Teachers are extraordinarily important to student learning, but researchers have surprisingly little data about what teachers do moment-to-moment with students. What are the instructional moves and improvisational responses that characterize highly effective practice? To better understand and support U.S. K-12 STEM teachers, this Incubator project will develop a network of "tutor observatories." Tutor observatories are learning environments that record teacher engagements with students along with information about the context of the interaction. From these data, researchers will be able to gain a deeper understanding of STEM teacher practice, identify highly effective practices, and develop training data that can inform a new generation of artificially intelligent tools to support teachers and student learning.
Projects
Understanding of algebra concepts is necessary for students to gain access to STEM pathways. However, recent efforts in education have failed to improve algebra outcomes for many students, especially those with learning disabilities and persistent difficulties in mathematics. The primary goal of this project is to develop a supplemental intervention that intentionally develops students' concept of variable as they learn to (a) interpret and evaluate expressions, (b) represent real-life mathematical word problems using algebraic notation, and (c) solve linear equations. A focus on clarifying common misconceptions about variables will be interwoven throughout the program.
This project examines how Latine, bilingual teachers' dispositions to teach science and engineering to bilingual learners change as they enter the teaching profession. Specifically, it explores bilingual teachers' transition from a period of strong social support to one of scarce social support, i.e., from being Bilingual Teacher Candidates to Novice Bilingual Teachers (NBTs) as they plan and teach bilingual science and engineering lessons.
This project envisions a future of work where advanced technologies provide automated, job-embedded, individualized feedback to drive professional learning of the future worker. To achieve this goal, it addresses a fundamental question: Are evaluative or non-evaluative feedback systems more effective in driving professional learning? This question will be tested on professionals where objective, fine-grained feedback is especially critical to improvement--the teaching professions. This research will be situated within English and language arts (ELA) instruction in middle and high school classrooms, where underperformance and inequality in literacy outcomes are persistent problems facing the U.S. Current methods of supporting teacher learning through feedback are sparse, cumbersome, subjective, and evaluative. Thus, a major reconceptualization is needed to provide feedback mechanisms that- meaningfully affect teacher practice and are accessible to all. In partnership with TeachFX, an industry leader in technology-enabled instructional feedback, this project will work with teachers to design and test systems of automated feedback. Insights from the study will lead to feedback systems that empower teaching professionals, generate continued professional learning, and ultimately, increase student achievement.
This project envisions a future of work where advanced technologies provide automated, job-embedded, individualized feedback to drive professional learning of the future worker. To achieve this goal, it addresses a fundamental question: Are evaluative or non-evaluative feedback systems more effective in driving professional learning? This question will be tested on professionals where objective, fine-grained feedback is especially critical to improvement--the teaching professions. This research will be situated within English and language arts (ELA) instruction in middle and high school classrooms, where underperformance and inequality in literacy outcomes are persistent problems facing the U.S. Current methods of supporting teacher learning through feedback are sparse, cumbersome, subjective, and evaluative. Thus, a major reconceptualization is needed to provide feedback mechanisms that- meaningfully affect teacher practice and are accessible to all. In partnership with TeachFX, an industry leader in technology-enabled instructional feedback, this project will work with teachers to design and test systems of automated feedback. Insights from the study will lead to feedback systems that empower teaching professionals, generate continued professional learning, and ultimately, increase student achievement.
The goal of the project is to understand the current conditions, challenges, and resources that pertain to mathematics education in rural areas in the United States.
The goal of the project is to understand the current conditions, challenges, and resources that pertain to mathematics education in rural areas in the United States.
The goal of the project is to understand the current conditions, challenges, and resources that pertain to mathematics education in rural areas in the United States.
K-12 teachers are a critical resource for promoting equitable STEM achievement and attainment. Experimental research, however, rarely identifies specific, transferable STEM instructional practices, because STEM education research has typically implemented student-level randomization far more than it has implemented teacher-level randomization. A major barrier limiting scientific progress is the lack of a large-scale trialing infrastructure that can support teacher-level randomization and experimentation, given the logistical constraints of recruiting multiple sites and successfully randomizing at the teacher or classroom level. This Midscale Research Infrastructure Incubator will launch a two-year, accelerated process to address these challenges and develop a consensus plan for a STEM-teacher-focused trialing platform.
Science and engineering teaching and curriculum have begun to engage learners’ knowledge of themselves, their communities, and their experiences of science and engineering. This knowledge can make the experience of learning science and engineering more meaningful and impactful as learners can see greater connections between the content and how their own experiences and communities. However, assessment approaches for documenting and presenting what learners’ know have typically not been able to sufficiently represent the new approaches to teaching and learning. This conference brings together researchers, school leaders, and teachers to develop frameworks and resources for making culturally sustaining approaches to teaching and learning science and engineering.
Semiconductors are essential components of electronic devices, enabling advances in important applications and systems such as communication, healthcare, and national security. In order to sustain the U.S.'s global competitiveness in the semiconductor industry, there is a growing demand for a skilled semiconductor workforce. High schoolers are among the most frequent users of electronic devices. However, many do not know how these devices are designed and manufactured. To address the knowledge gaps and workforce needs equitably, this project will develop a semiconductor curriculum with high-school-aged students from diverse backgrounds, and with partners in higher education, K-12, and industries, enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) and other innovative technologies.
This project will contribute knowledge about cultivating and strengthening productive mathematical identities of early childhood and elementary students. The project has the potential to improve kindergarten to third grade mathematics education for students from historically and persistently marginalized groups by intentionally leveraging (and confirming) resources for productive mathematical identity development. Further, this project will also equip educators to design number talks building upon students’ funds of knowledge and to also support their efforts to positively develop students’ mathematical identities.
