Teachers of mathematics engage in curricular reasoning as they design and interact with their students, choose curricular materials, and implement curriculum standards in the service of high-quality instruction. Currently, there is no shared measure of curricular reasoning of middle school teacher classroom decision making in mathematics. In this research project, the team develops and validates two measures of middle school teachers’ curricular reasoning in mathematics as practiced. The first measure looks at curriculum reasoning from the perspective of the teacher, the second measure attends to the perspectives of the mathematics education research community.
Projects
This project will design and research a professional development (PD) model in which elementary teachers experience integrated, place-based, culturally sustaining STEM curriculum focused on local watersheds and grounded in local Native American cultural values and knowledge. The teachers will then design and implement their own culturally relevant STEM unit, guided by the PD, which is situated within their local watershed and Indigenous community.
The focus of this project is the design of learning experiences in different high school science courses to help students gain experience in computational thinking. The project uses a partnership between two universities and school district to develop and refine the units as a collaboration between researchers, teachers, and school leaders. The goal is to help all students have opportunities to learn about computational thinking in multiple science courses.
The project will design and research the Cultural Connections Process Model (CCPM), a place-based, culturally sustaining STEM educational resources and model that will engage Alaska Native and other high school students in STEM. The project approach is strongly informed by Indigenous knowledge systems (i.e., knowledge embedded in the cultural traditions of regional, Indigenous or local communities) and incorporates relevant arctic scientific research.
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.
Teachers of mathematics engage in curricular reasoning as they design and interact with their students, choose curricular materials, and implement curriculum standards in the service of high-quality instruction. Currently, there is no shared measure of curricular reasoning of middle school teacher classroom decision making in mathematics. In this research project, the team develops and validates two measures of middle school teachers’ curricular reasoning in mathematics as practiced. The first measure looks at curriculum reasoning from the perspective of the teacher, the second measure attends to the perspectives of the mathematics education research community.
This project explores the effectiveness of two different versions of professional development (PD) designed to enhance middle school mathematics teachers’ understanding of fractions and proportions, and their teaching of these mathematical concepts to students. The PD uses an approach that engages teachers with web-based apps that allow them to test and experiment with their mathematical ideas. The apps, combined with guiding questions that challenge teachers’ thinking about fractions and proportions, serve both to promote critical thinking about the concepts and to further developing their understandings of the concepts. The researchers will use an innovative approach, topic modeling, to examine the effectiveness of each of version of the PD.
This project aims to deepen understanding of how to support and develop early childhood science learning by articulating science and engineering practices observed in children’s play. It also aims to develop early childhood educators’ abilities to identify and support nascent science and engineering practices with young children. Through this project early childhood educators will engage in professional learning using a refined version of the Science and Engineering Practices Observation Protocol (SciEPOP), an observation tool that allows researchers to identify and describe high-quality play-based engagement with science and engineering practices. Through video-rich professional learning along with peer-based coaching, early childhood educators will grow in their ability to prepare play environments, identify nascent science and engineering practices, enhance and extend investigations through play, and record and reflect upon this learning.
The project will develop a teacher professional learning (PL) model that focuses on middle-school biological sciences in addressing real world problems. Systems thinking is central to understanding biology systems. Game design has been shown to help develop systems thinking in teachers and students. Students will participate in PL to illustrate the value of distributed expertise by sharing their knowledge of computer. Teachers will adapt their existing curriculum and will co-design games with students to experience participatory practices.
The focus of this project is the design of learning experiences in different high school science courses to help students gain experience in computational thinking. The project uses a partnership between two universities and school district to develop and refine the units as a collaboration between researchers, teachers, and school leaders. The goal is to help all students have opportunities to learn about computational thinking in multiple science courses.
Teachers of mathematics engage in curricular reasoning as they design and interact with their students, choose curricular materials, and implement curriculum standards in the service of high-quality instruction. Currently, there is no shared measure of curricular reasoning of middle school teacher classroom decision making in mathematics. In this research project, the team develops and validates two measures of middle school teachers’ curricular reasoning in mathematics as practiced. The first measure looks at curriculum reasoning from the perspective of the teacher, the second measure attends to the perspectives of the mathematics education research community.
This project explores the effectiveness of two different versions of professional development (PD) designed to enhance middle school mathematics teachers’ understanding of fractions and proportions, and their teaching of these mathematical concepts to students. The PD uses an approach that engages teachers with web-based apps that allow them to test and experiment with their mathematical ideas. The apps, combined with guiding questions that challenge teachers’ thinking about fractions and proportions, serve both to promote critical thinking about the concepts and to further developing their understandings of the concepts. The researchers will use an innovative approach, topic modeling, to examine the effectiveness of each of version of the PD.
This project focuses on developing anti-racist mathematics teaching and learning practices that have led to inequitable school experiences for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students. This study is a partnership with school and central office leaders from one district and educational researchers from three universities with expertise in both educational leadership and mathematics education. Partnership activities include documenting how leaders learn and develop anti-racist leadership practices and then measuring the impact on teachers’ instruction and students’ experiences.
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.
The project is designing a web-based, district-led professional development implementation, focusing on improving mathematics discourse practices in K-2 classrooms, with particular attention to emergent multilingual learners. Building on two prior NSF-funded projects, the All Included in Mathematics K-2 New Extensions professional learning program will develop and research the impact of an augmented model for mathematics professional development on K-2 student learning through the addition of supports for coaches and leaders to the existing professional development model.
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 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 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.
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.
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 project supports the development of a collaborative digital learning environment that embeds rich middle school mathematics tasks. The project aims to understand how students' individual and collaborative engagement in learning mathematics is enhanced by the digital platform, and how student engagement and learning is affected over the course of a year-long seventh grade course.
To act on energy issues, students need a strong understanding of energy flow and energy efficiency. However, students rarely have opportunities to learn about how buildings, such as their own school, drive about 40% of energy use and global carbon emissions. Addressing this gap in science education, this project will design, pilot, and evaluate a 6-week middle school curriculum called Build it Green! (BIG!). Blending classroom experiences and interactive digital learning tools, the researchers will work with rural middle schools in Missouri to implement and test how following the story of energy flow in and out of a hypothetical school building enhances students’ understanding of energy systems in the science of green buildings.
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.
This project will develop and test a learning progression for middle school physical science that incorporates the three dimensions identified in Next Generation of Science Standards (NGSS): the Disciplinary Core Ideas of matter, interaction, and energy; the Science and Engineering Practices of constructing explanations and developing and using models; and the Crosscutting Concepts of cause and effect and systems and system models. Bringing together all three NGSS dimensions is an innovation that allows for the project to explore the variety of learning pathways that students may follow as they apply scientific knowledge and practices to make sense of compelling phenomena or solve complex problems.
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.