Projects

This project investigates how high school students' understanding about design thinking compares to that of experienced practitioners and whether participation in a multiyear sequence of courses focused on engineering correlates with changes in design thinking. The project builds upon the Standards for Technological Literacy and courses developed at the University of Colorado and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

This study aims to understand parents' perspectives on the educational impacts of COVID-19 by leveraging a nationally representative, longitudinal study, the Understanding America Study (UAS). The study will track educational experiences during the summer of 2020 and into the 2020-21 school year and analyze outcomes overall and for key demographic groups of interest.

This project is assessing the potential value and feasibility of developing and implementing content standards for K-12 engineering education. The project is reviewing existing efforts to define what students should know; identifying elements of existing standards for related content areas that could link to engineering; considering how purposes for engineering education might affect content and implementation of standards; and suggesting changes to policies, programs, and practices necessary to develop and implement engineering standards.

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.

This study can provide a basis for design research focused on developing effective materials and programs for flipped instruction in secondary mathematics, which is already occurring at an increasing rate, but it is not yet informed by empirical evidence. This project will result in a framework for flipped instruction robust enough to be useful at a variety of grade levels and contexts. The framework will provide a better understanding of the relationships among various implementations of flipped instruction and student learning.

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.

We are analyzing the intended algebra curriculum as represented in a variety of high-school mathematics textbooks – Core Plus Mathematics Project (CPMP), Discovering Mathematics (Key Curriculum Press), EDC's Center for Mathematics Education, Glencoe, Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP), and University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP). The textbook analysis is based on two dimensions frequently used for curriculum analysis: a content dimension and a cognitive dimension.

This project aims to elaborate a structure for practice-oriented, collaborative professional development that increases the capacities for collaborative learning by facilitating teacher-to-teacher interactions within and across cultural contexts. By convening international groups of teachers to design lessons and provide and respond to commentaries on their lesson designs, the project introduces possibilities for surfacing and disrupting common experiences, assumptions, and norms in US mathematics teaching.

This study examines the impact of the newly revised Advanced Placement (AP) Biology and Chemistry courses on students' understanding of and ability to utilize scientific inquiry, on students' confidence in engaging in college-level material, and on students’ enrollment and persistence in college STEM majors. The project provides estimates of the impact of students' AP-course taking on their progress into postsecondary educational experiences and their intent to continue to prepare to be future engineers and scientists.

This project collects evidence supporting the validity of test instruments and initial characterization of high school teachers' background and use of materials and pedagogies. The project is constructing and validating multiple forms of test instruments that can be used for the evaluation of interventions (e.g. professional development, implementation of new curricula) and the measurement of aspects of teacher knowledge (e.g. subject matter, knowledge of student misconceptions).

This project examines the effect of an assessment system that automatically generates feedback based on students’ open-ended assessment responses in chemistry and physics consistent with a previously-developed learning progression that describes the successively more complex understandings students can develop about electrical interactions. The scoring system will provide individualized feedback to students and class summaries to their teachers.

This project will engage in a community-wide effort to synthesize the literature from a broad range of fields and to use the findings to create frameworks that will guide the planning, implementation, and scale-up of efforts to improve geographic education over the next decade. This will result in a set of publicly reviewed, consensus reports that will guide collaborative efforts and broaden awareness of the acute need for geographic literacy and geographic science education.

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.

This exploratory proposal is researching and developing professional learning activities to help high school teachers use available and emerging social media to teach scientific argumentation. The project responds to the growing emphasis on scientific argumentation in new standards.

This conference focuses on the use of virtual/mixed reality simulation in the preparation of secondary science teachers. The conference convenes experts in simulation in teacher preparation, practicing high school teachers, and teacher candidates to engage in a design process related to mixed reality simulations. Conference attendees will identify important gaps in science teacher preparation and design prototype simulation environments for addressing those gaps.

This development and research project designs, develops, and tests a digital game-based learning environment for supporting, assessing and analyzing middle school students' conceptual knowledge in learning physics, specifically Newtonian mechanics. This research integrates work from prior findings to develop a new methodology to engage students in deep learning while diagnosing and scaffolding the learning of Newtonian mechanics.

This project investigates the educational value of computer technologies for learning engineering. The project engages high school students to design, build, and evaluate an energy-efficient model house with the aid of computer simulation and design tools. 

The ReaL Earth Inquiry project empowers teachers to employ real-world local and regional Earth system science in the classroom. Earth systems science teachers need the pedagogic background, the content, and the support that enables them to engage students in asking real questions about their own communities. The project is developing online "Teacher-Friendly Guides" (resources), professional development involving fieldwork, and inquiry-focused approaches using "virtual fieldwork experiences."  

This Engineering Teacher Pedagogy project implements and assesses the promise of an extended professional development model coupled with curriculum enactment to develop teacher pedagogical skills for integrating engineering design into high school biology and technology education classrooms. 

With increased focus on STEM education for students with extensive support needs ESN, engineering practices highlight the importance of problem-solving skills (e.g., systems thinking, creativity), and engineering lessons/units may provide a viable format for systematically planned math and science instruction that naturally embeds opportunities to teach students skills promoting increased self-regulated learning. Due to lack of prior experience teaching engineering, little is known about how teachers of students with ESN scaffold instruction to build their students’ engineering practices. Thus, this project focuses on teachers’ development of engineering practices, including how teachers support their students’ development of engineering-focused behaviors and mindsets through instruction.

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.

This project will develop, implement, test, and revise instructional approaches and materials for high school students that focus on the links between scientific evidence and alternative explanations of phenomena relating to Earth and space education. Students will learn to construct diagrams showing the links between explanatory models of natural phenomena and lines of evidence, and then evaluate the plausibility of various alternative explanations for events.

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.