Projects

This study seeks to further understanding of the STEM learning environment by 1) examining the extent to which mathematics and science achievement varies across students, teachers, schools, and districts, and 2) examining the extent to which student, teacher, school, and district characteristics that are found in state administrative databases can be used to explain this variation at each level. This work will support advances in research and evaluation methodologies that will enable researchers to design more rigorous and comprehensive evaluations of STEM interventions and improve the accuracy of statistical power calculations.

This conference will shed light on how mathematics and science teacher educators are currently using lesson study to prepare pre-service teachers. The project will improve teacher educators' understanding of how lesson study can be optimized to teach pre-service teachers which will help bring this technique to the future teachers in their programs.

This project aims to develop the knowledge to teach reasoning and proving with secondary teacher candidates, and to follow them into they first years of independent practice to better understand how they are using that knowledge.  The goals of the project are to better understand how beginning teachers' knowledge, dispositions, and proof-related practices evolve over time, and how the sociocultural context and support structures of the schools teachers are in influences their teaching of reasoning and proving.

This project characterizes and analyses the developing mathematical identities of Latinx students transitioning from elementary to middle grades mathematics. The central hypothesis of this project is that elementary Latino students' stories can identify how race and language are influential to their mathematical identities and how school and classroom practices may perpetuate inequities.

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.

This project will create a fully online video-based model for mathematics teacher professional development focused on supporting mathematics coaches in rural contexts, building on the investigators' previous work focused on online professional learning opportunities for mathematics teachers in rural contexts. Results from the previous project focused on rural teachers and their coaches show that the professional development model increased connections between what teachers notice about student thinking and broader principles of teaching and learning, that teachers were able to enact stronger levels of ambitious mathematics instruction, and that teachers who received coaching showed a stronger focus on math content and instructional practice. This extension of the model to coaches includes an online content-focused coaching course, cycles of one-on-one video-based coaching, and an online video club to analyze coaching practice. The video clubs will be structured as a graduated model that will begin with facilitation by mentor coaches and move into coach participants facilitating their own sessions.

This project will develop a set of educative resources, assessment tools and teacher professional development (PD) activities to support teachers in developing knowledge of CS standards and improving their instructional pedagogy. Teachers will learn to use formative assessments related to these standards to determine student understanding. Improved CS instruction that is responsive to the needs and challenges of the student population is particularly critical in school districts with a large population of students who are typically underserved and under-represented in computer science. The project, a partnership between SRI International and the Milwaukee Public School District, will provide professional development experiences tied to standards instead of a specific curriculum in order to support diverse teachers teaching a variety of computer science curricula using different programming languages. Teachers will receive training via a combination of virtual webinars and face-to-face instruction. Teachers will have opportunities to evaluate their own teaching and measure their students' progress towards the standards.

This project will create a fully online video-based model for mathematics teacher professional development focused on supporting mathematics coaches in rural contexts, building on the investigators' previous work focused on online professional learning opportunities for mathematics teachers in rural contexts. Results from the previous project focused on rural teachers and their coaches show that the professional development model increased connections between what teachers notice about student thinking and broader principles of teaching and learning, that teachers were able to enact stronger levels of ambitious mathematics instruction, and that teachers who received coaching showed a stronger focus on math content and instructional practice. This extension of the model to coaches includes an online content-focused coaching course, cycles of one-on-one video-based coaching, and an online video club to analyze coaching practice. The video clubs will be structured as a graduated model that will begin with facilitation by mentor coaches and move into coach participants facilitating their own sessions.

This project will support a national research study on how teachers are helping students respond to COVID-19. The findings will inform the development of curriculum materials for teaching about COVID-19 and help science teachers to adapt their instruction as they help to fulfill a critical public health function. This study will enable a better understanding of the role that science teachers can play in a national response, both now and in future crises.

This project will design opportunities for mathematics and science teachers to coordinate their instruction to support a more coherent approach to teaching statistical model-based inference in middle school. It will prepare teachers to help more students develop a deeper understanding of ideas and practices related to measurement, data, variability, and inference and to use these tools to generate knowledge about the natural world.

This project will develop a research-practice partnership to plan and pilot a linguistically and culturally relevant computer science curriculum in middle school with the goal of broadening the participation of emergent bilingual (or English learner) students and Latino/a students in computer science education.

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 conference will attract thought leaders, policy makers, supervisors of practice and scholars of measurement science to be informed of emerging thought and developments and to discuss selected models for the implementation of new ways of generating and utilizing data from education tests.

This project will develop, evaluate, and compare the effectiveness of newly-designed online learning platform with traditional face-to-face PD in supporting rural high school science teachers' implementation of an existing biology curriculum aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

This project will use an alternative model for online videos to develop video units that feature the unscripted dialogue of pairs of students. The project team will create a repository of 6 dialogic mathematics video units that target important Algebra 1 and 2 topics for high school and upper middle school students, though the approach can be applied to any STEM topic, for any age level.

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 proposes to study the teaching and learning of algebra in grades 7-9, with a specific focus on the ways in which classroom language explicitly describes properties of and relationships among algebraic objects. The project seeks to investigate the bi-directional relationship between reasoning-rich algebraic discourse and the mathematical meanings students hold for core algebraic concepts such as equations, the equation-solving process, and functions.

This project will explore how a nationally implemented professional development model is applied in two distinct Indigenous communities, the impact the model has on teacher practice in Native-serving classrooms, and the model's capacity to promote the integration of culturally responsive approaches to STEM teaching.

This project will support the participation of 53 US K-12 mathematics teachers, graduate students, community college/university mathematicians, mathematics teacher educators, and mathematics education researchers to attend the Fourteenth International Congress for Mathematical Education (ICME-14) in Shanghai, China.

The purpose of this project is to fully explore the mathematics education literature to synthesize what validity evidence is available for quantitative assessments in mathematics education.

This project will develop and test a professional development program designed for school district science coordinators by examining impacts of participating coordinators on science teachers and their students.

This project aims to support stronger student outcomes in the teaching and learning of geometry in the middle grades through engaging students in animated contrasting cases of worked examples. The project will design a series of animated geometry curricular materials on a digital platform that ask students to compare different approaches to solving the same geometry problem. The study will measure changes in students' procedural and conceptual knowledge of geometry after engaging with the materials and will explore the ways in which teachers implement the materials in their classrooms.

The project will develop and research a new Mixed Reality environment (MR), called GEM-STEP, that leverages play and embodiment as resources for integrating computational modeling into the modeling cycle as part of science instruction for elementary students.

This project will develop and test a two-year professional development model for secondary school science teacher leaders that will help them support their colleagues in implementing the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

This project will engage teams of students and teachers of grades 7-12 in four competitive Challenges to design innovative strategies for carbon mitigation in areas such as transportation, agriculture or energy use. The project expands the typical boundaries of schools by enabling teams of students in multiple locations to collaborate in model-based reasoning through online discussion forums, using social media, and crowdsourcing ideas to construct possible solutions to environmental challenges. Project research will examine the impacts of the project on student learning and engagement.