Projects

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.

Teacher professional learning is a critical part of the mathematics education landscape. For decades, professional learning has been the primary strategy for developing the skills of the teaching workforce and changing how teachers interact with students in classrooms around academic content. Professional learning also can be expensive for districts, both financially and in terms of teacher time. Given these investments, most school leaders wish to spend their professional development dollars efficiently, making decisions about professional learning design that maximize teacher and student learning. However, despite more than two decades of rigorous research on professional learning programs, practitioners have little causal evidence on which professional learning design features work to accelerate teacher learning. This project seeks to identify features of teacher professional learning experiences that lead to better mathematics outcomes for both teachers and students.

This project will provide evidence on how school, classroom, teacher, and student factors shape elementary school science learning trajectories for English learners (ELs). The project will broaden ELs’ participation in STEM learning by investigating how individual, classroom, and school level situations such as instructional practices, learning environments, and characteristics of school personnel relate to EL elementary school science learning.

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.

In this project, investigators from the University of North Dakota develop, evaluate, and implement an on-going, collaborative professional development program designed to support teachers in teaching engineering design to 5th-8th grade students in rural and Native American communities.

This project is assessing the potential value and feasibility of developing and implementing content standards for K-12 engineering education. The project is reviewing existing efforts to define what students should know; identifying elements of existing standards for related content areas that could link to engineering; considering how purposes for engineering education might affect content and implementation of standards; and suggesting changes to policies, programs, and practices necessary to develop and implement engineering standards.

This study aims to understand parents' perspectives on the educational impacts of COVID-19 by leveraging a nationally representative, longitudinal study, the Understanding America Study (UAS). The study will track educational experiences during the summer of 2020 and into the 2020-21 school year and analyze outcomes overall and for key demographic groups of interest.

This research study examines the potential of integrating student-driven descriptive investigations of complex multivariate civic datasets into middle school social studies classrooms. It uses a collaborative co-design process to develop data-rich experiences for the social studies classroom crafted to 1) deepen students' data literacy, 2) develop students' sense of efficacy in working with civic data sets, and 3) create learning experiences that connect data to local problems that have meaning for students and their communities.

This project will explore PK-2 teachers' content knowledge by investigating their understanding of the design and implementation of culturally relevant computer science learning activities for young children. The project team will design a replicable model of PK-2 teacher professional development to address the lack of research in early computer science education.

This project investigates how high school students' understanding about design thinking compares to that of experienced practitioners and whether participation in a multiyear sequence of courses focused on engineering correlates with changes in design thinking. The project builds upon the Standards for Technological Literacy and courses developed at the University of Colorado and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

This project will explore how children in grades K-2 understand visual representations of algebraic concepts. For instance, children might create tables or graphs to organize information about the relationship between two quantities. They might use graphs and diagrams to explain their mathematical thinking and develop their understanding of relationships in numbers and operations. The project will use data gathered in K-2 classrooms and via interviews with children to describe their use of the visual representations. This exploratory project aims to develop learning trajectories as cognitive models of how children in grades K–2 understand visual representations for algebraic relationships.

In this project, researchers are working with 4th and 5th grade teachers to improve their mathematics instruction by experimenting with different ways to implement the MQI model of professional development. The professional development experiences are intentionally aligned with the Mathematical Quality of Instruction (MQI) observation instrument. This research can inform models of professional development by providing more information about various ways that the same model of professional development can be implemented.

This research study focuses on the impact of different teacher preparation and induction models, as well as on the quality and persistence of secondary science teachers. Combining the strengths of case-based research with a quasi-experimental design this study will follow 120 secondary science teachers for three years from four different and well characterized preservice - induction programs.

Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) programs have been designed to give teachers authentic scientific inquiry experience, but their results have remained largely unexamined. This research focuses on analyzing RET programs through description of their essential features, their efficacy in fostering teachers’ understanding and enactment of inquiry, their interaction with the personal characteristics of participating teachers, and the influence of teaching through inquiry on student learning in science.

This project is developing evidence about the efficacy of the Engineering is Elementary curriculum under ideal conditions by studying the student and teacher-level effects of implementation. The project seeks to determine the core elements of the curriculum that support successful use. The findings from this study have broad implications for how engineering design curricular can be developed and implemented at the elementary level.

This project researches the use of cyberinfrastructure to implement a strategy for using online telescopes as a laboratory to engage middle and high school students in cutting edge science research while providing them with significant new opportunities to apply STEM concepts, practice inquiry, and design and learn about the nature of scientific discovery.  

This intervention will explore whether technology enhanced professional development will provide third and fifth grade science teachers with the knowledge and skills needed to prepare and inspire students to become more interested and motivated to pursue careers in STEM fields. The professional development will provide teachers with instructional strategies that promote students' relational mattering and sense of belonging that will help retain students in the STEM pipeline.

The project will develop a teacher professional learning (PL) model that focuses on middle-school biological sciences in addressing real world problems. Systems thinking is central to understanding biology systems. Game design has been shown to help develop systems thinking in teachers and students. Students will participate in PL to illustrate the value of distributed expertise by sharing their knowledge of computer. Teachers will adapt their existing curriculum and will co-design games with students to experience participatory practices.

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.

This project will examine the impact on mathematics learning of an initiative to provide kindergartners in an urban school district with personal tablet devices that include free, widely available digital mathematics resources. The research questions examine how teachers use table-based mathematics resources during instruction, how caregivers and children engage with table-based mathematics resources, and how the resources then relate to kindergartners mathematics learning.

This project will focus on an early stage exploratory study of an idea that will reveal ways to develop more effective interventions to address student retention in bioscience and bioengineering pipelines. The study will attempt to initiate a new line of research in search of factors associated with bioscience and bioengineering education as a novel approach for uncovering factors that may negatively influence student participation in these fields.

This project will explore the influence of a professional learning community model on preparing preservice and novice science teachers to teach in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms of English language learners. The project will study the effect of a professional learning community model on teachers' self-efficacy beliefs and practices as it relates to teaching science to this population.

This project will integrate Native Hawaiian cross-cultural practices to explore ways to help teachers know about and know how to connect resources of students' familiar worlds to their science teaching. This project will transform the ways teachers orient their teaching at the upper elementary and middle grades through professional development courses offered at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.