Projects

This project explores how teachers can use activities with young children to develop their knowledge of numbers and patterns. Part of the study examines how much guidance teachers should provide to students. The project also explores the design of resources that are the most likely to be used by preschool teachers and that can be easily incorporated into their teaching of young children.

This study will provide foundational knowledge about the activities and interactions in the home environment that drive the early emergence of math skills disparities related to SES.

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.

The focus of this conference is to carefully examine past and current research with an eye toward improving its impact on practice and to create concrete steps that could shape the nature and impact of mathematics education research.

This project will investigate the development and emergence of spatial gender stereotypes (and their relation to math gender stereotypes) in elementary school-aged children and their impact on parent-child interactions in the pre-school period.

The main goal of this project is to validate a set of rubrics that attend to the existence and the quality of instructional practices that support equity and access in mathematics classes. The project team will clarify the relationships between the practices outlined in the rubrics and aspects of teachers' perspectives and knowledge as well as student learning outcomes.

The purpose of this project is to test the efficacy of the Learning and Teaching with Learning Trajectories (LT2) program with the goal of improving mathematics teaching and thereby increasing young students' math learning. LT2 is a professional development tool and a curriculum resource intended for teachers to be used to support early math instruction and includes the mathematical learning goal, the developmental progression, and relevant instructional activities.

The goal of this design and development project is to address the critical need for innovative resources that transform the mathematics learning environments of preschool children from under-resourced communities by creating a cross-context school-home intervention.

This project will study the activities of a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) as a vehicle to bridge gaps across four identified steps along the science teacher training and development pathways within local contexts of 8 participating universities. The overarching goal of the project is to strengthen the capacity of universities and school districts to reliably produce teachers of science who are knowledgeable about and can effectively enact the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), although prepared in varied organizational contexts.

The goal of this project is to formalize subjective ideas about the important concept of replication, provide statistical analyses for evaluating replication studies, provide properties for evaluating the conclusiveness of replication studies, and provide principles for designing conclusive and efficient programs of replication studies.

This study will investigate the integration of science with mathematics and engineering and develop resources that provide preschool children with integrated STEM learning experiences. The study will also investigate the connection between home and school learning and will develop resources that strengthen children's experiences at school and home.

The purpose of this project is to examine the process by which math language instruction improves learning of mathematics skills in order to design and translate the most effective interventions into practical classroom instruction.

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.

Building on successful prior work, this project simultaneously targets young children's teachers and families/caregivers in an effort to build both parties' capacity to promote student interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning. The project aims to: 1) Transform early childhood science teaching based upon Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to measurably increase student science, literacy, and math achievement, and 2) Engage families of PreK-3 students in science inquiry practices to measurably improve student science, literacy, and math achievement.

Building upon prior research on Head Start curriculum, this phase of Readiness through Integrative Science and Engineering (RISE) will be expanded to include classroom coaches and community experts to enable implementation and assessment of RISE in a larger sample of classrooms. The goal is to improve school readiness for culturally and linguistically diverse, urban-residing children from low-income families, and the focus on science, technology, and engineering will address a gap in early STEM education.

The project will develop and refine an electronic Test of Early Numeracy (e-TEN) in English and Spanish that will assess informal and formal knowledge of number and operations in domains including verbal counting, numbering, numerical relationships, and mental addition/subtraction. The overarching goal of the assessment design is to create a measure that is more accurate, more accessible to a wider range of children, and easier to administer than existing measures.

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 design and development project is an expansion of the Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP), an established model for research-based formative assessment in grades 3-8, to the early elementary grades. The project will translate findings from research on student learning of early number, addition, and subtraction into tools and routines that teachers can use to formatively assess their students' understanding on a regular basis and develop targeted instructional responses.

This project will integrate Native Hawaiian cross-cultural practices to explore ways to help teachers know about and know how to connect resources of students' familiar worlds to their science teaching. This project will transform the ways teachers orient their teaching at the upper elementary and middle grades through professional development courses offered at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

This project will adapt and study a promising and replicable teacher professional development (PD) intervention, called Collaborative Math (CM), for use in early childhood programs. Prepared as generalists, preschool teachers typically acquire less math knowledge in pre-service training than their colleagues in upper grades, which reduces their effectiveness in teaching math. To address teacher PD needs, the project will simultaneously develop teacher content knowledge, confidence, and classroom practice by using a whole teacher approach.

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.

SciMath-DLL is an innovative preschool professional development (PD) model that integrates supports for dual language learners (DLLs) with high quality science and mathematics instructional offerings. It engages teachers with workshops, classroom-based coaching, and professional learning communities. Based on initial evidence of promise, the SciMath-DLL project will expand PD offerings to include web-based materials.

This project is developing, iteratively refining and evaluating a science curriculum for Pre-K classrooms with units on Plant Growth, How Things Move, and What Makes Shadows by integrating traditional classroom resources (large and small group activities, hands-on activities, read-alouds) with digital media (touch screen tablets, photos and short videos, and games/simulations).

This curriculum project is using empirically-tested mathematics and science programs and research-based approaches to develop a six module interdisciplinary curriculum for pre-K students. Mathematics and science content is included with literacy/language and social-emotional development. The curriculum is being designed to counter the frequent situation of devoting most pre-school instructional time to literacy by having activities that join literacy with mathematics and science.

The RISE project is creating curriculum resources for dual language learners (DLLs) in science, technology and engineering (STE). Participants include teachers in pre-K programs in the Boston area selected to target Hispanic and Chinese students and their families. The curriculum will be based on the Massachusetts framework, one of only a few states with pre-K standards. The evaluation will monitor both the progress of the research and development and the dissemination to the target audiences.