Projects

This project will develop and investigate mathematics language routines focused on data science topics in middle and high school. The study will investigate teachers’ use of mathematics language routines and a professional development model to support teachers’ learning. The educational integration plan in the project will build mathematics teacher expertise and create video cases to support teacher professional development.

This project supports school-based science teachers and students in conducting community-based science research on the causes and effects of extreme heat/urban islands in racially and ethnically diverse communities. Teachers will participate in professional learning experiences that support their development of content knowledge, scientific research practices, and critical pedagogies needed to design and implement research projects in their classroom. Students will identify locally-relevant issues related to this phenomenon, conduct investigations to explore the issue, share their findings through arts-based community narratives, and advocate for change. This project will broaden access to empowering youth-centered approaches that support learning and identity construction in science.

This project considers how teachers’ engagement in scientific sensemaking as an opportunity for teachers’ learning to support more expansive science learning environments. It seeks to address two ongoing challenges in science teacher education: the need for teachers to learn (1) to recognize, value, and integrate students’ diverse ways of knowing, communicating, and relating with one another and phenomena and (2) to acknowledge and disrupt restrictive narratives that shape what counts as science in schools and who is seen as a scientist. This project will provide new models for science teacher education to engage teachers in expansive scientific sensemaking, seeking to develop more humanizing relationships between teachers, students, and science. More broadly, the project will produce a new structure for professional learning and resources for supporting more heterogeneous and equitable forms of science in teacher education. 

This project integrates educational and research activities with the ultimate goal of improving the mathematics education of students in high poverty, urban high schools. The project focuses on developing secondary mathematics teachers‘ capacity for implementing culturally relevant mathematics pedagogy (CuReMaP). CuReMaP consists of teaching mathematics for understanding; centering mathematics instruction on students; and providing opportunities for students to develop critical consciousness about and with mathematics.

Doing science requires that students learn to create evidence-based arguments (EBAs), defined as claims connected to supporting evidence via premises. In this CAREER project, I investigate how argumentation ability can be enhanced among middle school students. The project entails theoretical work, instructional design, and empirical work, and involves 3 middle schools in northern Utah and southern Idaho.

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 development of six curricular projects that integrate mathematics based on the Common Core Mathematics Standards with science concepts from the Next Generation Science Standards combined with an engineering design pedagogy is the focus of this CAREER project.

This project will develop an intervention to support the teaching and learning of proof in the context of geometry. This study takes as its premise that if we introduce proof, by first teaching students particular sub-goals of proof, such as how to draw a conclusion from a given statement and a definition, then students will be more successful with constructing proofs on their own.

This project focuses on fostering equitable and inclusive STEM contexts with attention to documenting and reducing adolescents' experiences of harassment, bias, prejudice and stereotyping. This research will contribute to understanding of the current STEM educational climates in high schools and will help to identify factors that promote resilience in the STEM contexts, documenting how K-12 educators can structure their classrooms and schools to foster success of all students in STEM classes.

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.

This project team partners with the mathematics department of one urban public charter high school that serves 65% students of color (most of whom identify as African American). At the school, 70% of all students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and 25% of the students have Individualized Education Plans. This project investigates: 1) how mathematics teachers learn to teach the mathematics content through investigation of relevant social issues, 2) how teachers negotiate classroom dilemmas related to this approach, and 3) how students feel about mathematics and their ability to enact change toward an equitable society.

This project will develop and study a professional development framework that is designed to help high school geometry teachers attend more carefully to student prior knowledge, interpret the learning implications of student prior knowledge, and adjust teaching practices accordingly. Participating teachers will participate in study groups that analyze animations of productive teaching practices; they will collaborate in planning, implementing, and analyzing geometry lessons; and they will critique videos of their own classroom instruction.

This project investigates the outcomes of a teacher education model designed to foster prospective mathematics teachers' abilities to notice and capitalize on important mathematical moments in instruction. The project engages prospective teachers in research-like analysis of unedited teacher-perspective classroom video early in their teacher education coursework in order to help them learn to identify, assess the mathematical potential of, and respond to important student ideas and insights that arise during instruction.

This project will develop a comprehensive framework to inform and guide the analytic design of teacher professional development studies in mathematics. An essential goal of the research is to advance a science of teaching and learning in ways that traverse both research and education.

Research has shown that engaging students, including students from underrepresented groups, in appropriately structured reasoning activities, including argumentation, may lead to enhanced learning. This project will provide information about how teachers learn to support collective argumentation and will allow for the development of professional development materials for prospective and practicing teachers that will enhance their support for productive collective argumentation.

This project will develop a professional development model that allows rural secondary teachers to learn and develop computational thinking related teaching skills with long-term support and scaffolds in place to both build their knowledge and the long-term capacity of their school districts.

The project will examine how teachers reason about variation subsequent to focused instruction and contribute knowledge to in-service middle and secondary mathematics teacher education by targeting characteristics of professional development that might support teachers' reasoning about variation in increasingly sophisticated ways. The project will produce a coherent collection of shareable instructional materials for use in introductory statistics education and teacher education in statistics.

This project explores "backward transfer", or the ways in which new learning impacts previously-established ways of reasoning. The PI will observe and evaluate algebra I students as they learn quadratic functions and examine how different kinds of instruction about the new concept of quadratic functions helps or hinders students' prior mathematical knowledge of the previous concept of linear functions. This award will contribute to the field of mathematics education by expanding the application of knowledge transfer, moving it from only a forward focused direction to include, also, a backward focused direction.

This project will support teacher capacity for implementing mathematical modeling lessons by engaging teachers in co-planning and co-teaching with researchers skilled in Emergent Bilingual (EB) mathematics instruction. The outcomes of this project will be a framework for teaching mathematical modeling to EB students, teacher professional development materials that can be used widely to support EB mathematics teachers, and a massive open online course (MOOC) for teachers to support their continued learning about teaching mathematics modeling to EB students.

This project advances the understanding of teaching and learning of algebra in grades 6 through 12 by using a methodology that leverages the cumulative power of an analysis of many studies on a topic. This work will synthesize results aggregated from 40 years of research in the field of mathematics education and develop a unified framework to inform parents, students, teachers, other educators, and researchers.

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 will address the need to educate teachers and students to engage in asking questions, collecting and interpreting data, making claims, and constructing explanations about real-world problems that matter to them. The study will explore ways to enhance youths' learning experiences in secondary school classrooms (grades 6-12) by building a sustainable partnership between researchers and practitioners.

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.

Students of color must have access to robust and meaningful opportunities to learn science in classrooms that center their assets and humanity. This project aims to cultivate such spaces through designing and studying teacher professional learning focused on pedagogical practices that engage students of color meaningfully in science learning. These practices leverage students’ assets to foster growth in science and scientific habits of mind. This project will support pre-service and practicing teachers in developing tools for practice and reflection that focus on equity and highlighting the assets of students of color in secondary science.