Projects

This project will work in partnership with the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) to adapt a previously designed Professional Learning (PL) model based on the District's objectives and constraints to build the capacity of teacher leaders and a program coordinator to implement the adapted PL program. The project is examining the sustainability and scalability of a PL model that supports the development of teachers' pedagogical content knowledge and instructional practices. The project is contributing knowledge about how to build capacity in districts to lead professional learning in science that addresses the new teaching and learning standards and is responsive to the needs of their local context.

This project will work in partnership with the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) to adapt a previously designed Professional Learning (PL) model based on the District's objectives and constraints to build the capacity of teacher leaders and a program coordinator to implement the adapted PL program. The project is examining the sustainability and scalability of a PL model that supports the development of teachers' pedagogical content knowledge and instructional practices. The project is contributing knowledge about how to build capacity in districts to lead professional learning in science that addresses the new teaching and learning standards and is responsive to the needs of their local context.
 

This project will develop and study a prototype online learning environment that supports student learning via Engaging Practices for Inquiry with Collections in Bioscience (EPIC Bioscience), which uses authentic research investigations with digitized collections from natural history museums. 

This project will study if, how, and under what circumstances an integration of literacy strategies, hands-on inquiry-based investigations, and planetarium experiences supports the development of science practices (noticing, recognizing change, making predictions, and constructing explanations) in early elementary level students. The project will generate knowledge about how astronomy-focused storybooks, hands-on investigations, and planetarium experiences can be integrated to develop age-appropriate science practices in very young children.

Through the integration of STEM content and literacy, this project will study the ways teachers implement project practices integrating literacy activities into STEM learning. Teachers will facilitate instruction using scenarios that present students with everyday, STEM-related issues, presented as scenarios, that they read and write about. After reading and engaging with math and science content, students will write a source-based argument in which they state a claim, support the claim with evidence from the texts, and explain the multiple perspectives on the issue.

To act on energy issues, students need a strong understanding of energy flow and energy efficiency. However, students rarely have opportunities to learn about how buildings, such as their own school, drive about 40% of energy use and global carbon emissions. Addressing this gap in science education, this project will design, pilot, and evaluate a 6-week middle school curriculum called Build it Green! (BIG!). Blending classroom experiences and interactive digital learning tools, the researchers will work with rural middle schools in Missouri to implement and test how following the story of energy flow in and out of a hypothetical school building enhances students’ understanding of energy systems in the science of green buildings.

This project will use visualizations from an easily accessible tool from NOAA, Science On a Sphere, to help students develop critical thinking skills and practices required to effectively make meaning from authentic scientific data. The project will use arts-based pedagogies for observing, analyzing, and critiquing visual features of data visualizations to build an understanding of what the data reveal. The project will work with middle school science teachers to develop tools for STEM educators to use these data visualizations effectively.

This project aims to enact and study the co-design of classroom activities by mathematics and visual arts teachers to promote middle school students' data literacy.

This project explores "backward transfer", or the ways in which new learning impacts previously-established ways of reasoning. The PI will observe and evaluate algebra I students as they learn quadratic functions and examine how different kinds of instruction about the new concept of quadratic functions helps or hinders students' prior mathematical knowledge of the previous concept of linear functions. This award will contribute to the field of mathematics education by expanding the application of knowledge transfer, moving it from only a forward focused direction to include, also, a backward focused direction.

The goal of this study is to improve elementary science teaching and learning by developing, testing, and refining a framework and set of tools for strategically incorporating forms of uncertainty central to scientists' sense-making into students' empirical learning.

This project will design opportunities for mathematics and science teachers to coordinate their instruction to support a more coherent approach to teaching statistical model-based inference in middle school. It will prepare teachers to help more students develop a deeper understanding of ideas and practices related to measurement, data, variability, and inference and to use these tools to generate knowledge about the natural world.

