Projects

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.

The purpose of this 4-year project is to improve student mathematics achievement by developing a mathematics intervention focused on key measurement and data analysis skills. The PM intervention will be designed for first and second grade students who are experiencing mathematics difficulties. To increase student mathematics achievement, the intervention will include: (a) a technology-based component and (b) hands-on activities.

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.

This project will convene mathematics teacher educators with different theoretical perspectives to develop a shared menu of research-supported practices and new research questions to explore that could improve mathematics methods courses.

One significant challenge facing elementary STEM education is the varied preparation of English-language learners. The project addresses this with an innovative use of engineering curriculum to build on the English-language learners' prior experiences. The project will support teachers' learning about strategies for teaching English-language learners and using engineering design tasks as learning opportunities for mathematics, science and communication skills. 

This project aims to build elementary age students' content knowledge in robotics and computer science more broadly by fostering their disciplinary engagement and participation within a humanoid robots-programming environment. Fourth and fifth grade students will participate in a semester long course with a final project that involves bringing the robot to classrooms of first and second grade students to demonstrate the robot's capabilities and promote their disciplinary engagement with robotics and computer science.

This project will develop and study two sets of instructional materials for K-2 teacher professional development in mathematics and science that are aligned with the CCSS and NGSS. Teachers will be able to review the materials online, watch video of exemplary teaching practice, and then upload their own examples and students' work to be critiqued by other teachers enrolled in professional learning communities as well as expert coaches.

Education researchers, practitioners, industry representatives, and policymakers are increasingly committed to making engineering education accessible to all K-12 students and teachers. This project is designed to learn what type of collaborative infrastructure would best support NSF awardees in engaging in the innovative, synergistic research, development, and dissemination activities that will enable engineering to fulfill this important role in K-12 teaching and learning. 

This project utilizes existing citizen science programs as springboards for professional development for teachers during an intensive summer workshop. The project curriculum helps teachers use student participation in citizen science to engage them in the full complement of science practices; from asking questions, to conducting independent research, to sharing findings.

This project will research the knowledge and supervision skills principals' and other instructional leaders' need to support teachers in successfully integrating scientific practices into their instruction, and develop innovative resources to support these leaders with a particular focus on high-minority, urban schools. The project will contribute to the emerging but limited literature on instructional leadership in science at the K-8 school level. 

The investigators propose to characterize the multitude of approaches currently employed in the professional development of K-12 teachers of science, and to measure the effectiveness of such approaches in increasing teacher knowledge in the sciences. The project will result in a website, conference presentations, and scholarly and professional publications.

This project  will develop a video recording and analysis system called VideoReView (VRV) that allows grade four science teachers to record, tag, and analyze video in their classroom in real time. The investigators will then study and enhance the system in the context of professional learning communities of teachers. 

This project will develop and investigate the opportunities and limitations of Focus on Energy, a professional development (PD) system for elementary teachers (grades 3-5). The PD will contain: resources that will help teachers to interpret, evaluate and cultivate students' ideas about energy; classroom activities to help them to identify, track and represent energy forms and flows; and supports to help them in engaging students in these activities.

This project will develop and investigate the opportunities and limitations of Focus on Energy, a professional development (PD) system for elementary teachers (grades 3-5). The PD will contain: resources that will help teachers to interpret, evaluate and cultivate students' ideas about energy; classroom activities to help them to identify, track and represent energy forms and flows; and supports to help them in engaging students in these activities.

The goal of this CAREER program of research is to identify, from a cross-cultural perspective, essential Algebraic Knowledge for Teaching (AKT) that will enable elementary teachers to better develop students' algebraic thinking. This study explores AKT based on integrated insights of the U.S. and Chinese expert teachers' classroom performance.

Research increasingly provides insights into the magnitude of mathematics teacher turnover, but has identified only a limited number of factors that influence teachers' career decisions and often fails to capture the complexity of the teacher labor market. This project will address these issues, building evidence-based theories of ways to improve the quality and equity of the distribution of the mathematics teaching workforce. 

This research investigates student mathematics learning outcomes at the elementary level in relation to teacher expertise (elementary teachers with math specialist certification versus generally prepared elementary teachers) and school organization (departmentalized versus self-contained mathematics classrooms). Findings will provide evidence of the impact of content-specific teacher expertise and a departmentalized school organizational model that offers students access to well-qualified teachers of mathematics with no additional staffing costs.

This project investigates the variation in teachers' practice of lesson study to identify effective and scalable design features of lesson study associated with student mathematics achievement growth in Florida. Lesson study is a teacher professional development model in which a group of teachers works collaboratively to plan a lesson, observe the lesson in a classroom with students, and analyze and discuss the student work and understanding in response to the lesson.

This project is building a set of software tools, including a tool for annotating screen recordings of activities in games, a teacher data dashboard for information about students' in-game learning, and tools to help teachers customize activities in games to better align with curricular standards. The project will find out whether these new tools can enhance teaching and/or learning. 

This project will use classroom-based research to teach children about important algebraic concepts and to carefully explore how children come to understand these concepts. The primary goal is to identify levels of sophistication in children's thinking as it develops through instruction. Understanding how children's thinking develops will provide a critical foundation for designing curricula, developing content standards, and informing educational policies.

This project will address two obstacles that hinder elementary science instruction: (1) a lack of content-specific teaching knowledge (e.g., research on effective topic-specific instructional strategies); and (2) the knowledge that does exist is often not organized for use by teachers in their lesson planning and instruction. The project will collect existing empirical literature for two science topics and synthesize it with an often-overlooked resource -- practice-based knowledge. 

This project is documenting how students with learning disabilities (LD) access and advance their conceptual understanding of fractions.  Rather than focusing on the knowledge students do not have, this work is focused on uncovering students' informal knowledge that can bridge to fractions and how instruction can be used to promote conceptual change. 

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. 

PATHWAYS has two primary objectives: (1) To develop mathematics teachers who approach classrooms with a researcher's mindset, making instructional decisions based on empirical data; (2) To engage aspiring mathematics teachers in systematic formal mathematics education research, thereby providing foundations for participation in mathematics education graduate programs.

Following up on a special issue of Science (August 2013) that identified several Grand Challenges in Science Education, this project proposes a convocation to more deeply explore those challenges that are particularly relevant for K-12 teachers and highlights the roles teachers can play on issues vital to the improvement of K-12 STEM education.