Projects

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 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 develop a cloud-based platform that enables high school students, teachers, and scientists to conduct original neuroscience research in school classrooms.

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.

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 examine how partnerships among state science leaders, education researchers and education practitioners cultivate vertical coherence and equity in state science education.

This project will plan, implement, and evaluate the outcomes of an invitational conference on the role of equity in whole-school STEM education models, particularly Inclusive STEM Schools (ISS), at the high school level.

This project seeks to strengthen the teaching of statistics and data science in grades 6-12 through the design and implementation of an online professional learning environment for teachers. The professional learning environment aims to support in-service teachers in developing stronger content knowledge related to statistics, and knowledge of how to effectively teach statistics in their classrooms.

In this project, high school engineering teachers will spend five weeks in a research lab devoted to biologically-inspired design, as they partner with cutting-edge engineers and scientists to study animal features and behavior and their applications to engineering designs. After this lab experience, the high school teachers will receive three six- to ten-week curricular units, tailored for tenth- through twelfth-grade students, which teach biologically-inspired design in the context of problems that are relevant to youth.

This project will address STEM learning through classroom implementation at two project partner schools in North Carolina, one urban and the other rural, with culturally diverse student populations. The project offers high school students the opportunity to be immersed in science content through engaging in globally-relevant learner-centered activities.

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.

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 CAREER award aims to study the construct of "epistemic empathy" and examine how it can be cultivated in science and mathematics teacher education, how it functions to promote responsive teaching, and how it shapes learners' engagement in the classroom. In the context of this project, epistemic empathy is defined as the act of understanding and appreciating another's cognitive and emotional experience within an epistemic activity aimed at the construction, communication, and critique of knowledge.

This project will address the pressing national need to generate shared, practice-based knowledge about how to implement freely available, high-quality instructional resources (mathematics formative assessment lessons) that have been shown to produce significant gains in student learning outcomes. It will expand a professional development model (Analyzing Instruction in Mathematics using the Teaching for Robust Understanding Framework (AIM-TRU)) that supports teacher learning about effective lesson implementation.

This project will study the activities of a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) as a vehicle to bridge gaps across four identified steps along the science teacher training and development pathways within local contexts of 8 participating universities. The overarching goal of the project is to strengthen the capacity of universities and school districts to reliably produce teachers of science who are knowledgeable about and can effectively enact the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), although prepared in varied organizational contexts.

This project will research and develop instructional materials and conduct professional development for teachers to help students understand energy flow. The project will create a model for secondary science teacher professional development that integrates science concepts with equity education. This model promotes a key epistemological issue: that science concepts are not culture-free or socially neutral ideas, but rather are concepts created and sustained by people in specific times and places for the purposes of addressing specific social needs and empowering people or groups of people.

This project will address the pressing national need to generate shared, practice-based knowledge about how to implement freely available, high-quality instructional resources (mathematics formative assessment lessons) that have been shown to produce significant gains in student learning outcomes. It will expand a professional development model (Analyzing Instruction in Mathematics using the Teaching for Robust Understanding Framework (AIM-TRU)) that supports teacher learning about effective lesson implementation.

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 will research and develop instructional materials and conduct professional development for teachers to help students understand energy flow. The project will create a model for secondary science teacher professional development that integrates science concepts with equity education. This model promotes a key epistemological issue: that science concepts are not culture-free or socially neutral ideas, but rather are concepts created and sustained by people in specific times and places for the purposes of addressing specific social needs and empowering people or groups of people.

This project will address the pressing national need to generate shared, practice-based knowledge about how to implement freely available, high-quality instructional resources (mathematics formative assessment lessons) that have been shown to produce significant gains in student learning outcomes. It will expand a professional development model (Analyzing Instruction in Mathematics using the Teaching for Robust Understanding Framework (AIM-TRU)) that supports teacher learning about effective lesson implementation.

The purpose of this project is to gather, analyze, and synthesize mathematics and science education research studies published from 1988 to the present that have investigated different approaches to supporting students in grades 6-14 in learning to analyze, interpret, and reason about data.

This project will investigate how high school students can be supported in developing, organizing and using knowledge of atomic/molecular behavior to make sense of phenomena such as phase changes, atomic emmision spectra and dissolution. The project will study whether an innovative college level curriculum, "Chemistry, Life, the Universe and Everything" (CLUE) can be co-modified by teachers, chemists, and researchers to help students master these difficult concepts and connections.

This study seeks to describe trajectories that describe the ways in which Black learners develop as particular kinds of mathematical learners. The study takes place in the context of an established, multi-year college bridge program that has as its goals to increase the representation of historically marginalized groups in the university community.

This research investigates how state-of-the-art creative and pedagogical agents can improve students' learning, attitudes, and engagement with computer science. The project will be conducted in high school classrooms using EarSketch, an online computer science learning environments that engages learners in making music with JavaScript or Python code. The researchers will build the first co-creative learning companion, Cai, that will scaffold students with pedagogical strategies that include making use of learner code to illustrate abstraction and modularity, suggesting new code to scaffold new concepts, providing help and hints, and explaining its decisions.

This project will focus on an early stage exploratory study of an idea that will reveal ways to develop more effective interventions to address student retention in bioscience and bioengineering pipelines. The study will attempt to initiate a new line of research in search of factors associated with bioscience and bioengineering education as a novel approach for uncovering factors that may negatively influence student participation in these fields.