Projects

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.

This project will develop and study approaches to equip 4th and 5th grade general and special education teachers to teach computer science (CS) to a broad range of learners with disabilities through professional development. The project will aim to improve accessibility, accommodations, and highlight the role of paraeducators to increase participation and learning in CS for students with disabilities, and it will investigate the impact of the professional development on teachers’ instruction and the influence of the professional development model on student learning, ability beliefs, and attitudes about CS.

Cybersecurity is becoming an increased concern among young technology users; however, elementary school teachers often have limited preparation to teach students about cybersecurity. This project is designed to iteratively develop, refine, and test an innovative professional development program that supports teachers to infuse cybersecurity into 4th-5th grade mathematics and science instruction. The project will synergistically merge cybersecurity with mathematics and science content in authentic, real-world contexts to teach topics such as cyberbullying, digital security, encryption/decryption, digital privacy, and digital footprint.

High school counselors play an integral role in supporting students’ trajectories toward science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. Many professional learning experiences for counselors have not focused specifically on developing awareness of a broad array of STEM careers and the corresponding high school activities and coursework that can establish students’ trajectories toward these careers. This project addresses this gap in practice by developing year-long professional learning experiences focused on engineering-related careers, with and for high school counselors.

Despite years of research and interventions to address inequities that are largely related to race, science education continues to perpetuate these inequities in both participation and outcomes in science. This CAREER project will address the need to provide science teachers with a framework for considering race and racial dynamics in science teaching as well as exemplars in science teaching and professional development to support teachers’ teaching identities and praxis.

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.

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.

High school and first-year college mathematics courses sometimes act as gatekeepers, ‘weeding out’ students who struggle with the subject matter and narrowing students’ opportunities for advanced STEM education and employment. Acknowledging opportunity gaps for students of color and those experiencing poverty, this partnership development project brings together Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC), and WestEd to establish dual enrollment math courses that function as a lever for equity.

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.

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.

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.

Effective “early” algebra interventions in elementary grades that can develop all students’ algebra readiness for later grades are needed. This study will use an experimental design to test the effectiveness of a Grades K–2 early algebra intervention when implemented in diverse classroom settings by elementary teachers. The broader impact of the study will be to deepen the role of algebra in elementary grades, provide much-needed curricular support for elementary teachers, and strengthen college and career readiness standards and practices.

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.

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.

Over the years, researchers and practitioners have created and tested different ways to support students who struggle with learning mathematics. These methods include directly teaching various mathematics skills and strategies that affect mathematics performance, such as alleviating mathematics anxiety and fostering motivation and engagement in mathematics learning. The idea is that teaching mathematics using a mix of these skills or strategies might help students learn better than teaching just one skill or strategy at a time. However, it remains unclear which skills or strategies should be taught together and if mixing different skills or strategies leads to differential effects across different students or contexts. Understanding this is vital because it can help researchers and practitioners determine the best ways to address the need of struggling students in mathematics. A network meta-analysis will allow the field to examine different combinations of instructional skills/strategies as well as their interaction effects, which can provide more optimal information about different instructional approaches.

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.

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.

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) will host a workshop that brings together NSF-funded teams working on midscale research infrastructure incubator projects for STEM education research with a focus on education equity. ICPSR will share information, resources, and support incubator teams in developing and managing mid-scale infrastructure projects. These incubator projects have identified research infrastructure gaps related to assessments, teacher practices, and digital tools to support student learning and have proposed pilot tools, cyberinfrastructure, large-scale datasets, etc., for filling these gaps. To scale these pilots, the teams will need to successfully develop proposals to create mid-scale research infrastructure (Midscale RI). However, Midscale RI proposals require specialized knowledge that is not common within the STEM education research community and thus may limit the community’s ability to develop competitive Midscale RI proposals.

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.