Projects

The goal of this project is to study the design and development of community-centered, job-embedded professional development for classroom teachers that supports bias reduction. The project team will partner with three school districts serving racially, ethnically, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse communities, for a two-year professional development program. The aim is to reduce bias through: analyzing and designing mathematics teaching with colleagues, students, and families to create classrooms and schools based on community-centered mathematics; engaging in anti-bias teaching routines; and building relationships with parents, caretakers, and community members.

This project will develop and test a learning progression for middle school physical science that incorporates the three dimensions identified in Next Generation of Science Standards (NGSS): the Disciplinary Core Ideas of matter, interaction, and energy; the Science and Engineering Practices of constructing explanations and developing and using models; and the Crosscutting Concepts of cause and effect and systems and system models. Bringing together all three NGSS dimensions is an innovation that allows for the project to explore the variety of learning pathways that students may follow as they apply scientific knowledge and practices to make sense of compelling phenomena or solve complex problems.

The fundamental purpose of this project is to examine and gather initial validity evidence for assessments designed to measure and build kindergarten-fifth grade science teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT) about matter and its interactions in teacher education settings.

This project will design instructional assessment materials by using an innovative and unique design approach that brings together the coherent and systematic design elements of evidence-centered design, an equity and inclusion framework for the design of science materials, and inclusive design principles for language-diverse learners. Using this three-pronged approach, this project will develop a suite of NGSS aligned formative assessment tasks for first-grade science and a set of instructional materials to support teachers as they administer the formative assessments to students with diverse language skills and capacities.

This project uses a new theoretical framework that specifies criteria for developing scientific thinking skills that include the value that people place on scientific aims, the cognitive engagement needed to evaluate scientific claims, and the scientific skills that will enable one to arrive at the best supported explanation of a scientific phenomenon. The project will work with high school biology teachers to investigate their own understanding of scientific thinking, how it can be improved through professional development, and how this improvement can translate into practice to support student learning.

This project will promote pre-K teachers' use of specific teaching strategies that have been shown to enhance young children's learning and social skills. To enhance teachers' use of these practices, the project will develop a new practitioner-friendly version of the Classroom Quality Real-time Empirically-based Feedback (CQ-REF) tool for instructional coaches who work with pre-K teachers. The CQ-REF tool will guide coaches' ability to observe specific teacher practices in their classrooms and then provide feedback to help teachers evaluate their practices and set goals for improvement, addressing the need for accessible, real-time feedback on high quality pre-K classroom teaching.

This project represents a new approach to quality assessment of K-12 science and engineering learning experiences. By updating and expanding the Dimensions of Success (DoS) observation tool initially established for informal science learning settings to middle school science and engineering classrooms (DoS-MSSE), the project will create and implement a sustainable and scalable system of support for teachers who are learning how to implement the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Framework for K-12 effectively and equitably.

The project will design, develop, and test a research-based professional development (PD) approach that will ensure that teachers, and ultimately their middle-school students, have the knowledge to act in a way that promotes zero net loss of biodiversity in their communities. Through their participation in the PD, teachers will be equipped to plan for and implement NGSS-aligned instruction, facilitate student identification and understanding of biodiversity and environmental justice issues in their local community, and foster student capacity to take action. Students will come to understand that biodiversity is a global issue that they can influence at the local level, and will become empowered, in both their knowledge and their agency, to be leaders in solving biodiversity problems in their communities.

This project builds on a successful introductory computer science curriculum, called Scratch Encore, to explore ways to support teachers in bringing together—or harmonizing—existing Scratch Encore instructional materials with themes that reflect the interests, cultures, and experiences of their students, schools, and communities. In designing these harmonized lessons, teachers create customized activities that resonate with their students while retaining the structure and content of the original Scratch Encore lesson.

This project aims to create and study an Equitable and Interactive Mathematical Modeling (EIM2) program that positions students as decision makers in their own learning. Despite the value of connecting students’ life experiences with their mathematical learning, the practical implementation of this strategy has proven challenging in a classroom setting. EIM2 addresses this issue by supporting students to engage in equitable mathematical modeling, a process of using mathematics to analyze and quantify scenarios through a lens of equity.

The project focuses on the development of formative assessment tools that highlight assets of students’ use of crosscutting concepts (CCCs) while engaged in science and engineering practices in grades 9-12 Life Sciences.

