Projects

This project will provide a field-based science and mathematics teacher education program that supports teaching focused on students’ affective development through culturally responsive practices. The project's teacher education program takes place over a two-year period and models how culturally responsive and affective instruction can occur in the STEM classroom to engage students.

Science and engineering teaching and curriculum have begun to engage learners’ knowledge of themselves, their communities, and their experiences of science and engineering. This knowledge can make the experience of learning science and engineering more meaningful and impactful as learners can see greater connections between the content and how their own experiences and communities. However, assessment approaches for documenting and presenting what learners’ know have typically not been able to sufficiently represent the new approaches to teaching and learning. This conference brings together researchers, school leaders, and teachers to develop frameworks and resources for making culturally sustaining approaches to teaching and learning science and engineering.

Through integration of research and education, this project is providing high resolution data on the spatial distribution of the thermal state of permafrost in Alaska, improving the general knowledge of Earth's climatic patterns, bringing science to remote Alaskan villages, and providing an opportunity for younger generations to take part in understanding Earth's climatic and hydrologic systems.

This project is developing a series of print and web resource guides in science and mathematics based on curriculum topic study (CTS), an approach developed and tested successfully. CTS is used to provide a systematic way of intellectually engaging K-12 mathematics and science teachers with national standards and cognitive research. It is used to engage teachers in thought and discussion about both content and appropriate ways of teaching that content.

This project is demonstrating the use of cyber-enabled technologies to build and share adaptable interventions for pre- and in-service teacher growth that effectively make use of major video collections and have high promise of success at multiple sites. The cyber infrastructure being significantly extended through this project is supporting development and documentation of additional interventions for teacher professional development using this video collection, as well as other videos that might be added in the future.

This project will design and develop a new K-12 classroom observation protocol for integrated STEM instruction (STEM-OP). The STEM-OP will inform the instruction of integrated STEM in many contexts with the goal of improving integrated STEM education.

This project will design and develop a new K-12 classroom observation protocol for integrated STEM instruction (STEM-OP). The STEM-OP will inform the instruction of integrated STEM in many contexts with the goal of improving integrated STEM education.

This project will design and develop a new K-12 classroom observation protocol for integrated STEM instruction (STEM-OP). The STEM-OP will inform the instruction of integrated STEM in many contexts with the goal of improving integrated STEM education.

Elementary school students' prolonged experiences with positive numbers and operations often lead to their overgeneralizations of rules (e.g., adding always makes larger numbers, subtracting always makes smaller numbers). These overgeneralizations can make learning algebra more difficult later, particularly when students must simultaneously learn algebra, negative numbers, and operations with negative numbers. The purpose of this project is to design and develop educational games centered on negative number concepts that target students before they learn algebra in middle school. Earlier exposure to and learning about negative numbers could increase students' motivation, understanding of connections between positive and negative numbers, and preparation for algebra.

Elementary school students' prolonged experiences with positive numbers and operations often lead to their overgeneralizations of rules (e.g., adding always makes larger numbers, subtracting always makes smaller numbers). These overgeneralizations can make learning algebra more difficult later, particularly when students must simultaneously learn algebra, negative numbers, and operations with negative numbers. The purpose of this project is to design and develop educational games centered on negative number concepts that target students before they learn algebra in middle school. Earlier exposure to and learning about negative numbers could increase students' motivation, understanding of connections between positive and negative numbers, and preparation for algebra.

Elementary school students' prolonged experiences with positive numbers and operations often lead to their overgeneralizations of rules (e.g., adding always makes larger numbers, subtracting always makes smaller numbers). These overgeneralizations can make learning algebra more difficult later, particularly when students must simultaneously learn algebra, negative numbers, and operations with negative numbers. The purpose of this project is to design and develop educational games centered on negative number concepts that target students before they learn algebra in middle school. Earlier exposure to and learning about negative numbers could increase students' motivation, understanding of connections between positive and negative numbers, and preparation for algebra.

This project will address the potential positive and negative impacts of using 360-degree video for bridging the gap between theory and practice in mathematics instruction by investigating how preservice teachers' tacit and explicit professional knowledge are facilitated using immersive video technology and annotations.

This project explores how classroom conversations can engage children in making sense of the problems that they are addressing and foregrounding ethics while making design decisions. To provide children with opportunities to engage in rich classroom conversations, the project team uses a community-based engineering curricular approach, where students address problems that affect their local school communities.

This project explores how classroom conversations can engage children in making sense of the problems that they are addressing and foregrounding ethics while making design decisions. To provide children with opportunities to engage in rich classroom conversations, the project team uses a community-based engineering curricular approach, where students address problems that affect their local school communities.

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 will create a portable training system that can be easily deployed in middle grades (5th-7th grade) as a prototype for increasing students' spatial reasoning skills. The project will study gender differences in spatial reasoning and examine how learning experiences can be designed to develop spatial skills using Minecraft as a platform.

This project is developing a model for integrating best practices in technology-supported instructional design and formative assessment for genetics instruction in upper elementary, middle and high school. Using the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment platform, the project is developing school curriculum that scaffold and model scientific practices, enable students to interface with real-world problems, provide opportunities for students to make connections between visible phenomena and underlying genetic processes, and promote student monitoring and reflection on learning.

This project will study a model of pre-service teacher preparation that is designed to to increase teachers' and students' skills and confidence with computational thinking and develop teachers as designers of inclusive learning environments to promote computational thinking. The project will engage elementary (grades K-5) pre-service teachers (who are concurrently involved in school-based teacher preparation programs) as facilitators in an existing family technology program called Family Creative Learning (FCL).

This project responds to these priorities by developing and testing a place-based environmental science research and monitoring program for elementary school students and their teachers.

This project responds to these priorities by developing and testing a place-based environmental science research and monitoring program for elementary school students and their teachers.

This project is developing professional resources to help elementary teachers strengthen their students' writing skills, particularly writing in science notebooks. The proposed resources would include print and multi-media formats for teachers and handbooks for their professional development providers.

Throughout the United States, elementary classrooms include students with a range of communicative practices and strengths, including strengths in speaking one or more languages, and strengths in generating and understanding different types of representations. Although an emerging body of research has begun to explore how individual teachers can productively leverage these communicative strengths toward enhanced science learning and further develop language through science, there is currently little research on how larger-scale district infrastructures can be designed to support science learning that leverages and supports language development. This project will address this critical gap by developing a process through which school districts can design comprehensive infrastructures that leverage a broad range of linguistic and communicative practices for enhanced science learning among elementary students.

The goal of this project is to develop a classroom observation tool and an online professional development model to help early-elementary teachers improve science instruction among young learners by cultivating scientific discourse.

This project will study five elementary STEM schools from across the U.S. that are inclusive of students from underrepresented groups in order to determine what defines these schools and will use an iterative case study replication design to study the design and implementation of five exemplary eSTEM schools with the goal of developing a logic model that highlights the commonalities in core components and target outcomes across the schools, despite the different school contexts.

This project is developing and testing a curricular learning progression of early algebra objectives and activities for students in grades 3 - 5. The goal of the work is to provide teachers with curricular guidance and instructional resources that are useful in preparing students for success in study of algebra at the middle grade level. The project is also developing and validating assessment tools for evaluating student progress toward essential pre-algebra mathematical understandings.