Projects

This project will design, develop, and test a new curriculum unit for high school chemistry courses that is organized around the question, "How does chemistry shape where I live?" The new unit will integrate relevant Earth science data, scientific practices, and key urban environmental research findings with the chemistry curriculum to gain insights into factors that support the approach to teaching and learning advocated by current science curriculum standards.

This project will investigate the integration of engineering design, practices, and thinking into middle school life science curriculum while providing opportunities for students to foster knowledge of and increase interest in life and biosciences. The project will specifically respond to the need to create, implement, and evaluate a model intervention that will advance the knowledge base for establishing and retaining underrepresented minorities in STEM fields.

This exploratory project seeks to understand the role that a network of tablet computers may play in elementary and middle school math and science classrooms. The study will use classroom observations, student interviews, teacher interviews and student artifacts to identify the advantages and disadvantages of these resources, understand what challenges and benefits they offer to teachers, and offer recommendations for future hardware, software, and curriculum development.

This project is supporting and investigating the implementation of reformed mathematics instruction at the middle school level in two large school districts. The primary goal of the project is to develop an empirically grounded theory of action for implementing reform at school and district levels. The researchers are investigating reform within a coherent system that focuses on leadership and school-based professional development.

This study will investigate factors influencing teacher change after professional learning (PL) experiences and will examine the extent to which modest supports for science and engineering teaching in grades 3-5 sustain PL outcomes over the long term, such as increases in instructional time devoted to science, teacher self-efficacy in science, and teacher use of reform-oriented instructional strategies aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards.

This project responds to the need for technology-enhanced assessments that promote the critical practice of scientific argumentation--making and explaining a claim from evidence about a scientific question and critically evaluating sources of uncertainty in the claim. It will investigate how to enhance this practice through automated scoring and immediate feedback in the context of two high school curriculum units--climate change and fresh-water availability--in schools with diverse student populations. 

This project focuses on the teaching practice of building on student thinking, a practice in which teachers engage students in making sense of their peers' mathematical ideas in ways that help the whole class move forward in their mathematical understanding. The study examines how teachers incorporate this practice into mathematics discussions in secondary classrooms by designing tasks that generate opportunities for teachers to build on students' thinking and by studying teachers' orchestration of whole class discussions around student responses to these tasks.

This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project is an exploratory mixed methods study investigating the impact of vulnerability and resilience in the recovery of North Carolina schools affected by both Hurricanes Florence (2018) and Matthew (2016). Specifically, the study assesses whether schools that were impacted by both storms used organizational learning strategies to recover faster than schools that were impacted by either Hurricane Florence or Matthew alone.

To meet College and Career-Ready standards in mathematics, classroom instruction must change dramatically.  As in past reform efforts, many look to professional development as a major force to propel this transformation, yet not enough is known about mathematics professional development programs that operate at scale in the United States. In this project, we evaluated one such program.

Investigations in Cyber-enabled Education (ICE) strives to provide a professional development design framework for enhancing teacher ability to provide science, technology, and math (STM) instruction for secondary students. Exploratory research will clarify ICE framework constructs and gather empirical evidence to form the basis of anticipated further research into the question: Under what circumstances can cyber-enabled collaboration between STM scientists and educators enhance teacher ability to provide STM education?

This project seeks to strengthen the teaching of statistics and data science in grades 6-12 through the design and implementation of an online professional learning environment for teachers. The professional learning environment aims to support in-service teachers in developing stronger content knowledge related to statistics, and knowledge of how to effectively teach statistics in their classrooms.

This project will examine the impact of a 12-year statewide science field trip program called LabVenture, a hands-on program in discovery and inquiry that brings middle school students and teachers across the state of Maine to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) to become fully immersed in explorations into the complexities of local marine science ecosystems.

This is a large-scale, cross-sectional, and longitudinal study aimed at understanding and supporting the teaching of science and engineering practices and academic language development of middle and high school students (grades 7-10) with a special emphasis on English language learners (ELLs) and a focus on biotechnology.

