elementary science in Title 1 schools through the development, implementation, and evaluation of a professional development model that will prepare teachers to effectively utilize science education practices grounded in culturally responsive pedagogy. It provides a new science instruction model that intersects the best practices in science education with the theoretical principles of culturally relevant/responsive pedagogy found to influence students from low economic, diverse communities.

This project addresses a critical need to help middle school teachers learn to incorporate data science in their teaching. It uses an open-source platform called the Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) as a tool for teachers to learn about data science and develop resources for students’ learning. The project team will develop a framework for teachers’ knowledge of data science teaching and learning. Insights from the project will help develop effective practices for teaching data science and understanding how students learn data science.

The goal of this project is to help middle school students, particularly in rural and underserved areas, develop deep scientific knowledge and knowledge of the practices and routines of science. Research teams will develop an innovative learning environment called Bio-Sphere, which will foster learning of complex science issues through hands-on design and engineering.

Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears, an online professional development magazine for elementary teachers, focuses on preparing teachers to teach science concepts in an already congested curriculum by integrating inquiry-based science with literacy teaching. Launched in March 2008, each thematic issue relates elementary science topics and concepts to the real-world context of the polar regions and includes standards-based science and content-rich literacy learning.

This project will implement and study a professional community designed to alleviate the mismatch between the expectations of student teachers in mathematics and science and their mentor in-service teachers. The project is creating a neutral forum for the exchange of perspectives on issues of pedagogy with the expectation that student teachers would implement inquiry-based science and problem-solving mathematics pedagogies with the knowledgeable support of their mentor teachers.

Teachers’ beliefs influence their instructional decisions and these decisions shape the mathematical learning opportunities for all students. This is particularly important when considering the learning opportunities for groups that have historically been marginalized in mathematics, including girls and students of color. There are few validated, mathematics-specific instruments that measure teachers’ beliefs about mathematics learning related to race, ethnicity, and gender. This project seeks to investigate teachers’ beliefs related to how they explain the systemic racial and gender differences in mathematics education outcomes by developing and validating a survey instrument and to explore how those beliefs might impact their teaching.

This project seeks to advance knowledge in K-12 STEM education and assessment practices by building capacity for Assessment for Learning, improving assessments and teacher preparation courses, and providing models for pre-service teacher preparation through enhanced teaching modules. Three goals are: (1) faculty from three centers form a learning community, (2) recruit 5 STEM research scholars to conduct research on measurement and evaluation, and (3) expose pre-service teachers to assessment models in their coursework.

The mayor of Birmingham is making a two year loan of XO laptops to middle school students in the Birmingham City Schools in Alabama. The educational and social changes that will occur in classrooms and the effects on several student outcomes are studied in this Small Grant for Exploratory Research. It is expected that access to technology will change the educational and social environment in classrooms and affect student outcomes.

This project is assessing the capacities needed by elementary teachers for productive use of mathematics curriculum materials. The project is guided by the assumption that well-designed curriculum programs have the potential to contribute to improvement in mathematics learning opportunities in K-12 classrooms. Yet, minimal research has examined the kind of knowledge and capacities necessary for teachers to use these resources productively. The project will undertake such research and develop tools to assess these capacities.

The project will use a comprehensive mixed methods design to develop theoretically-grounded measures of student engagement in middle school math and science classes that reflect a multidimensional construct within an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample of urban youth. The project conceptualizes student engagement as a multidimensional construct including behavioral, emotional, and cognitive components. This multidimensional perspective of student engagement provides a rich characterization of how students act, feel, and think.

This collaborative project is developing instruments to assess secondary teachers' Mathematical Habits of Mind (MHoM). These habits bring parsimony, focus, and coherence to teachers' mathematical thinking and, in turn, to their work with students. This work fits into a larger research agenda with the ultimate goal of understanding the connections between secondary teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching and secondary students' mathematical understanding and achievement.

This collaborative project is developing instruments to assess secondary teachers' Mathematical Habits of Mind (MHoM). These habits bring parsimony, focus, and coherence to teachers' mathematical thinking and, in turn, to their work with students. This work fits into a larger research agenda with the ultimate goal of understanding the connections between secondary teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching and secondary students' mathematical understanding and achievement.

This project’s researchers are determining individual teacher effect estimates and investigating their stability across models. This study also investigates the instructional practices of a subsample of 30 highly effective and 30 less effective sixth-grade mathematics teachers using videotaped classroom lessons, which are coded and analyzed by researchers who are blind to the value-added effectiveness of the teachers.

This project explores the effectiveness of two different versions of professional development (PD) designed to enhance middle school mathematics teachers’ understanding of fractions and proportions, and their teaching of these mathematical concepts to students. The PD uses an approach that engages teachers with web-based apps that allow them to test and experiment with their mathematical ideas. The apps, combined with guiding questions that challenge teachers’ thinking about fractions and proportions, serve both to promote critical thinking about the concepts and to further developing their understandings of the concepts. The researchers will use an innovative approach, topic modeling, to examine the effectiveness of each of version of the PD.

This project explores the effectiveness of two different versions of professional development (PD) designed to enhance middle school mathematics teachers’ understanding of fractions and proportions, and their teaching of these mathematical concepts to students. The PD uses an approach that engages teachers with web-based apps that allow them to test and experiment with their mathematical ideas. The apps, combined with guiding questions that challenge teachers’ thinking about fractions and proportions, serve both to promote critical thinking about the concepts and to further developing their understandings of the concepts. The researchers will use an innovative approach, topic modeling, to examine the effectiveness of each of version of the PD.