This project will develop, pilot, and refine a set of coordinated and complementary activities that teacher education programs can use in both online and face-to-face settings to provide practice-based opportunities for preservice teachers to develop their ability to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions in mathematics and science.
Projects
This project is using Second Life and other technology to structure carefully planned learning experiences for pre-service teachers. Virtual technologies are used to provide pre-service teachers practice in presenting and assessing problem solving activities in a virtual classroom with diverse populations. Researchers hypothesize that technology enriched strategies have the potential to deepen pre-service teachers' understanding and effectiveness in teaching emerging algebra concepts to diverse student populations.
This project will design and study an online, portable mentor teacher professional development (PD) program that target mentors’ teaching and feedback skills in elementary mathematics. The project aims to (1) promote educator development by generating new knowledge about how to help mentors support teacher candidate learning; (2) broaden participation in mathematics by historically marginalized and minoritized youth, who are far more likely than their peers to be taught by a first year teacher; and (3) enhance infrastructure for research and education by generating PD materials and measures that can be used and studied at scale.
This project aims to: (1) develop, implement and study the impact of a subject matter-focused, Problem-based Learning professional development model; and to (2) design ways of incorporating Problem-Based Learning (PBL) into key subject matter and teacher preparation courses taken by pre-service teachers, and study the impact on pre-service teachers' learning. This project is designed with and for teams of K-12 science and mathematics teachers from school districts of mid-Michigan.
The project is studying the impact of the mathematics and science intensive pre-service preparation program for elementary school teachers. The project includes assessments of pre-service teachers' math and science content, teacher performance, self-report surveys, and teacher interviews. Each of the study dimensions (Knowledge Dimension, Teaching Performance, and Perspectives on the Program) will be assessed at three time points across this longitudinal study, providing a model for elementary teacher development of STEM teaching.
This project examines the potential of two research-based and college-tested active learning strategies in high school classrooms: Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) and Peer Instruction by adapting the strategies for implementation in biology classes, with the goal of determining which strategy shows the most promise for increasing student achievement and attitudes toward science.
This study takes an innovative approach to documenting how teacher knowledge can be enhanced by incorporating a design experience into pre-service mathematics education. Teachers will use digital and fabrication technologies (e.g., 3D printers and laser cutters) to design and use manipulatives for K-6 mathematics learning. The goals of the project include describing how this experience influences the prospective teachers' knowledge and identities while creating curriculum for teacher education.
This project is examining an innovative model of situated Professional Development (PD) and the contribution of controlled teaching experiences to teacher learning and, as a result, to student learning. The project is carrying out intensive research about an existing special PD summer institute (QuEST) that has been in existence for more than five years through a state Improving Teacher Quality Grants program.
Despite the tremendous growth in the availability of mathematics videos online, little research has investigated student learning from them. The goal of this exploratory project is to create, investigate, and provide evidence of promise for a model of online videos that embodies a more expansive vision of both the nature of the content and the pedagogical approach than is currently represented in YouTube-style lessons.
The goal of these two linked conferences was to build more effective connections between research and practice. Specifically, the conferences brought together researchers, practitioners. and policy makers around improving students' mathematics proficiency by ensuring that researchers were investigating the most urgent problems of practice and that practitioners were connected to the research in ways that makes the knowledge useful to instruction.
This project is organizing and hosting a working conference on Response to Intervention (RtI) and related strategies in teaching and assessment in Mathematics. Goals of this work are: To build a community of researchers and practitioners to identify, expand and sustain research needs in this area; to identify and improve the research available related to teaching mathematics within an RtI model; and to develop resources to support teacher's understanding and application of RtI strategies.
This is a four-year project to develop, implement, and study an experimental model of secondary science pre-service teacher education designed to prepare novice school teachers to provide effective science instruction to English language learners (ELLs). The project incorporates the principles underlying the Next Generation Science Standards with a focus on promoting students' scientific sense-making, comprehension and communication of scientific discourse, and productive use of language.
This project investigates how real time formative feedback can be automatically composed from the results of computational analysis of student design artifacts and processes with the envisioned SmartCAD software. The project conducts design-based research on SmartCAD, which supports secondary science and engineering with three embedded computational engines capable of simulating the mechanical, thermal, and solar performance of the built environment.
