Projects

In this project, a video and audio network links elementary school teachers with researchers and educators at Purdue to form a community of practice dedicated to implementing engineering education at the elementary grades. The research plan includes identifying the attributes of face-to-face and cyber-enabled teacher professional development and community building that can transform teachers into master users and designers of engineering education for elementary learners.

This project is demonstrating the use of cyber-enabled technologies to build and share adaptable interventions for pre- and in-service teacher growth that effectively make use of major video collections and have high promise of success at multiple sites. The cyber infrastructure being significantly extended through this project is supporting development and documentation of additional interventions for teacher professional development using this video collection, as well as other videos that might be added in the future.

This project is developing and evaluating a test form that diagnoses teachers' capacities in two closely connected cases of reasoning about multiplicative relations among quantities: fractions and proportions. Teachers' responses to test items will be informative about their capacities to reason about content in ways that support student’s thinking. The project is developing instruments using a new class of psychometric models called Diagnostic Classifcation Models (DCMs) that are based on categorical latent variables.

Geometry Assessments for Secondary Teachers (GAST) represents a collaborative partnership among faculty and staff at the University of Louisville, the University of Kentucky, Florida State University, Alpine Testing Solutions, and Horizon Research, Inc. to develop a knowledge framework and assessments for secondary mathematics teachers' geometry knowledge for teaching. The framework for the assessments will be designed to collect validity evidence for predicting effective geometry teaching and improving student achievement.

This project will define and synthesize effective feedback strategies that can be linked to specific features of daily classroom assessment practices. It will develop a framework, including a conceptual strand (will conceptualize feedback practice considering intrinsic and contextual dimensions) and a methodological strand (used to describe and evaluate the feedback studies and findings to be synthesized). The framework will provide a shared language within and across multiple forms of research in various disciplines.

This project holds a workshop to disseminate the findings of a privately-funded, two-year study of the status and nature of efforts to teach engineering to U.S. K-12 students. The symposium and other dissemination activities inform key stakeholders about the role and potential of engineering as an element of K-12 STEM education and also inform the programmatic activities of organizations and individuals concerned about engineering education.

This project involves a longitudinal, ethnographic study of children's mathematical performances from preschool to first grade in both formal classroom settings and informal settings at school and home. The study seeks to identify opportunities for mathematical learning, to map varied performances of mathematical competence, to chart changes in mathematical performance over time, and to design and assess the impact of case studies for teacher education.

Investigations in Cyber-enabled Education (ICE) strives to provide a professional development design framework for enhancing teacher ability to provide science, technology, and math (STM) instruction for secondary students. Exploratory research will clarify ICE framework constructs and gather empirical evidence to form the basis of anticipated further research into the question: Under what circumstances can cyber-enabled collaboration between STM scientists and educators enhance teacher ability to provide STM education?

This project conducts research on knowledge that contributes to successful coaching in two domains: coaching knowledge and mathematics content knowledge. The influence of these knowledge domains on both coaches and teachers is being examined in two ways: (1) by investigating correlations between assessments of coach and teacher knowledge and practice in each domain and (2) by investigating causal effects of targeted professional development for coaches.

This project is developing, designing, and testing materials for professional development leaders (e.g., teacher educators, district mathematics specialists, secondary mathematic department chairs) to use in their work with secondary mathematics teachers. The aim is to help those teachers analyze the discourse patterns of their own classrooms and improve their skills in creating discourse patterns that emphasize high-level mathematical explanation, justification, and argumentation.

This project builds and tests applications tied to the school curriculum that integrate the sciences with mathematics, computational thinking, reading and writing in elementary schools. The investigative core of the project is to determine how to best integrate computing across the curriculum in such a way as to support STEM learning and lead more urban children to STEM career paths.

This project draws from the expertise of a fully collaborative educator-scientist team to create learning progressions, curricular units and assessment instruments towards large scale research on the teaching and learning of climate change and impacts by 7-12^th graders in primarily under-resourced schools. Products include eight week curricular units, IPCC-compliant simplified future scenarios, an online interface with guided predictive distribution modeling, and research results.

