Projects

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 develop a research-practice partnership to plan and pilot a linguistically and culturally relevant computer science curriculum in middle school with the goal of broadening the participation of emergent bilingual (or English learner) students and Latino/a students in computer science education.

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.

This research project aims to enhance elementary teacher education in science and computational thinking pedagogy through the use of Culturally Relevant Teaching, i.e. teaching in ways that are relevant to students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The project will support 60 elementary teachers in summer professional development and consistent learning opportunities during the school year to learn about and enact culturally relevant computational thinking into their science instruction.

This project focuses on developing the Adapted Measure of Math Engagement (AM-ME), a culturally sustaining self-report measure of Black and Latina/o middle school students’ mathematics engagement. By developing a measure of mathematics engagement that centers Black and Latina/o students’ experiences, this project offers insight into creating inclusive mathematics learning environments and culturally sustaining understandings of what it means to be engaged in mathematics.

This project focuses on developing the Adapted Measure of Math Engagement (AM-ME), a culturally sustaining self-report measure of Black and Latina/o middle school students’ mathematics engagement. By developing a measure of mathematics engagement that centers Black and Latina/o students’ experiences, this project offers insight into creating inclusive mathematics learning environments and culturally sustaining understandings of what it means to be engaged in mathematics.

This project is designed to enhance an existing interdisciplinary high school science curriculum—Astrobiology in the Secondary Classroom (ASC)—in an innovative way and conduct research to determine the effectiveness of these materials in three different underrepresented student populations—African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americas—experiencing an achievement gap in STEM areas at five sites. Improvements will focus on program alignment and increased use of data sets made available by research scientists.

This project seeks to foster the science achievement of Latinx preschoolers by confronting current barriers that impact their STEM education through an integrated science-language instructional approach for preschool classrooms. The project will use everyday science experiences to engage Latinx preschoolers in learning the practices of scientists, including the practices of obtaining information and using language to communicate scientific findings.

This conference will bring together a group of teacher educators to focus on preservice teacher education and a shared vision of instruction called ambitious science teaching. It is a critical first step toward building a community of teacher educators who can collectively share and refine strategies, tools, and practices for preparing preservice science teachers for ambitious science teaching.

This workshop provides minority serving institutions with an opportunity to engage in dialogue about effective ways to create, implement, and evaluate models of intervention that will advance knowledge about retaining underrepresented minorities in STEM fields. It will advance knowledge in life science and the biosciences for K-12 and undergraduate students attending local schools or eligible minority-serving institutions. The workshop will focus on assisting minority serving institutions with use of research designs, and review of best practices for intervention shown to be effective in helping underrepresented student cope with chronic stresses that interfere with their retention in STEM fields and careers.

This project seeks to investigate the possibilities and challenges of using a participatory approach to research and design, centering Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Hmong students and their families in imagining and creating change. The project will generate new knowledge about the possibilities and limitations of participatory design research (PDR) as a method for advancing equity in mathematics education through PDR cycles at three middle schools over the five years of the project. This approach has the potential to disrupt inequitable practices of mathematics education as well as undemocratic processes for making decisions about mathematics education. Further, it will be a catalyst for developing racially just practices and processes in mathematics education.

This project explores possibilities for localized change led by parents and caregivers. By making explicit how to foster and increase Black and Latinx parents’ engagement in solidarity with community organizations and teachers, this project could provide a model for other communities and schools seeking to advance racial justice in mathematics education. Through critical community-engaged scholarship and in collaboration with ten Black and Latinx families, ten teachers, and two community organizations, the research team will co-design and co-study two educational programs aimed at advancing racial justice in elementary mathematics.

This project will design and develop specialized instructional materials and guidelines for teaching secondary algebra in linguistically diverse classrooms. These materials will incorporate current research on student learning in mathematics and research on the role of language in students' mathematical thinking and learning. The work will connect research on mathematics learning generally with research on the mathematics learning of ELLs, and will contribute practical resources and guidance for mathematics teachers who teach ELLs.

This project will address the need to educate teachers and students to engage in asking questions, collecting and interpreting data, making claims, and constructing explanations about real-world problems that matter to them. The study will explore ways to enhance youths' learning experiences in secondary school classrooms (grades 6-12) by building a sustainable partnership between researchers and practitioners.

Most students learn about negative numbers long after they have learned about positive numbers, and they have little time or opportunity to build on their prior understanding by contrasting the two concepts. The purpose of this CAREER project is to identify language factors and instructional sequences that contribute to improving elementary students' understanding of addition and subtraction problems involving negative integers. 

This project will investigate the potential benefits of interactive, dynamic visualization technologies in supporting science learning for middle school students, including ELLs. This project will identify design principles for developing such technology, develop additional ways to support student learning, and provide guidelines for professional development that can assist teachers in better serving linguistically diverse students. The project has the potential to transform traditional science instruction for all students, and to broaden their participation in science.

This project will develop a comprehensive framework to inform and guide the analytic design of teacher professional development studies in mathematics. An essential goal of the research is to advance a science of teaching and learning in ways that traverse both research and education.

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.

The goal of this project is to extend the theoretical and methodological construct of noticing to develop the concept of reciprocal noticing, a process by which teacher and student noticing are shared. The researcher argues that through reciprocal noticing the classroom can become the space for more equitable mathematics learning, particularly for language learners.

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.

Doing science requires that students learn to create evidence-based arguments (EBAs), defined as claims connected to supporting evidence via premises. In this CAREER project, I investigate how argumentation ability can be enhanced among middle school students. The project entails theoretical work, instructional design, and empirical work, and involves 3 middle schools in northern Utah and southern Idaho.

This research project aims to explore and understand how geographic information systems (GIS) can be used to promote and teach spatial thinking and social science inquiry skills. It addresses the research question: What are effective teaching practices using GIS to teach spatial thinking and social science inquiry in middle-school and undergraduate classrooms? This program will study the effectiveness of teaching practices for social science instruction with GIS in urban public schools for specific learning objectives.

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 research the programmatic changes that resulted from the NSF investment in Centers for Learning and Teaching of Mathematics (CLT) at the 31 participating institutions. It will provide information on the core elements of doctoral preparation in mathematics education at the institutions and ways in which participation in the CLTs has changed their programs.