The goal of this project will be to provide the field with a cost-effective model for intense content-based professional development in ways that have not been possible before, except through costly face-to-face models, by creating and testing design principles for blended online courses. Team members will design, implement, and research the effects of a professional development immersion experience in mathematics for practicing secondary teachers (grades 7-12).
Projects
This project will investigate the role of collaborative design in supporting teachers' professional growth around productive epistemic discourse in high school science classrooms. The project will examine an activity that is often used for the generation of curricular materials, collaborative design, and explore its promise in fostering biology teachers' professional growth as part of a larger professional development experience focused on epistemic practice.
The goal of this project will be to provide the field with a cost-effective model for intense content-based professional development in ways that have not been possible before, except through costly face-to-face models, by creating and testing design principles for blended online courses. Team members will design, implement, and research the effects of a professional development immersion experience in mathematics for practicing secondary teachers (grades 7-12).
This project focuses on the teaching practice of building on student thinking, a practice in which teachers engage students in making sense of their peers' mathematical ideas in ways that help the whole class move forward in their mathematical understanding. The study examines how teachers incorporate this practice into mathematics discussions in secondary classrooms by designing tasks that generate opportunities for teachers to build on students' thinking and by studying teachers' orchestration of whole class discussions around student responses to these tasks.
This project aims to develop an innovative field-based science learning approach that will support the capacity of culturally diverse students in Grades K-3 to engage in complex ecological reasoning and related problem solving. To provide rich learning environments, outdoor learning gardens will be created in which students, teachers, garden educators, and families participate in activities that facilitate the investigation of tangible ecological challenges such as water capture and food security.
This project focuses on the teaching practice of building on student thinking, a practice in which teachers engage students in making sense of their peers' mathematical ideas in ways that help the whole class move forward in their mathematical understanding. The study examines how teachers incorporate this practice into mathematics discussions in secondary classrooms by designing tasks that generate opportunities for teachers to build on students' thinking and by studying teachers' orchestration of whole class discussions around student responses to these tasks.
This project will explore the learning of mathematics through architectural tasks in an online simulation game, E-Rebuild. In the game-based architectural simulation, students will be able to complete tasks such as building and constructing structures while using mathematics and problem solving. The project will examine how to collect data about students' learning from data generated as they play the game, how students learn mathematics using the simulation, and how the simulation can be included in middle school mathematics learning.
The project team will conduct an efficacy study of a new comprehensive science curriculum for middle grades 6-8 called Amplify Science Middle School (ASMS). This school science curriculum integrates disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts. The overarching aim of the study will be to understand the impact of the curriculum on student achievement, classroom implementation, and teacher practice in relation to the recommendations of "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" and the Next Generation of Science Standards.
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 study can provide a basis for design research focused on developing effective materials and programs for flipped instruction in secondary mathematics, which is already occurring at an increasing rate, but it is not yet informed by empirical evidence. This project will result in a framework for flipped instruction robust enough to be useful at a variety of grade levels and contexts. The framework will provide a better understanding of the relationships among various implementations of flipped instruction and student learning.
Project Accelerate blends the supportive structures of a student's home school, a rigorous online course designed specifically with the needs of under-served populations in mind, and hands-on laboratory experiences, to make AP Physics accessible to under-served students. The project could potentially lead to the success of motivated but under-served students who attend schools where the opportunity to engage in a rigorous STEM curriculum is not available.
This conference will bring together a group of teacher educators to focus on preservice teacher education and a shared vision of instruction called ambitious science teaching. It is a critical first step toward building a community of teacher educators who can collectively share and refine strategies, tools, and practices for preparing preservice science teachers for ambitious science teaching.
The project will provide the opportunity for upper elementary students to learn computer science and build strong collaboration practices. Leveraging the promise of virtual learning companions, the project will collect datasets of collaborative learning for computer science in diverse upper elementary school classrooms; design, develop, and iteratively refine its intelligent virtual learning companions; and generate research findings and evidence about how children collaborate in computer science learning and how best to support their collaboration with intelligent virtual learning companions.
This project will design, develop, and test a new curriculum unit for high school chemistry courses that is organized around the question, "How does chemistry shape where I live?" The new unit will integrate relevant Earth science data, scientific practices, and key urban environmental research findings with the chemistry curriculum to gain insights into factors that support the approach to teaching and learning advocated by current science curriculum standards.
