Projects

Teachers’ beliefs influence their instructional decisions and these decisions shape the mathematical learning opportunities for all students. This is particularly important when considering the learning opportunities for groups that have historically been marginalized in mathematics, including girls and students of color. There are few validated, mathematics-specific instruments that measure teachers’ beliefs about mathematics learning related to race, ethnicity, and gender. This project seeks to investigate teachers’ beliefs related to how they explain the systemic racial and gender differences in mathematics education outcomes by developing and validating a survey instrument and to explore how those beliefs might impact their teaching.

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 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.

Students of color must have access to robust and meaningful opportunities to learn science in classrooms that center their assets and humanity. This project aims to cultivate such spaces through designing and studying teacher professional learning focused on pedagogical practices that engage students of color meaningfully in science learning. These practices leverage students’ assets to foster growth in science and scientific habits of mind. This project will support pre-service and practicing teachers in developing tools for practice and reflection that focus on equity and highlighting the assets of students of color in secondary science.

In this project, we examine middle-school students’ understandings of coordinate systems and frames of reference prior to examining their graph construction and interpretation. This focus allows us to design instructional materials that can support students’ graphing understandings in ways that avoid or mitigate how persistent challenges in students’ graphing understandings identified in the research literature.

This project supports school-based science teachers and students in conducting community-based science research on the causes and effects of extreme heat/urban islands in racially and ethnically diverse communities. Teachers will participate in professional learning experiences that support their development of content knowledge, scientific research practices, and critical pedagogies needed to design and implement research projects in their classroom. Students will identify locally-relevant issues related to this phenomenon, conduct investigations to explore the issue, share their findings through arts-based community narratives, and advocate for change. This project will broaden access to empowering youth-centered approaches that support learning and identity construction in science.

Building on the team's prior research from early in the pandemic, this project team will continue to collect data from families and 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 spring and summer of 2022 and into the 2022-23 school year. The team will analyze student and family overall and for key demographic groups of interest as schooling during the pandemic continues. This RAPID project allows critically important data to continue to be collected and contribute to continued understanding of the impacts of and responses to the pandemic by American families.

This project addresses a longstanding problem in informal science education: how to increase the likelihood of consequential STEM learning from short duration experiences such as field trips. The project seeks to harness the power and potential of visual representations (e.g., graphs, drawings, charts, maps, etc.) for enhancing learning and encouraging effective reflection during and after science learning experiences, and provide new and actionable informal science learning practices that promote engagement with visual representations and reflection, and science understandings that can be applied broadly by informal science institutions.

This project addresses a longstanding problem in informal science education: how to increase the likelihood of consequential STEM learning from short duration experiences such as field trips. The project seeks to harness the power and potential of visual representations (e.g., graphs, drawings, charts, maps, etc.) for enhancing learning and encouraging effective reflection during and after science learning experiences, and provide new and actionable informal science learning practices that promote engagement with visual representations and reflection, and science understandings that can be applied broadly by informal science institutions.

This project addresses a longstanding problem in informal science education: how to increase the likelihood of consequential STEM learning from short duration experiences such as field trips. The project seeks to harness the power and potential of visual representations (e.g., graphs, drawings, charts, maps, etc.) for enhancing learning and encouraging effective reflection during and after science learning experiences, and provide new and actionable informal science learning practices that promote engagement with visual representations and reflection, and science understandings that can be applied broadly by informal science institutions.

This project brings together a successful mathematics rubric-based coaching model (MQI Coaching) and an empirically developed observation tool focused on equity-focused instructional practices, the Equity and Access Rubrics for Mathematics Instruction (EAR-MI). The project measures the effects of the coaching model on teachers' beliefs and instructional practices and on students' mathematical achievement and sense of belonging in mathematics. The project also investigates how teachers' attitudes and beliefs impact their participation and what teachers take away from engagement with the coaching model.

