Projects

This project leverages the role of mentor teachers to support novices’ development of pedagogical reasoning and increase the likelihood that they will be prepared to engage in responsive mathematics teaching. Mentor teachers in three differently structured teacher education programs will receive professional development aimed at making their pedagogical reasoning visible and supporting them in engaging collaboratively with novices in this type of teacher thinking. The researchers will study mentor teachers’ development of collaborative pedagogical reasoning (Co-PR) and its relationship to responsive teaching.

In this project, the investigators will explore different ways that elementary school teachers participate in online learning in a platform that includes videos, discussions, and other resources for mathematics teaching. Knowing that teachers may use the platform to different degrees depending on their interest and time available, the study will investigate how different profiles of participation influence teachers' learning.

Access to high quality STEM education is highly variable depending on where one lives. In addition, early career teachers need support during their first years of teaching to be successful and help them stay in the profession. This project aims to provide in-service and beginning elementary school teachers increased opportunities to refine their mathematics teaching to support minoritized youth in racially diverse rural communities in Georgia that have less access to elementary mathematics specialists. This project follows and supports both beginning teachers (BTs) and elementary mathematics coaches (EMCs) over 5 years to develop and refine their mathematics teaching and coaching, respectively, using equity-based tools to guide reflection and conversations about both the BTs’ instructional practices and the EMCs’ coaching practices.

Today’s schools are experiencing increasing cultural and linguistic diversity and facing the challenge of creating meaningful connections between school science and student lived experiences outside of school. Middle school is a critical time to provide fundamental knowledge and encourage interest in STEM careers. In order to best impact learners during this critical period, science teachers need improved models to support the development and delivery of relevant curriculum materials to better serve all students in their classrooms. Highly supported design teams consisting of researchers, teachers, and both school and district science specialists will co-adapt existing district-generated science units to integrate socially and culturally relevant science practices and draw on students' diverse cultural and language practices as strengths.

This project will provide rural STEM middle school teachers and career counselors professional development and the support needed to collaborate with each other and local community assets in designing, integrating, and implementing effective STEM content and career development activities. Local teams will co-develop project-based learning units that incorporate a place-based education perspective involving STEM assets, careers, and stakeholders from the local communities for middle school rural youth that intentionally infuse STEM careers in their area with STEM content.

Despite growing interest in supporting the integration of computational thinking (CT) in elementary education, there is not an agreed-upon definition of CT that is developmentally appropriate for early childhood, nor is there a clear understanding of how young children’s CT develops and which kinds of instructional approaches and practices truly support the development of CT. Early elementary educators need feasible research-based, developmentally appropriate CT curricula. This project will contribute to this critical STEM educational need by working with a design team of 5 elementary teachers to develop a research-based integrated mathematics and CT curriculum.

This project will develop a standards-aligned engineering professional learning model for elementary teachers of multilingual learners. This interdisciplinary approach is innovative in its effort to provide teachers with sustained time to reflect on what they believe about language, their teaching of linguistically and racially minoritized students, and their interactions with multilingual students around engineering content. Using a participatory and collaborative approach, experts in literacy, language, and engineering will work with elementary teachers to develop strategies for how teachers can view students’ multilingualism as an asset to engineering.

One of the most persistent challenges in education is the gap between research and classroom practice, meaning that research-informed recommendations and practices that could support students’ mathematics learning do not always reach the classroom. Improving how mathematics-focused education research is communicated to a teacher audience—using strategies that are useful and valuable from the teacher perspective—is one key avenue for mitigating consequences of the research-practice gap. This project will develop, assess, and refine innovative key abstracts (i.e., concise, infographic-type resources) for communicating mathematics-focused practitioner articles with a teacher audience. Teacher perspectives will be embedded throughout the project to inform key abstract design. The project also involves a collaboration with the university disability center to provide funded research opportunities in STEM education to university students with disabilities.

Acquiring scientific knowledge and skills requires persisting through challenges, yet it has become increasingly common for parents in the United States to step in and solve problems for their children. This type of over-engaged parenting leads preschool-age children to have lower persistence, lower executive function, and worse reading and math achievement in grade school across socioeconomic backgrounds. Prior work leaves open major theoretical and practical questions about the beliefs that drive over-engaged parenting and children’s response to it. Our research aims to fill these gaps by examining the causes and consequences of over-engaged parenting so that we can better understand how caregivers can support children's scientific success upon school entry.

The goal of this project is to investigate the integration of computational thinking (CT) into elementary school curricula by studying how teachers develop expertise in integrating CT activities that align with interdisciplinary standards and existing curricula. Leveraging an asset-based approach, the project will provide opportunities to broaden participation in computer science education through building a community of practice for teachers and designing CT-infused curricula.

This project will develop, enact, and study a critical climate technology journalism curriculum to support multilingual sixth grade students’ knowledge and practices in engineering. Synthesizing expertise in climate technology, communication, and multilingual education, the project will engage students in investigating, designing, and communicating critical engineering knowledge about community-based technological systems. Students will learn engineering as they construct and convey messages about climate technology in their community for an audience of family members, community groups, and civic leaders.

The goal of this project is to investigate the integration of computational thinking (CT) into elementary school curricula by studying how teachers develop expertise in integrating CT activities that align with interdisciplinary standards and existing curricula. Leveraging an asset-based approach, the project will provide opportunities to broaden participation in computer science education through building a community of practice for teachers and designing CT-infused curricula.

Videos of teaching have become a popular tool for facilitating teacher learning, with the potential to powerfully impact teacher practice. However, less is known about specific mechanisms through which teachers learn from video. The goal of this study is to build foundational knowledge about teacher learning by using video clips of science instruction within a professional development (PD) context. 

This comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis synthesizes evidence surrounding math and science remote education programs from the past 15 years. The goal is to understand the effectiveness of math and science remote education programs; how their effectiveness varies by program characteristics (e.g., fully online vs. hybrid, synchronous vs. asynchronous, and student-instructor ratio); and whether their effects vary with student sample characteristics.

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.

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 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 aims to restructure middle school science education around Grand Challenges (GCs) such as pandemics, climate events, and diminishing biodiversity. Anchoring science education around grand challenges can motivate students learning and provide a meaningful context for science curriculum and assessment. By engaging in the units around GCs, middle school science teachers and students will have opportunities to work with real data, engage in argumentation based on evidence, and take part in solutions to the grand challenges.

Three-dimensional figures can now be represented as diagrams that appear to extend into space in ways that are free of material or physical constraints. They can be rendered at any size, in any orientation, and at any position in space, and can thereby realize a far more varied set of mathematical concepts than what is possible with physical models. The goal of this project is to investigate the transformative educational potential of these representations and to generate a knowledge base that teachers, teacher educators, and researchers can use to reimagine the learning and teaching of geometry.