Projects

This project will develop and investigate the opportunities and limitations of Focus on Energy, a professional development (PD) system for elementary teachers (grades 3-5). The PD will contain: resources that will help teachers to interpret, evaluate and cultivate students' ideas about energy; classroom activities to help them to identify, track and represent energy forms and flows; and supports to help them in engaging students in these activities.

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.

This project builds on prior efforts to create teaching resources for high-school Advanced Placement Statistics teachers to use an open source statistics programming language called "R" in their classrooms. The project brings together datasets from a variety of STEM domains, and will develop exercises and assessments to teach students how to program in R and learn the underlying statistics concepts.

Computational and algorithmic thinking are new basic skills for the 21st century. Unfortunately few K-12 schools in the United States offer significant courses that address learning these skills. However many schools do offer robotics courses. These courses can incorporate computational thinking instruction but frequently do not. This research project aims to address this problem by developing a comprehensive set of resources designed to address teacher preparation, course content, and access to resources.

This project will provide curricular and pedagogical support by developing and evaluating teacher-ready curricular Digital Internship Modules for Engineering (DIMEs). DIMES will be designed to support middle school science teachers in providing students with experiences that require students to use engineering design practices and science understanding to solve a real-world problem, thereby promoting a robust understanding of science and engineering, and motivating students to increased interest in science and engineering.

The purpose of this 4-year project is to improve student mathematics achievement by developing a mathematics intervention focused on key measurement and data analysis skills. The PM intervention will be designed for first and second grade students who are experiencing mathematics difficulties. To increase student mathematics achievement, the intervention will include: (a) a technology-based component and (b) hands-on activities.

Data Nuggets (http://datanuggets.org) are classroom activities, co-designed by scientists and teachers, which give students practice interpreting quantitative information and making claims based on evidence. The goal of this research is to investigate whether the integration of real data from cutting-edge scientific research in grade 6-10 classrooms will increase students’ quantitative reasoning ability in the context of science. 

The goal of this research is to investigate whether the integration of real data from cutting-edge scientific research in grade 6-10 classrooms will increase students’ quantitative reasoning ability in the context of science. We will adapt the materials to address current science and mathematics standards, including key concepts from  develop a professional development program for teachers, and test the efficacy of the materials through a quasi-experiment.

CADRE is the resource network that supports researchers and developers who participate in DRK-12 projects on teaching and learning in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines. CADRE works with projects to strengthen and share methods, findings, results and products, helping to build collaboration around a strong portfolio of STEM education resources, models and technologies. CADRE raises external audiences’ awareness and understanding of the DRK-12 program, and builds new knowledge.