This project will capitalize on the STEM for All Video Showcase and extend its impact by creating a STEM for All Multiplex. The Multiplex will draw on past and future Video Showcase videos to create a multimedia environment for professional and public exchange, as well as to provide a way for anyone to search the growing database of videos, create thematic playlists, and re-use the content in new educational and research contexts.
Ensuring that beginning teachers are "classroom-ready" requires assessments that efficiently and validly evaluate proficiency in teaching. This project explores assessments involving simulated students as a way to assess teaching practice, which could provide an important complement, or alternative, to directly assessing teaching practice in classrooms.
This project examines how Latine, bilingual teachers' dispositions to teach science and engineering to bilingual learners change as they enter the teaching profession. Specifically, it explores bilingual teachers' transition from a period of strong social support to one of scarce social support, i.e., from being Bilingual Teacher Candidates to Novice Bilingual Teachers (NBTs) as they plan and teach bilingual science and engineering lessons.
This project focuses on practicing and preservice secondary mathematics teachers and mathematics teacher educators. The project is researching, designing, and developing materials for preservice secondary mathematics teachers that enable them to acquire the mathematical knowledge and situated rationality central to teaching, in particular as it regards the leading of mathematical discussions in classrooms.
This project will modify the teacher preparation program for preK-8 teachers. The program is designed to help pre-service teachers learn mathematics well, learn to access students' cultural funds of knowledge, and learn to encourage students' mathematical thinking. The developers are designing (a) modules that can be used in teacher preparation courses, (b) a mentoring program for new teachers, and (c) on-line networks to facilitate collaboration among participating teachers and institutions.
This project is designing, developing, and testing a model that delivers effective teacher PD to in-service and preservice teachers to enable the successful implementation of engineering curricula. Research is performed to evaluate the impacts of the curricular materials and the teacher PD framework on classroom instructional practices and student learning, interests, and attitudes and to evaluate which curriculum components are most effective in promoting student learning and interest as a function of gender and ethnicity.
This project will develop a Professional Learning Community (PLC) model for engaging science and education researchers from a university with science and mathematics faculty at community colleges to increase the number, quality and diversity of middle school and high school mathematics and science teachers; apply design-based research to assess the effectiveness and replicability of the PLC model; and disseminate replicable project and research findings.
The Science and Mathematics Simulated Interaction Model (SIM) project will design and clinically test simulations for teachers. The hypothesis is that simulations will identify strengths and misconceptions in teachers' understanding of content and pedagogy, increase instructional capacity, and advance student achievement. The SIM will be for pre-service and induction-stage teachers. The simulations will focus on common problems of practice, challenges, dilemmas, issues that mathematics and science teachers encounter at the secondary level.
The goal of this project is to accelerate the progress of early-career and pre-service science teachers from novice to expert-like pedagogical reasoning and practice by developing and studying a system of discourse tools. The tools are aimed at developing teachers' capabilities in shaping instruction around the most fundamental science ideas; scaffolding student thinking; and adapting instruction to diverse student populations by collecting and analyzing student data on their thinking levels.
Given the changes in instructional practices needed to support high quality mathematics teaching and learning based on college and career readiness standards, school districts need to provide professional learning opportunities for teachers that support those changes. The project is based on the TRUmath framework and will build a coherent and scalable plan for providing these opportunities in high school mathematics departments, a traditionally difficult unit of organizational change.
This conference will shed light on how mathematics and science teacher educators are currently using lesson study to prepare pre-service teachers. The project will improve teacher educators' understanding of how lesson study can be optimized to teach pre-service teachers which will help bring this technique to the future teachers in their programs.
This project will develop and implement a working conference for scholars and practitioners to articulate current use cases and theories of action regarding the use of simulations in PreK-12 science and mathematics teacher education. The conference will be structured to provide opportunities for attendees to share their current research, theoretical models, conceptual views, and use cases focused on the design and use of digital and non-digital simulations for building and assessing K-12 science and mathematics teacher competencies.