This exploratory project will design, pilot, and evaluate a 10-week, energy literacy curriculum unit for a program called Energy and Your Environment (EYE). In the EYE curriculum, students will study energy use and transfer in their own school buildings. They will explore how Earth systems supply renewable and nonrenewable energy, and how these energy sources are transformed and transferred from Earth systems to a school building to meet its daily energy requirements.

This project will engage teams of students and teachers of grades 7-12 in four competitive Challenges to design innovative strategies for carbon mitigation in areas such as transportation, agriculture or energy use. The project expands the typical boundaries of schools by enabling teams of students in multiple locations to collaborate in model-based reasoning through online discussion forums, using social media, and crowdsourcing ideas to construct possible solutions to environmental challenges. Project research will examine the impacts of the project on student learning and engagement.

Adopting a teaching and curricular approach that will be novel in its integration of custom explanatory storybook materials with hands-on investigations, this project seeks to promote third grade students' understanding of small- and large-scale evolution by natural selection. By studying students across multiple school districts, this research will shed light on the benefits to diverse students of instruction that focuses on supporting children's capacities to cogently explain aspects of the biological world rather than learn disparate facts about it.

This project aims to elaborate a structure for practice-oriented, collaborative professional development that increases the capacities for collaborative learning by facilitating teacher-to-teacher interactions within and across cultural contexts. By convening international groups of teachers to design lessons and provide and respond to commentaries on their lesson designs, the project introduces possibilities for surfacing and disrupting common experiences, assumptions, and norms in US mathematics teaching.

This project will provide evidence on how school, classroom, teacher, and student factors shape elementary school science learning trajectories for English learners (ELs). The project will broaden ELs’ participation in STEM learning by investigating how individual, classroom, and school level situations such as instructional practices, learning environments, and characteristics of school personnel relate to EL elementary school science learning.

This study aims to understand parents' perspectives on the educational impacts of COVID-19 by leveraging a nationally representative, longitudinal study, the Understanding America Study (UAS). The study will track educational experiences during the summer of 2020 and into the 2020-21 school year and analyze outcomes overall and for key demographic groups of interest.

This project will explore PK-2 teachers' content knowledge by investigating their understanding of the design and implementation of culturally relevant computer science learning activities for young children. The project team will design a replicable model of PK-2 teacher professional development to address the lack of research in early computer science education.

This project will convene stakeholders in STEM and early childhood education to discuss better integration of STEM in the early grades. PIs will begin with a phase of background research to surface critical issues in teaching and learning in early childhood education and STEM.  A number of reports will be produced including commissioned papers, vision papers, and a forum synthesis report.

This project investigates how to support sustained engagement in computational modeling in middle school classrooms in two ways: 1) Design and develop an accessible modeling toolkit and accompanying thematically linked curricular units; and, 2) Examine how this toolkit and curriculum enable students to become sophisticated modelers and integrate modeling with other scientific practices such as physical experimentation and argumentation.

This project will develop and test a new instructional approach that integrates a data analysis tool with Earth systems models in a suite of online curriculum modules for middle and high school Earth science students. The modules will facilitate development of rich conceptual understandings related to the system science of natural hazards and their impacts.

This project will create two curriculum units that use sophisticated simulations designed for students in secondary schools that integrate the study of the tectonic system and the rock genesis system. The project seeks to overcome the more typical approaches taken in earth science classrooms where such geologic processes are treated as discrete and highly predictable, rather than intertwined and dynamic.

The project will create opportunities for teachers to develop programming content knowledge and new understandings of the creative possibilities in computer science education, thereby increasing opportunities for students to develop conceptual and creative fluency with programming.

This study seeks to further understanding of the STEM learning environment by 1) examining the extent to which mathematics and science achievement varies across students, teachers, schools, and districts, and 2) examining the extent to which student, teacher, school, and district characteristics that are found in state administrative databases can be used to explain this variation at each level. This work will support advances in research and evaluation methodologies that will enable researchers to design more rigorous and comprehensive evaluations of STEM interventions and improve the accuracy of statistical power calculations.

The main goal of this project is to better understand how to build and sustain the capacity of elementary science teachers in grades 3-5 to instruct and formatively assess students in ways that are aligned with contemporary science education frameworks and standards. To achieve this goal, the project will use classroom-based science assessment as a focus around which to build teacher capacity in science instruction and three-dimensional learning in science.