The project is a longitudinal assessment of the prerequisite (e.g. fractions), cognitive (e.g. working memory), and non-cognitive (e.g. math anxiety) factors that dynamically influence 7-9th grade students' algebraic learning and cognition, with a focus on students with learning disabilities in mathematics. The study will provide the most comprehensive assessment of the development of algebra competence ever conducted and is organized by an integrative model of cognitive and non-cognitive influences on students' engagement in math classrooms and on the learning of procedural and spatial-related aspects of algebra.
The project will provide the opportunity for upper elementary students to learn computer science and build strong collaboration practices. Leveraging the promise of virtual learning companions, the project will collect datasets of collaborative learning for computer science in diverse upper elementary school classrooms; design, develop, and iteratively refine its intelligent virtual learning companions; and generate research findings and evidence about how children collaborate in computer science learning and how best to support their collaboration with intelligent virtual learning companions.
The project plans to develop and study a series of metacognitive strategies that support learning and engagement for struggling middle school students during makerspace experiences. The study will focus narrowly on establishing a foundational understanding of how to ameliorate barriers to engaging in design learning through the use of metacognitive strategies. The project plans to translate and apply research on the use of metacognitive strategies in supporting struggling learners to develop approaches that teachers can implement to increase opportunities for students who are the most difficult to reach academically.
This project builds upon the prior work by creating problem-solving measures for grades 3-5. The elementary assessments will be connected to the middle-grades assessments and will be available for use by school districts, researchers, and other education professionals seeking to effectively measure children's problem solving. The aims of the project are to (a) create three new mathematical problem-solving assessments and gather validity evidence for their use, (b) link the problem-solving measures (PSMs) with prior problem-solving measures (i.e., PSM6, PSM7, and PSM8), and (c) develop a meaningful reporting system for the PSMs.
This project will focus on learning about model based reasoning in science, and will develop, implement, study, and refine a 6-week climate science module for high school students. The module will feature use of a web-based climate modeling application, and the project team will collect and analyze evidence of model-based reasoning about climate phenomena among students.
This project will investigate the integration of engineering design, practices, and thinking into middle school life science curriculum while providing opportunities for students to foster knowledge of and increase interest in life and biosciences. The project will specifically respond to the need to create, implement, and evaluate a model intervention that will advance the knowledge base for establishing and retaining underrepresented minorities in STEM fields.
This collaborative project will conduct early stage research on promising advances in how we prepare science teachers to support three-dimensional science learning as outlined in the Framework for Science Education. The project aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of a new approach to designing support tools and professional development focused on adapting classroom assessments that achieves these shifts in teachers' instructional vision and practice in less than 20 hours of professional development.
This project will develop, implement, test, and revise instructional approaches and materials for high school students that focus on the links between scientific evidence and alternative explanations of phenomena relating to Earth and space education. Students will learn to construct diagrams showing the links between explanatory models of natural phenomena and lines of evidence, and then evaluate the plausibility of various alternative explanations for events.
This project will develop a scalable, classroom-focused measure of usable mathematics teaching knowledge that is aligned with the state standards through a classroom video analysis measure (CVA-M) in three content areas: (a) fractions for grades 4 and 5, (b) ratio and proportions for grades 6 and 7; and (c) variables, expressions, and equations for grades 6 and 7. The project will examine the psychometric properties of the new items and scales, including the reliability of scores, and collect evidence on content, substantive, structural, and external aspects of validity to evaluate the overall construct validity of the CVA-M.
This project will research how elementary (K-5) teachers in the Teacher Engineering Education Program (TEEP) program progress in one particular aspect of responsive teaching, noticing student thinking. Project research will also contribute to literature on how to support responsive teaching in web-based environments, expanding understanding of how design principles and features developed in in-person professional development settings can be implemented online. The project will refine a program for engineering teachers nationwide, identify key features that are effective in developing teachers' practice, and create video resources for other professional development programs to use.
This project will develop, pilot, and evaluate a nine-week STEM-rich multimedia production course for high school students called Multimedia Immersion (MI). The MI course will engage teams of students to develop a personally and socially relevant storyline that guides their use of accessible audio and video technologies to create a five-minute animated video. To develop student STEM experience and provide technical support, the project will provide guidance and learning experiences in engineering (e.g., criteria, constraints, optimization, tradeoffs), science (e.g. sound, light, energy, mechanics) and multimedia technologies (e.g., computer based audio production, video editing and visualizations through animatics (i.e., shooting a succession of storyboards with a soundtrack). MI will make important contributions to the field through its efforts to design and evaluate the promises and challenges of a nine-week multimedia curriculum in multiple urban high schools.