Projects

Anxiety about math has increased for some students due to disruptions in their learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. This partnership development project involving Portland State University and the Tigard-Tualatin School District addresses pandemic-related learning challenges in middle school mathematics, with a focus on math anxiety. Across the yearlong project, the partners play equal roles in co-developing research, practice, and policy proposals aimed at enhancing math outcomes and reducing math anxiety among the district’s middle school students.

Environmental issues like wildfires can serve as effective science learning contexts to promote scientific literacy and citizenship. This project will partner with teachers, teacher educators, and disciplinary experts in data science, fire ecology, public health, and environmental communication to co-design a data-driven, justice-oriented, and issue-based unit on wildfires. In the unit, student will engage in various data practices to gain insights into the issue of wildfires and how it affects their lives and communities. The project seeks to theorize how learners can leverage disciplinary knowledge and practices in environmental and data science as a foundation for making data-informed actions towards a more just and sustainable society.

Although science is increasingly recognized as a key dimension of early learning, findings to date indicate that young children, especially those enrolled in public preschool programs serving historically excluded communities, have limited opportunities to engage in high quality science investigations. The lack of professional learning resources available to teachers makes it challenging for them to feasibly and effectively promote science in their classrooms. To address this need, this four-year design and development project brings together public preschool teachers, families from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, early learning and STEM researchers, and designers of media to co-design a Professional Learning Hub for Early Science.

This project will support a conference series, including an in-person gathering and virtual follow-up meetings, that will bring together teachers, researchers, education leaders, and instructional material designers to build a shared understanding of how to integrate the use of high-quality instructional materials with the benefits of localizing these materials to better address students’ contexts and backgrounds. By fostering dialogue, sharing models, and setting priorities for future research and design, the project seeks to build knowledge about inclusive, effective, and culturally responsive approaches to science instruction that will advance equitable science education in K–12 classrooms.

High-quality early educational experiences, particularly in mathematics, are crucial for students’ success in K-12 schooling. To create these foundational experiences for young children, early childhood educators need opportunities to enhance their mathematics teaching through job-embedded, sustained professional learning. This partnership development project establish a collaboration among early childhood mathematics educators, school and district leaders, the state department of education, and university faculty in Delaware that aims to enhance children’s early mathematics learning by collaboratively designing support systems for strengthening their teachers’ professional learning.

Science education integrates the study of and practices from the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). At the fundamental level, the pedagogy involves teaching and learning that emphasizes the use of scientific inquiry and the engineering design process to develop students’ problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaboration skills. Unfortunately, funding and professional development for teachers, which is essential to assure successful implementation of science lessons to increase the potential for student achievement, is lacking.

Therefore, this NSF-funded science-education research project explored the development of a model that deepens the existing partnerships among grass-roots, non-profit community education organizations, K-12 public schools, and local university partners. Together, they worked collaboratively to develop a model where teachers could work together with community partners to implement high-quality, place-based, NGSS-aligned science learning opportunities that actively engage students in their classrooms during the school day.

This research project has led to the development of a full PreK-12 DRK proposal for high-quality professional development for teachers, using the newly developed Teacher-Plus-Community Partners (T+CP) model, with the goals of increasing science efficacy for teachers and impacting student achievement in science.

Data science is fast becoming a dominant part of scientific, economic, and social scientific reasoning, as well as a necessary perspective for making life decisions that rely on data. But there is little work in either research or development with students younger than 2nd grade, and even less focusing on children not yet in kindergarten. By expanding knowledge in an emergent content area where young children are currently underserved, this set of three workshops will build capacity to create rigorous, equitable, inclusive, and culturally responsive data science teaching resources, a necessity for school readiness in the early childhood years.

This project will develop a sustainable Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) model between the Worcester Public Schools (WPS) and the Learning Sciences Lab at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Together, WPI and WPS will build the collaborative infrastructure for conducting impactful STEM education research within WPS. Specifically, the RPP will establish and document shared infrastructural systematic processes and materials, brainstorm and facilitate research ideas that address pressing issues in mathematics education, and build a community of trust among researchers, administrators, teachers, and families to make future research and implementation, innovation, and collaboration more impactful, accessible, and efficient.

As STEM education researchers work to improve STEM teaching and learning in schools and districts across the nation, rural communities are often overlooked. There is a definite critical need for STEM education research focused on rural communities. Rural schools typically have less funding for STEM programs, have trouble recruiting and retaining quality STEM teachers, and have less access to STEM learning opportunities. Yet, rural communities possess an abundance of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and collective problem-solving skills. This project works to address this need by bringing together researchers, rural educators, and workforce leaders in rural communities to support the mutual exchange of knowledge and learning around pressing problems in rural K-12 STEM education, understanding rural ingenuity within teaching STEM, and STEM education's connection with the local workforce.

While family engagement in mathematics is highly predictive of children's mathematical outcomes, teachers' family engagement responsibilities are rarely addressed in teacher preparation programs. This conference seeks to improve how teacher preparation programs equip educators to engage families in preK-5 children's math learning by bringing together math teacher educators, preK-5 classroom teachers, families/caregivers, and mathematics teacher candidates. Beginning with an in-person gathering and followed by two virtual workshops, the conference will elevate models of community-engaged mathematics teacher preparation and explore the competencies that elementary grade teachers must develop to meaningfully engage families in mathematics.