This project characterizes and analyses the developing mathematical identities of Latinx students transitioning from elementary to middle grades mathematics. The central hypothesis of this project is that elementary Latino students' stories can identify how race and language are influential to their mathematical identities and how school and classroom practices may perpetuate inequities.

This project addresses a gap between vision and implementation of state science standards by designing a coordinated suite of instructional, assessment and teacher professional learning materials that attempt to enact the vision behind the Next Generation Science Standards. The study focuses on using state-of-the-art technology to create an 8-week long, immersive, life science field experience organized around three investigations.

This project will engage students and teachers in rich, real-world math tasks; will support future teachers and mathematics educators in adapting, designing, and implementing similar tasks; and will provide a basis for further research on the most effective ways to design and implement real-world tasks in the mathematics classroom.

This project will engage students and teachers in rich, real-world math tasks; will support future teachers and mathematics educators in adapting, designing, and implementing similar tasks; and will provide a basis for further research on the most effective ways to design and implement real-world tasks in the mathematics classroom.

This project will develop a cloud-based platform that enables high school students, teachers, and scientists to conduct original neuroscience research in school classrooms.

This project will address the need for engineering resources by applying an innovative pedagogy called Imaginative Education (IE) to create middle school engineering curricula. In IE, developmentally appropriate narratives are used to design learning environments that help learners engage with content and organize their knowledge productively. This project will combine IE with transmedia storytelling.

This project will address the need for engineering resources by applying an innovative pedagogy called Imaginative Education (IE) to create middle school engineering curricula. In IE, developmentally appropriate narratives are used to design learning environments that help learners engage with content and organize their knowledge productively. This project will combine IE with transmedia storytelling.

This project explores how classroom conversations can engage children in making sense of the problems that they are addressing and foregrounding ethics while making design decisions. To provide children with opportunities to engage in rich classroom conversations, the project team uses a community-based engineering curricular approach, where students address problems that affect their local school communities.

This project will create a portable training system that can be easily deployed in middle grades (5th-7th grade) as a prototype for increasing students' spatial reasoning skills. The project will study gender differences in spatial reasoning and examine how learning experiences can be designed to develop spatial skills using Minecraft as a platform.

The focus of this project is the design of learning experiences in different high school science courses to help students gain experience in computational thinking. The project uses a partnership between two universities and school district to develop and refine the units as a collaboration between researchers, teachers, and school leaders. The goal is to help all students have opportunities to learn about computational thinking in multiple science courses.

This project will support students to develop evidence-based explanations for the impact of disturbances on complex systems. The project will focus on middle school environmental science disciplinary core ideas in life, Earth, and physical sciences and serve as a starting point for supporting students to coordinate different sources of information to parse out the direct and indirect effects of disturbances on components of a system and to examine the interconnections between components to predict whether a system will return to equilibrium (resilience) or the system will change into a new state (hysteresis).

This project addresses the need to make science relevant for school students and to support student interpretation of large data sets by leveraging citizen science data about ecology and developing instruction to support student analyses of these data. This collaboration between Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Bowdoin College and Vanderbilt University engages middle-school students in building and revising models of variability and change in ecosystems and studies the learning and instruction in these classroom contexts.

This project builds upon the prior work by creating problem-solving measures for grades 3-5. The elementary assessments will be connected to the middle-grades assessments and will be available for use by school districts, researchers, and other education professionals seeking to effectively measure children's problem solving. The aims of the project are to (a) create three new mathematical problem-solving assessments and gather validity evidence for their use, (b) link the problem-solving measures (PSMs) with prior problem-solving measures (i.e., PSM6, PSM7, and PSM8), and (c) develop a meaningful reporting system for the PSMs.

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) problem-solving measures assess students’ problem-solving performance within the context of CCSSM math content and practices. This project expands the scope of the problem-solving measures use and score interpretation. The project work advances mathematical problem-solving assessments into computer adaptive testing. Computer adaptive testing allows for more precise and efficient targeting of student ability compared to static tests.