Projects

The project addresses the historic marginalization of women and minoritized racial/ethnic (MRE) groups in physics. The aim of the project is to co-design, test, and disseminate professional learning for high school physics teachers, specifically targeting the implementation of inclusive and equitable practices that support physics identity development and persistence of women and MRE groups.

This RAPID project responds to the Buffalo blizzard of 2022 (Buffalo, NY) by developing, with and for the community, a science education curriculum framework focused on disaster justice and resilience. This project will document the science education human and social impact of the blizzard by capturing the experiences, reflections, and needs of science teachers, Black and Brown community leaders, and families who were directly affected.

Online STEM credit courses have become attractive to school leaders as a way to support students who fail STEM courses in face-to-face school year settings. However, there is little research about the processes involved in how schools make decisions regarding student credit recovery. The available research focuses solely on student results and is not definitive enough to support important policy decisions at the district level. This research brings redress to this policy dilemma.

The project addresses the historic marginalization of women and minoritized racial/ethnic (MRE) groups in physics. The aim of the project is to co-design, test, and disseminate professional learning for high school physics teachers, specifically targeting the implementation of inclusive and equitable practices that support physics identity development and persistence of women and MRE groups.

This exploratory study aims to design, implement, and test climate science and history professional learning materials and experiences for high school teachers. By leveraging existing science and history/social science materials, the program will develop curricular planning tools and lessons to help teachers integrate climate literacy into their instructional units. The goal is to provide students with the knowledge to understand and respond to the social and environmental issues associated with the climate crisis.

This research synthesis study reviews the effects of professional learning interventions and will advance STEM educators' understanding of the critically important relationships among teacher professional learning (PL), teacher knowledge and practice, and average student effects. Understanding these relationships will allow the field to design better PL experiences for teachers that truly benefit student learning.

There is a need for resources for teacher education programs to help pre-service teachers learn about equitable mathematics approaches to teaching and learning. This project will develop modules, resources, and tools for exploring how teachers' understanding of equity changes from their last year of the preparation program into their first year of teaching. The tools and resources can be shared with other teacher education programs.

There is a need for resources for teacher education programs to help pre-service teachers learn about equitable mathematics approaches to teaching and learning. This project will develop modules, resources, and tools for exploring how teachers' understanding of equity changes from their last year of the preparation program into their first year of teaching. The tools and resources can be shared with other teacher education programs.

There is a need for resources for teacher education programs to help pre-service teachers learn about equitable mathematics approaches to teaching and learning. This project will develop modules, resources, and tools for exploring how teachers' understanding of equity changes from their last year of the preparation program into their first year of teaching. The tools and resources can be shared with other teacher education programs.

There have been prominent and widespread calls for high school science students to work with data in more complex ways that better align with and support the work of professional scientists and engineers. However, high school students' analysis and interpretation of scientific data is often limited in scope, complexity, and authentic purpose. This project aims to support and advance students' work with ecological data in high school biology classrooms by embracing a new approach: Bayesian data analysis methods. Such methods involve expressing initial ideas or beliefs and updating them quantitatively with data that students access or record. This project will empower 20 high school teachers and their approximately 1,200 students to make sense of data within and beyond classroom contexts. It also will involve sharing research findings, an educational technology tool for Bayesian data analysis, and curricular resources in open and accessible ways.

A long-standing challenge for education and learning sciences is sharing the distinct knowledge bases of researchers and teachers with each other. The goal of this project is to support teachers, STEM coaches, and researchers in sharing that knowledge so that they can learn from one another.

In this project, researchers will develop and investigate a novel professional development model to support mathematics teachers’ learning of responsive pedagogies for linguistically marginalized students. Working with secondary mathematics teachers in diverse settings in North Carolina, the project team will develop a series of workshops on linguistically responsive pedagogies tailored to participants’ challenges and school contexts. In addition to these workshops, as teachers enact linguistically responsive pedagogies in their classrooms, the research team will support their learning with video-coaching.

Geometry instruction offers unique opportunities for students to apply design thinking to authentic problems. This project supports teachers in designing and implementing lessons using a human-centered design (HCD) approach. Geometry teachers will participate in lesson study for two years to plan problem-based geometry lessons and to observe student thinking during those lessons. The project investigates how teachers learn about and apply a human-centered framework for teaching geometry.

The goal of this project is to study how secondary students come to understand better an underlying logic of natural sciences—the relation between construction of new ideas and critique of them. Science education has traditionally focused mostly on how students construct models of natural phenomena. However, critique is crucial for iterative refinement of models because in professional science, peer critique of explanatory models motivates and guides progress toward better understanding. This project engages students in this process and helps them understand the relation of critique to better explanations, by focusing students on the criteria by which critique and understanding develop together through classroom discussions.

