Early childhood educators (ECEs) understand that effective science teaching and learning requires content knowledge related to science concepts and practices and pedagogical knowledge. However, ECEs, especially in rural communities, express a lack of science content knowledge and confidence in incorporating science-related conversations in their early care and education settings, and they believe this might be a result of limited professional training relevant to science content. This project aims to strengthen key capabilities in ECEs, including the ability to (1) build science content knowledge and confidence in guiding young children's scientific investigation, (2) closely observe children's interactions with science materials, and (3) use those observations in the reflection, planning, and practice of science teaching.
Projects
This exploratory project will design, pilot, and evaluate a 10-week, energy literacy curriculum unit for a program called Energy and Your Environment (EYE). In the EYE curriculum, students will study energy use and transfer in their own school buildings. They will explore how Earth systems supply renewable and nonrenewable energy, and how these energy sources are transformed and transferred from Earth systems to a school building to meet its daily energy requirements.
This project investigates the educational value of computer technologies for learning engineering. The project engages high school students to design, build, and evaluate an energy-efficient model house with the aid of computer simulation and design tools.
This development and research project designs, develops, and tests a digital game-based learning environment for supporting, assessing and analyzing middle school students' conceptual knowledge in learning physics, specifically Newtonian mechanics. This research integrates work from prior findings to develop a new methodology to engage students in deep learning while diagnosing and scaffolding the learning of Newtonian mechanics.
This project is working with all teachers in grades three through five in the Portland, OR Public Schools in order to test the feasibility and efficacy of the Mathematics Studio Model of professional development. The model requires professional development to occur at the school level involving both teachers and principals. The goal of the project is to improve students' engagement and learning in mathematics by fostering effective instruction.
This project will develop and test a digital platform for middle school mathematics classrooms to help students deepen and communicate their understanding of mathematics. The digital platform will allow students to collaboratively create representations of their mathematics thinking, incorporate ideas from other students, and share their work with the class.
This project will develop and test a digital platform for middle school mathematics classrooms to help students deepen and communicate their understanding of mathematics. The digital platform will allow students to collaboratively create representations of their mathematics thinking, incorporate ideas from other students, and share their work with the class.
The project will develop and study a professional development program focused on fraction for interventionists who work with grades four and five students with mathematics disabilities and difficulties.
This conference focuses on the use of virtual/mixed reality simulation in the preparation of secondary science teachers. The conference convenes experts in simulation in teacher preparation, practicing high school teachers, and teacher candidates to engage in a design process related to mixed reality simulations. Conference attendees will identify important gaps in science teacher preparation and design prototype simulation environments for addressing those gaps.
Technical assistance is being provided to key leaders in state education agencies (SEAs) to: 1) build SEA leaders' knowledge about effective mathematical professional development research; 2) deepen their understanding about necessary supports and structures that should be in place; and 3) enable SEA leaders to incorporate what they learn and analyze to their existing mathematics college- and career-readiness standards implementation plans.
One crucial predictor of success in STEM disciplines is spatial reasoning ability, which involves mentally manipulating and representing objects in space. However, STEM courses often neglect the purposeful development of spatial reasoning skills, and limited knowledge exists on effective training methods. This project aims to address this gap by: 1) identifying neural and cognitive processes associated with successful mental rotation, a fundamental aspect of spatial reasoning; 2) assessing the responsiveness of these processes to training; and 3) measuring the transfer of training effects to real-world STEM problems, specifically focusing on introductory chemistry.
This mixed-method exploratory study will examine how bilingual teachers working in elementary schools in Massachusetts and Puerto Rico understand the role and skills of engineers in society. In turn, it will examine how teachers adapt existing engineering lessons so that those activities and concepts are more culturally and linguistically accessible to their students.
This exploratory proposal is researching and developing professional learning activities to help high school teachers use available and emerging social media to teach scientific argumentation. The project responds to the growing emphasis on scientific argumentation in new standards.
