Projects

This project investigates and expands teachers' learning to notice in two important ways. First, the research expands beyond teachers' noticing of written and verbal thinking to attend to gesture and other aspects of embodied and multimodal thinking. Second, the project focuses on algebraic thinking and seeks specifically to understand how teacher noticing relates to the content of algebra. Bringing together multimodal thinking and the mathematical ideas in algebra has the potential to support teachers in providing broader access to algebraic thinking for more students.

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 project investigates the STEM teacher pipeline and examine qualifications, from teacher candidates who express interest in teaching STEM through to the eventual career paths of teachers in the workforce. In doing so, the project examines how the supply of STEM teachers has changed over time, whether the supply is adequate in meeting the needs of a changing nation, the qualifications and credentials of STEM teachers, and the implications of the STEM teacher career paths for equity and serving high needs contexts and students.

This project involves a longitudinal, ethnographic study of children's mathematical performances from preschool to first grade in both formal classroom settings and informal settings at school and home. The study seeks to identify opportunities for mathematical learning, to map varied performances of mathematical competence, to chart changes in mathematical performance over time, and to design and assess the impact of case studies for teacher education.

Access to high quality STEM education is highly variable depending on where one lives. In addition, early career teachers need support during their first years of teaching to be successful and help them stay in the profession. This project aims to provide in-service and beginning elementary school teachers increased opportunities to refine their mathematics teaching to support minoritized youth in racially diverse rural communities in Georgia that have less access to elementary mathematics specialists. This project follows and supports both beginning teachers (BTs) and elementary mathematics coaches (EMCs) over 5 years to develop and refine their mathematics teaching and coaching, respectively, using equity-based tools to guide reflection and conversations about both the BTs’ instructional practices and the EMCs’ coaching practices.

This project is investigating the learning that can take place when elementary school students are directly involved in the collection, sense-making, and analysis of real, personally-meaningful data sets. The hypotheses of this work are that by organizing elementary statistics instruction around the study of physical activities, students will have greater personal engagement in data analysis processes and that students will also develop more robust understandings of statistical ideas.

This project will support pre-service and in-service teachers in professional development that will prepare them to teach about climate change in community-specific ways. This project aims to advance elementary teachers’ development in three high-impact areas: (a) their self-efficacy toward teaching climate change science or beliefs and attitudes about teaching climate change science; (b) their science content knowledge around climate change; and (c) their climate change identity, or how they view their agency and role in climate change.

This project will study ways to improve classroom instruction grounded in science practices to address inequities in science education for emerging bilingual students. The project will create research-based resources for teacher educators that focus on developing preservice elementary teachers' understanding and abilities to support emerging bilingual students' engagement in science practices.

Elementary students need opportunities to see science as meaningful and relevant to their lives. One way to increase this relevance is with learning experiences that are grounded in community-based questions and inquiries that students identify and carry out themselves. An important contribution of this project is investigating how culturally relevant and community-based science curriculum helps to affirm and develop Black students’ science identities in an urban, elementary classroom. This project will partner with third, fourth and fifth-grade elementary teachers to create and to investigate such learning experiences.

This CAREER award aims to study the construct of "epistemic empathy" and examine how it can be cultivated in science and mathematics teacher education, how it functions to promote responsive teaching, and how it shapes learners' engagement in the classroom. In the context of this project, epistemic empathy is defined as the act of understanding and appreciating another's cognitive and emotional experience within an epistemic activity aimed at the construction, communication, and critique of knowledge.

This is a Faculty Early Career Development project aimed at developing, implementing, and assessing a model that introduces novice elementary school teachers to community-based engineering design as a strategy for teaching and learning in urban schools. Reflective of the new Framework for K-12 Science Education, the model addresses key crosscutting concepts, disciplinary core ideas, and scientific and engineering practices. It builds on theoretical perspectives and empirical foundations, including situated learning, engineering design cognition, and children's resources and funds of knowledge, including cultural and linguistic diversity.

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.

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.

This project will contribute new knowledge on two aspects of participation in mathematics education. First, this research aims to understand how perceptions of race influence how teachers, future teachers, and researchers assess how bilingual children use their languages and movement to participate in mathematical activity. Second, it will explore ways to counter deficit views that influence teachers’, preservice teachers’, and researchers’ perceptions of these multiple ways of participating as inferior to what is traditionally considered as meaningful participation.

