This project will investigate the factors that influence curriculum coherence and how teachers in Grades 3-5 respond to these factors as they make decisions about their mathematics curriculum.
Projects
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 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 focuses on fostering equitable and inclusive STEM contexts with attention to documenting and reducing adolescents' experiences of harassment, bias, prejudice and stereotyping. This research will contribute to understanding of the current STEM educational climates in high schools and will help to identify factors that promote resilience in the STEM contexts, documenting how K-12 educators can structure their classrooms and schools to foster success of all students in STEM classes.
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.
This CAREER award aims to study the construct of "epistemic empathy" and examine how it can be cultivated in science and mathematics teacher education, how it functions to promote responsive teaching, and how it shapes learners' engagement in the classroom. In the context of this project, epistemic empathy is defined as the act of understanding and appreciating another's cognitive and emotional experience within an epistemic activity aimed at the construction, communication, and critique of knowledge.
The aim of this project is to enact and study a process in which middle school teachers of mathematics and visual arts co-design and teach activities that combine math and art to teach data science.
The aim of this project is to enact and study a process in which middle school teachers of mathematics and visual arts co-design and teach activities that combine math and art to teach data science.
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 will bring locally relevant virtual reality (VR) experiences to teachers and students in areas where there is historically low participation of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM. This exploratory project will support the professional growth and development of current middle and high school STEM teachers by providing multiyear summer training and school year support around environmental sciences themed content, implementing VR in the classroom, and development of a support community for the teachers.
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 proposal will develop and test an open-access, online system of professional development for high school biology teachers in order to build pedagogical competencies for teaching about complex systems and to support the application of those competencies in high school biology classrooms.
The main goal of this study will be to conduct exploratory-design work to produce both the design approach and the early-stage tasks that are critical inputs for creating a program of research and development to more fully develop a suite of innovative assessment tasks for the early grades. Specific goals of the effort will be: (1) to iteratively develop and refine a design approach that enables assessment designers to develop Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-aligned tasks and rubrics that include a literacy component for the early grades; (2) to use this design approach to create two exemplar assessment tasks that are feasible for classroom use; and (3) to collect initial evidence that informs the promise of the design approach.
The main goal of this study will be to conduct exploratory-design work to produce both the design approach and the early-stage tasks that are critical inputs for creating a program of research and development to more fully develop a suite of innovative assessment tasks for the early grades. Specific goals of the effort will be: (1) to iteratively develop and refine a design approach that enables assessment designers to develop Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-aligned tasks and rubrics that include a literacy component for the early grades; (2) to use this design approach to create two exemplar assessment tasks that are feasible for classroom use; and (3) to collect initial evidence that informs the promise of the design approach.
The main goal of this study will be to conduct exploratory-design work to produce both the design approach and the early-stage tasks that are critical inputs for creating a program of research and development to more fully develop a suite of innovative assessment tasks for the early grades. Specific goals of the effort will be: (1) to iteratively develop and refine a design approach that enables assessment designers to develop Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-aligned tasks and rubrics that include a literacy component for the early grades; (2) to use this design approach to create two exemplar assessment tasks that are feasible for classroom use; and (3) to collect initial evidence that informs the promise of the design approach.
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.
This project will investigate how NGSS has been implemented in California schools during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Through a state-wide survey, analysis of administrative data, interviews and case studies, this project will assess the impact of COVID-19 on NGSS implementation on a large scale, and more importantly, the extent to which high minority, high-poverty districts are disproportionately affected. It will also identify policy options available to state and school districts. By collecting critical and timely data, this project will contribute new knowledge to understanding of the impact of COVID-19 on NGSS implementation.