This project is developing new instructional materials for middle school earth science classes that incorporate emerging cyber-enabled technologies such as Google Earth as a transformative data analysis tool. The materials emphasize the use of claims, evidence, and reasoning in the exploration of volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, leading students through a process of discovery to help them build a deeper understanding of the driving forces and resulting manifestations of plate tectonics.

This project examines the effect of four different types of induction programs (district-based, e-mentoring, university-based, intern programs) on 100 5th year teachers of secondary science. The teachers involved in the study have participated in a previous study during their first three years of teaching.

SmartGraphs activities run in a web browser; there is no software to download or install. SmartGraphs allows students to interact with on-screen graphs to learn about linear equations, the motion of objects, population dynamics, global warming, or other STEM topics that use scatter plots or line graphs. Teachers and students may also use and share existing activities, which are released under a Creative Commons license (see http://www.concord.org/projects/smartgraphs#curriculum).

This project is producing research syntheses that summarize and make available to practitioners results from research on effective mathematics curricular interventions, teaching practices, and teacher professional development that have been designed to improve achievement by students in Title 1 programs. The project’s goal is to bring together the best resources in both mathematics education and Title I so that programs are better able to serve the mathematical learning and instructional needs of Title I schools.

This project addresses the challenge “How can promising innovations be successfully implemented, sustained, and scaled in schools and districts in a cost effective manner?” Project partners are researching the expansion of an established preparation and induction support program for K-5 mathematics specialists into rural school systems.

This exploratory research and development project addresses the question, "Can students develop an understanding of the ecological nature of science (ENOS) in high school biology and environmental science classes that is useful and productive in environmental citizenship?" To address this question, the project will identify the essential elements of ENOS, investigate how these can be taught and learned, and explore how ENOS skills and understandings are used to enhance environmental citizenship.

This project is assessing the capacities needed by elementary teachers for productive use of mathematics curriculum materials. The project is guided by the assumption that well-designed curriculum programs have the potential to contribute to improvement in mathematics learning opportunities in K-12 classrooms. Yet, minimal research has examined the kind of knowledge and capacities necessary for teachers to use these resources productively. The project will undertake such research and develop tools to assess these capacities.

This research and development project provides resources for ninth-grade mathematics students and teachers by developing, piloting, and field-testing intervention modules designed as supplementary materials for Algebra 1 classes (e.g., double-period algebra). Rather than developing isolated skills and reviewing particular topics, these materials aim to foster the development of mathematical habits of mind—in particular, the algebraic habit of abstracting from calculations, a key unifying idea in the transition from arithmetic to algebra.

This project is studying effects of linguistically sensitive science instructional materials by translating, enhancing, and evaluating culturally relevant and linguistically appropriate Collaborative Online Projects (originally written in Spanish) for middle school Spanish-speaking English Language Learners.

This project hypothesizes that learners must have access to the real work of scientists if they are to learn both about the nature of science and to do inquiry themselves. It explores the question "How can informal science education institutions best design resources to support teachers, school administrators, and families in the teaching and learning of students to conduct scientific investigations and better understand the nature of science?"

This project involves holding a conference, Helping Teachers Become Culturally Relevant Teachers: Developing New Tools for a New Generation, where the goals are to bring together the very best researchers/practitioners in this field to present a clear theoretical underpinning of Culturally Relevant Teaching (CRT), present the most recent rigorous research to support the theory, and show clearly how CRT theory translates directly into classroom action.

This project is developing, validating, and evaluating computer modeling-based formative assessments to improve student learning in chemistry. Activities include developing a series of computer models related to key topics in high school chemistry, developing questions to probe student understanding of matter and energy, identifying teaching and learning resources appropriate for different levels of student conceptual understanding, and developing professional development resources on integrating formative assessments into high school chemistry courses.