A long-standing challenge for education and learning sciences is sharing the distinct knowledge bases of researchers and teachers with each other. The goal of this project is to support teachers, STEM coaches, and researchers in sharing that knowledge so that they can learn from one another.

This project brings together education researchers, high school science teachers, research scientists, and community-based organizations as co-design teams to modify science curriculum materials to be justice- and community-oriented. Building on existing partnerships between education researchers and 11 science teachers in two districts in Illinois, project teams will engage in cycles of curriculum analysis and adaptation over the course of 3 years. These professional learning cycles will develop pedagogically relevant content expertise, such as deepened understanding of locally relevant science phenomena, as well as infrastructure for community-engaged science instruction.

The goal of this project is to study how secondary students come to understand better an underlying logic of natural sciences—the relation between construction of new ideas and critique of them. Science education has traditionally focused mostly on how students construct models of natural phenomena. However, critique is crucial for iterative refinement of models because in professional science, peer critique of explanatory models motivates and guides progress toward better understanding. This project engages students in this process and helps them understand the relation of critique to better explanations, by focusing students on the criteria by which critique and understanding develop together through classroom discussions.

Promoting equity-focused mathematics education requires models that will prepare and support mathematics pre-service teachers (PSTs) who will question existing norms and advocate for all their students. This project will develop a model of support for middle and high school mathematics PSTs to support them in becoming critical mathematics teachers (CMTs), teachers who address the needs of diverse students, are mindful of achievement disparities, and aware of their own biases. The main objective of the project is to develop a cohesive system of support for middle and high school PSTs to become CMTs.

Videos of teaching have become a popular tool for facilitating teacher learning, with the potential to powerfully impact teacher practice. However, less is known about specific mechanisms through which teachers learn from video. The goal of this study is to build foundational knowledge about teacher learning by using video clips of science instruction within a professional development (PD) context. 

This comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis synthesizes evidence surrounding math and science remote education programs from the past 15 years. The goal is to understand the effectiveness of math and science remote education programs; how their effectiveness varies by program characteristics (e.g., fully online vs. hybrid, synchronous vs. asynchronous, and student-instructor ratio); and whether their effects vary with student sample characteristics.

This project addresses tools to support students in reading and evaluating a variety of sources to compare various claims addressing socioscientific issues. It draws on literacy concepts from science education and social studies to develop and implement scaffolding tools that can support students' understanding of the links among data, evidence, and claims while considering the trustworthiness and plausibility of sources. The project will design and test such instructional scaffolds with the goal of helping middle and high school science and social studies students to deepen their evaluation skills as they make reasoned evaluations as expected of citizens in a functional democratic society.

This three-year early-stage design and development project will support a new teacher professional development and support model that builds the agency of 30 Miami-Dade County public high school science teachers to design, implement, and refine engineering instruction for their Latinx and Black students by partnering of high school teachers with Latinx and Black undergraduate engineering students in collaborative teams to co-design and implement inclusive, standards-aligned formal and informal engineering experiences. This work will generate new ways to support teachers’ roles as change agents in enacting engineering pedagogies centering those who have been historically excluded.

In this project, the research team will create a computer-mediated design environment that enables students in grades 7-10 to collaboratively explore, make connections, generate, and evaluate design ideas that address environmental science challenges. A unique feature of the project is its use of an artificial intelligent (AI) design mentor that relies on Design Heuristics, a research-based creativity tool that guides students through exploration of ideas and “learns” from students’ design processes to better assist them. The project will examine students’ perceptions of science and engineering, their ability to integrate academic and personal or community knowledge, their confidence for engaging in engineering, and their design thinking.

EarthX is a design-based research project that supports the integration of Earth science into high school biology, chemistry, and physics courses in Baltimore City Public Schools, while also supporting the district’s transition to three-dimensional (3D), ambitious and equitable science teaching aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). EarthX builds on the success of the Integrating Chemistry and Earth Science (ICE) DRK-12 project, which developed innovative chemistry course curriculum materials and PD strategies, to support Earth science integration into biology and physics course curriculum development and 3D teaching. EarthX will develop, test, and refine embedded and unit assessments for all three courses, along with providing an online system for assessment administration; real-time reporting to teachers and students; and provision of data to PD leaders, administrators, and researchers for multiple purposes. Assessments will be 3D, featuring core concepts from both Earth science and the course discipline combined with a science or engineering practice and a crosscutting concept.

Three-dimensional figures can now be represented as diagrams that appear to extend into space in ways that are free of material or physical constraints. They can be rendered at any size, in any orientation, and at any position in space, and can thereby realize a far more varied set of mathematical concepts than what is possible with physical models. The goal of this project is to investigate the transformative educational potential of these representations and to generate a knowledge base that teachers, teacher educators, and researchers can use to reimagine the learning and teaching of geometry.