This project partners with a mathematics department at a public middle school to co-design, analyze, and improve teachers’ translanguaging pedagogies, that is pedagogies that draw on students’ full linguistic repertoires as resources for their learning. This project will investigate how teachers make sense of and enact translanguaging pedagogies, how translanguaging pedagogies shape students’ mathematical experiences and learning opportunities, and how teachers’ learning of translanguaging spaces can be supported.
This project examines student and teacher experiences with the de-tracking of math sequences in a public school district in Western Oregon. It examines how a district-wide cohort of middle school students, as individuals and in groups, identify with and define what it means to be good at math, and how these identities shift over time as they progress through math sequences. It also establishes a partnership between a mathematics education researcher and a school district (Research Practice Partnership) to study changes in pedagogy, define problems of teaching practice, and design solutions as the district transitions to de-tracked classes.
While more accessible online learning opportunities that reflect everyday teaching challenges are becoming more available, most of these more flexible professional development experiences are being offered by colleges and universities to teachers who are not yet in the classroom. This situation provides an opportunity to explore how innovations in teacher professional development can be woven into school districts’ regular professional development work with its teachers. This partnership development project will create a shared vision and plan for making digitally-based teaching tasks available to elementary math and science teachers so they can learn at any time and from anywhere.
Environmental issues like wildfires can serve as effective science learning contexts to promote scientific literacy and citizenship. This project will partner with teachers, teacher educators, and disciplinary experts in data science, fire ecology, public health, and environmental communication to co-design a data-driven, justice-oriented, and issue-based unit on wildfires. In the unit, student will engage in various data practices to gain insights into the issue of wildfires and how it affects their lives and communities. The project seeks to theorize how learners can leverage disciplinary knowledge and practices in environmental and data science as a foundation for making data-informed actions towards a more just and sustainable society.
Anxiety about math has increased for some students due to disruptions in their learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. This partnership development project involving Portland State University and the Tigard-Tualatin School District addresses pandemic-related learning challenges in middle school mathematics, with a focus on math anxiety. Across the yearlong project, the partners play equal roles in co-developing research, practice, and policy proposals aimed at enhancing math outcomes and reducing math anxiety among the district’s middle school students.
This project will improve STEM education by studying the various strategies taught to and used by students for solving multi-digit multiplication and division to develop a more cohesive understanding of children's multiplicative reasoning. The work will also support teachers’ ability to better support students’ multiplicative reasoning strategies via professional development videos that help them learn about students’ strategies.
Although there is a push to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) in K-12 education, the novelty of AI means that little is known about what schools, teachers, students, and parents know, need, and expect regarding AI in classrooms. The lack of access to AI knowledge and training is especially significant in rural high-needs communities where schools are under-resourced. This year-long partnership development project will seek to strengthen and expand existing research-practice partnerships (RPPs) with East Tennessee teachers and school leaders, develop new RPPs with parents and students enrolled in East Tennessee middle and high schools, and co-construct a shared vision for AI that aligns with the needs and assets of the partner community.
Tutoring programs that are jointly supported by schools and universities can offer benefits to both parties. The programs, however, are only helpful to the extent they respond to the needs and interests of the students and schools they serve. This project will establish a partnership between a large, urban university and a small, rural high school to collaboratively create a tutoring program to support the mathematics learning of students with learning disabilities.
Partnership development between universities and school districts requires an understanding that each organization has a distinct institutional point of view that must be considered in defining and shaping collaborative work. The goals and objectives of each organization may not always align, and at times may compete or conflict with each other. With the understanding that successful partnerships are those where practitioners and researchers achieve high levels of trust, commitment, transparency, interdependence, and mutual benefit, this project centers on building a partnership between a university that serves a largely Hispanic student population and a rural school district that also serves a community that has long been underrepresented in STEM education and career opportunities. The partners will jointly focus on how to respond to three negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic: 1) limited access to quality learning opportunities, 2) increased student learning gaps in STEM subjects, and 3) a local teacher shortage.
Providing students with exposure to high quality computational thinking (CT) activities within science classes has the possibility to create transformative educational experiences that will prepare students to harness the power of CT for authentic problems. By building upon foundational research in human-AI partnership for classroom support and effective practices for integrating CT in science, this collaborative research project will advance understanding of how to empower teachers to lead computationally enriched science activities with adaptive pedagogical tools.
Across the nation, many school districts are experiencing rapid expansion in the enrollment of multilingual learners, yet many high school teachers do not have corresponding opportunities to learn how to effectively support these students’ engagement in scientific and engineering practices. This exploratory project will address this issue by developing and testing a model of professional learning for high school teachers in which they learn how to embed the Instructional Conversation pedagogy within standards-aligned scientific and engineering practices. Under this model, high school science teachers will collaborate with high school English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers to co-develop linguistically sustaining instructional materials that provide students with intentionally scaffolded opportunities to use scientific dialogue as they collaborate to explain natural phenomena or design solutions through engineering.
National frameworks for science education in the United States advocate for bringing science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and computer science (STEM+CS) disciplines together in K-12 classrooms. Although curricular materials are emerging to support STEM+CS integration, research demonstrates that teachers need support to engage students in authentic STEM+CS practices that leverage and sustain student and community assets. This project aims to support middle school teachers in their enactment of an integrated science, engineering, and computational modeling curriculum unit and understand how teachers customize computationally rich, Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-aligned curricular materials to their own schools and classrooms.
Research has shown that the emotions elementary school teachers and their students experience when engaging in mathematics activities play an important role in mathematics teaching and learning. Yet, the field lacks mathematics-specific professional learning opportunities for elementary teachers that focus on the role of teachers’ and learners’ emotions in the way they experience mathematics in the classroom. This project will address these gaps by developing and testing the Orienting Positive Emotions in New Teachers for Mathematics (OPEN for Math) professional learning program.