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 test two curriculum units on the topic of evolution for high school general biology courses, with one unit focusing primarily on human case studies to teach evolution and one unit focusing primarily on case studies of evolution in other species. The two units will be compared to examine how different approaches to teaching evolution affect students and teachers.

Data literacy is the ability to ask questions, analyze, interpret, and draw conclusions from data. As the world and the workplace become more data-driven, students need to have stronger data literacy across multiple disciplines, including science. This project uses an instructional framework, Data Puzzles, to investigate how to support middle grades teachers learning to include data literacy in their science teaching. Data Puzzles integrate mathematical and computational thinking with ambitious science teaching instructional practices and contemporary science topics. Students engaging with Data Puzzles resources can analyze real-world climate science data using web-based data analysis tools to make sense of science phenomena and develop data literacy.

Data literacy is the ability to ask questions, analyze, interpret, and draw conclusions from data. As the world and the workplace become more data-driven, students need to have stronger data literacy across multiple disciplines, including science. This project uses an instructional framework, Data Puzzles, to investigate how to support middle grades teachers learning to include data literacy in their science teaching. Data Puzzles integrate mathematical and computational thinking with ambitious science teaching instructional practices and contemporary science topics. Students engaging with Data Puzzles resources can analyze real-world climate science data using web-based data analysis tools to make sense of science phenomena and develop data literacy.

This project aims to develop an innovative field-based science learning approach that will support the capacity of culturally diverse students in Grades K-3 to engage in complex ecological reasoning and related problem solving. To provide rich learning environments, outdoor learning gardens will be created in which students, teachers, garden educators, and families participate in activities that facilitate the investigation of tangible ecological challenges such as water capture and food security.

This project hypothesizes that learners must have access to the real work of scientists if they are to learn both about the nature of science and to do inquiry themselves. It explores the question "How can informal science education institutions best design resources to support teachers, school administrators, and families in the teaching and learning of students to conduct scientific investigations and better understand the nature of science?"

The purpose of this project is to test the efficacy of the Learning and Teaching with Learning Trajectories (LT2) program with the goal of improving mathematics teaching and thereby increasing young students' math learning. LT2 is a professional development tool and a curriculum resource intended for teachers to be used to support early math instruction and includes the mathematical learning goal, the developmental progression, and relevant instructional activities.

This project is studying measurement practices from pre-K to Grade 8, as a coordination of the STEM disciplines of mathematics and science. This research project tests, revises and extends learning trajectories for children's knowledge of geometric measurement across a ten-year span of human development. The goal will be to validate all components of each learning trajectory, goal, developmental progression, and instruction tasks, as well as revising each LT to reflect the outcomes of the experiments.

This project aims to support the mathematics learning of students with disabilities through the development and use of mixed reality simulations for elementary mathematics teacher preparation. These simulations represent low-stakes opportunities for preservice teachers to practice research-based instructional strategies to support mathematics learning, and to receive feedback on their practices.

This project addresses a longstanding problem in informal science education: how to increase the likelihood of consequential STEM learning from short duration experiences such as field trips. The project seeks to harness the power and potential of visual representations (e.g., graphs, drawings, charts, maps, etc.) for enhancing learning and encouraging effective reflection during and after science learning experiences, and provide new and actionable informal science learning practices that promote engagement with visual representations and reflection, and science understandings that can be applied broadly by informal science institutions.

This project addresses a longstanding problem in informal science education: how to increase the likelihood of consequential STEM learning from short duration experiences such as field trips. The project seeks to harness the power and potential of visual representations (e.g., graphs, drawings, charts, maps, etc.) for enhancing learning and encouraging effective reflection during and after science learning experiences, and provide new and actionable informal science learning practices that promote engagement with visual representations and reflection, and science understandings that can be applied broadly by informal science institutions.

This project addresses a longstanding problem in informal science education: how to increase the likelihood of consequential STEM learning from short duration experiences such as field trips. The project seeks to harness the power and potential of visual representations (e.g., graphs, drawings, charts, maps, etc.) for enhancing learning and encouraging effective reflection during and after science learning experiences, and provide new and actionable informal science learning practices that promote engagement with visual representations and reflection, and science understandings that can be applied broadly by informal science institutions.