The project aims to: (1) study resources and strategies for teachers that will facilitate participation of 3rd grade Latino English Language Learners (ELLs) in the mathematics classrooms; (2) develop related teacher professional development (PD) materials; and (3) integrate research and teaching activities. The basic research question is: How can 3rd grade teachers facilitate better mathematics instruction for ELLs?

STEM learning is a function of both student level and classroom level characteristics. Though research efforts often focus on the impacts of classrooms level features, much of the variation in student outcomes is at the student level. Hence it is critical to consider individual students and how their developmental systems (e.g., emotion, cognition, relational, attention, language) interact to influence learning in classroom settings. This is particularly important in developing effective models for personalized learning. To date, efforts to individualize curricula, differentiate instruction, or leverage formative assessment lack an evidence base to support innovation and impact. Tools are needed to describe individual-level learning processes and contexts that support them. The proposed network will incubate and pilot a laboratory classroom to produce real-time metrics on behavioral, neurological, physiological, cognitive, and physical data at individual student and teacher levels, reflecting the diverse dynamics of classroom experiences that co-regulate learning for all students.

Teachers are extraordinarily important to student learning, but researchers have surprisingly little data about what teachers do moment-to-moment with students. What are the instructional moves and improvisational responses that characterize highly effective practice? To better understand and support U.S. K-12 STEM teachers, this Incubator project will develop a network of "tutor observatories." Tutor observatories are learning environments that record teacher engagements with students along with information about the context of the interaction. From these data, researchers will be able to gain a deeper understanding of STEM teacher practice, identify highly effective practices, and develop training data that can inform a new generation of artificially intelligent tools to support teachers and student learning.

This exploratory project aims to develop a community of individuals and organizations working together to address critical issues in K-12 computer science education by broadening the awareness of the need for curriculum computer science standards, providing multiple levels of professional development, conducting and disseminating research in computer science education, and promoting this subject as a unique field of study in schools.

This project covers participants' costs to attend a national conference series focusing upon supporting incipient science education research projects. A primary objective is to provide a venue in which researchers can describe their lines of inquiry and to then receive guidance and input about refining those ambitions. The other primary objective is to promote an innovative conference design in which a structured presentation format serves as an incubator for scholarly work.

The primary purpose of this international conference was for participants in the US to exchange views and discuss the latest research findings on (primary) science assessment. The conference focused on research around building assessment systems that help teachers diagnose student learning in the classroom but also link meaningfully to large-scale accountability systems (in districts or national levels). The project resulted in a report, proceedings, journal publications.

This grant is also known as The Responsive Math Teaching Project: Developing Instructional Leadership in a Network of Elementary Schools.

The goal of this project is to build instructional leadership capacity in teachers and school-based leaders in a network of underperforming elementary schools with limited resources. Through design-based improvement research, the project is designed to enhance the knowledge, skills, and competencies of elementary teacher leaders and principals to develop a shared vision and provide ongoing support of high-quality math instruction.

This project will focus on a networked improvement community (NIC) model of professional learning that shifts K-5 science instruction from traditional approaches to a three-dimensional design as outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards. The project will feature a multi-level model involving university educators and researchers and school district practitioners in an effort to co-defined problems of practice valuable to both parties. A mixed methods research design will examine how the NIC model develops professional capital through changes in implementation over multiple iteration.

This bilateral workshop examines the preparation of mathematics teachers in the United States and China. It will initiate knowledge exchanges among teacher educators in both countries and forge a joint research agenda. Objectives include increasing the comparative knowledge base in both nations about promising practices in and existing challenges to mathematics teacher preparation and mathematics instruction, and promoting the exchange of ideas and exploration of questions and points for possible collaborative research in mathematics education.

The goal of this planning grant is to explicitly focus on broadening participation in the K-12 STEM teaching workforce, with the theory of action that diversifying the K-12 STEM teaching workforce would in the long term help more students see STEM as accessible to them and then be more likely to choose a STEM degree or career.

Understanding Science provides an accurate portrayal of the nature of science and tools for teaching associated concepts. This project has at its heart a public re-engagement with science that begins with teacher preparation. To this end, its immediate goals are (1) improve teacher understanding of the nature of the scientific enterprise and (2) provide resources and strategies that encourage and enable K-16 teachers to incorporate and reinforce the nature of science throughout their science teaching.