The project will create a digital environment for middle school mathematics teachers that is combined with a student collaborative platform for a problem-solving curriculum. The goal is to design and develop the digital collaborative platform so networks of teachers can create, use, and share teaching resources for planning, enactment, and reflection on student thinking.
This project will engage teams of students and teachers of grades 7-12 in four competitive Challenges to design innovative strategies for carbon mitigation in areas such as transportation, agriculture or energy use. The project expands the typical boundaries of schools by enabling teams of students in multiple locations to collaborate in model-based reasoning through online discussion forums, using social media, and crowdsourcing ideas to construct possible solutions to environmental challenges. Project research will examine the impacts of the project on student learning and engagement.
The goals of this project are to 1) develop methods for analyzing data collected to document the institutional setting of mathematics teaching that are specific to equity and access for all middle school students to high quality mathematics instruction; and 2) develop an instrument for assessing the quality of mathematics instruction that focuses specifically on the extent to which all students are supported to substantially participate in academically rigorous mathematics.
This project will engage in a community-wide effort to synthesize the literature from a broad range of fields and to use the findings to create frameworks that will guide the planning, implementation, and scale-up of efforts to improve geographic education over the next decade. This will result in a set of publicly reviewed, consensus reports that will guide collaborative efforts and broaden awareness of the acute need for geographic literacy and geographic science education.
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 is a 3.5-year efficacy study of the Developing Mathematical Ideas (DMI) elementary math teacher professional development (PD) program. DMI is a well-known, commercially available PD program with substantial prior evidence showing its impact on elementary teachers' mathematical and pedagogical knowledge. However, no studies have yet linked DMI directly with changes in teachers' classroom practice, or with improved student outcomes in math. This study aims to remedy this gap.
The purpose of this project is to leverage ongoing efforts related to science education and the current emergency and disaster recovery landscape in Puerto Rico. It will develop culturally relevant project-based science lesson plans that incorporate the disaster context that can be implemented both inside and outside of the traditional classroom. The project will allow displaced students to continue learning under the guidance of teachers, parents or social workers. The project will train educators in the use of disaster-related problem-based lessons and assess project implementation and the impact of the lessons. The final outcome of this aim will be a lesson plan template and implementation guidelines for other jurisdictions faced by natural disasters.
This project collects evidence supporting the validity of test instruments and initial characterization of high school teachers' background and use of materials and pedagogies. The project is constructing and validating multiple forms of test instruments that can be used for the evaluation of interventions (e.g. professional development, implementation of new curricula) and the measurement of aspects of teacher knowledge (e.g. subject matter, knowledge of student misconceptions).
This project’s overarching goal is to evaluate the assessment components embedded within two NSF-supported mathematics curricula: Everyday Mathematics and Math Trailblazers. The investigators will apply a comprehensive validity perspective that integrates a variety of empirical evidence regarding the cognitive, psychometric, and instructional affordances of multiple assessments embedded in these curricula as part of their overall instructional design.
This study examines the impact of the newly revised Advanced Placement (AP) Biology and Chemistry courses on students' understanding of and ability to utilize scientific inquiry, on students' confidence in engaging in college-level material, and on students’ enrollment and persistence in college STEM majors. The project provides estimates of the impact of students' AP-course taking on their progress into postsecondary educational experiences and their intent to continue to prepare to be future engineers and scientists.
This exploratory project is studying the use of mathematics and science specialist teachers in elementary schools. The first four studies are in six school districts in Washington State. They are characterizing and categorizing the specialists, investigating the content knowledge, preparation and needs of these teachers, determining their instructional effectiveness, and determining their impact on student learning and attitudes towards mathematics and science.
Understanding the impact of STEM education efforts requires researchers to have cutting-edge knowledge of advanced research methods and the ability to translate research knowledge to multiple and diverse stakeholder audiences. The Evidence Quality and Reach (EQR) Hub project will work explicitly to strengthen these two competencies through focused work with the Discovery Research PreK-12 research community. The hub will develop and implement workshops and learning opportunities for researchers in the community, convene communities of practice to discuss specific research methods, and engage in individualized consultations with DRK-12 projects.