The project will develop and research an innovative model for rural science teacher professional development via technology-mediated lesson study (TMLS). This approach supports translating professional learning into classroom practice by developing a technology-based, social support system among rural teachers.

This project brings together a successful mathematics rubric-based coaching model (MQI Coaching) and an empirically developed observation tool focused on equity-focused instructional practices, the Equity and Access Rubrics for Mathematics Instruction (EAR-MI). The project measures the effects of the coaching model on teachers' beliefs and instructional practices and on students' mathematical achievement and sense of belonging in mathematics. The project also investigates how teachers' attitudes and beliefs impact their participation and what teachers take away from engagement with the coaching model.

This project explores the mechanisms by which teachers translate what they learn from professional development into their teaching practice. The goal of this project is to study how the knowledge and skills teachers acquire during professional development (PD) translate into more conceptually oriented mathematics teaching and, in turn, into increased student learning.

This project focuses on supporting emerging scholars who have new ideas and approaches for approaching racial equity in their scholarship and work. The workshop, implemented as a series of sessions over the course of a year, will support early career scholars in STEM education and the learning sciences in preparing proposals to submit to the National Science Foundation.

This project brings together a successful mathematics rubric-based coaching model (MQI Coaching) and an empirically developed observation tool focused on equity-focused instructional practices, the Equity and Access Rubrics for Mathematics Instruction (EAR-MI). The project measures the effects of the coaching model on teachers' beliefs and instructional practices and on students' mathematical achievement and sense of belonging in mathematics. The project also investigates how teachers' attitudes and beliefs impact their participation and what teachers take away from engagement with the coaching model.

Researchers from Georgia Tech have developed a three-year middle school Engineering and Technology course sequence that introduces students to advanced manufacturing tools such as computer aided design (CAD) and 3D printing, incorporates engineering concepts such as pneumatics, robotics and aeronautics, increases student awareness of career paths, and addresses the concerns of technical employers wanting workers with problem solving, teamwork, and communication skills. This impact study project will investigate the effectiveness of STEM-Innovation and Design (STEM-ID) curricula and determine whether STEM-ID courses are equally effective across different demographic groups and school environments under normal implementation conditions and whether the courses have the potential to positively impact a vast number of students around the country, particularly students who have struggled to stay engaged with their STEM education.

This project will develop and study a curriculum and app that support computational thinking (CT) in a high school biology unit. The project will engage students in rich data practices by gathering, manipulating, analyzing, simulating, and visualizing data of bioelectrical signals from neural sensors, and in so doing give the students opportunities to apply CT principles.

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.

Widely-adopted science education standards have expanded expectations for students to learn science research processes. To address these needs, the project will research and develop curricular materials and classroom practices that teachers can use to bring authentic science into their classes and engage students as active science researchers. The project, called MothEd, will focus on the study of moths, which are well-suited to the project’s goal of having students conduct authentic scientific investigations.

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) problem-solving measures assess students’ problem-solving performance within the context of CCSSM math content and practices. This project expands the scope of the problem-solving measures use and score interpretation. The project work advances mathematical problem-solving assessments into computer adaptive testing. Computer adaptive testing allows for more precise and efficient targeting of student ability compared to static tests.

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 aims to support teachers to engage their students in mathematical problem posing (problem-posing-based learning, or P-PBL). P-PBL is a powerful approach to the teaching and learning of mathematics, and provides students with opportunities to engage in authentic mathematical practices.

Using high school statewide longitudinal data from Maryland from 2012-2022, this study will first document who has taught STEM-CTE courses over this period. After exploring the teaching landscape, the study will then explore whether qualifications (i.e., education, credentials, teaching experience) of teachers in STEM-CTE high school courses were associated with their students’ success.

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) problem-solving measures assess students’ problem-solving performance within the context of CCSSM math content and practices. This project expands the scope of the problem-solving measures use and score interpretation. The project work advances mathematical problem-solving assessments into computer adaptive testing. Computer adaptive testing allows for more precise and efficient targeting of student ability compared to static tests.