Projects

This project will design and study an online, portable mentor teacher professional development (PD) program that target mentors’ teaching and feedback skills in elementary mathematics. The project aims to (1) promote educator development by generating new knowledge about how to help mentors support teacher candidate learning; (2) broaden participation in mathematics by historically marginalized and minoritized youth, who are far more likely than their peers to be taught by a first year teacher; and (3) enhance infrastructure for research and education by generating PD materials and measures that can be used and studied at scale.

This project will bring together two groups of educators - elementary school teachers (formal) and cooperative extension science volunteers (informal) - to create a community-based professional development partnership that improves educators' self-efficacy, science content knowledge, and instructional practice. The model builds on the premise that both groups have expertise that can be shared and collaboratively developed.

This study focuses on working with teachers to develop assessment practices that focuses on the three NGSS dimensions of science ideas, practices and cross-cutting concepts, and adds two more dimensions; teachers will develop assessment tasks interesting to students, and promote the development of their science identities. To advance equitable opportunities for all students to learn science, this project will design and provide an online course to support rural teachers who teach science in grades 6-12. The course will focus on improving classroom science assessment practices and instruction to meet the unique needs of rural educators and their students.

The objective of this project is to develop a toolkit of resources and practices that will help inservice middle grades mathematics teachers support mathematical argumentation throughout the school year. A coherent, portable, two-year-long professional development program on mathematical argumentation has the potential to increase access to mathematical argumentation for students nationwide and, in particular, to address the needs of teachers and students in urban areas.

This study explores the following issues in 9 schools across 3 neighborhoods: (1) How student engagement in STEM is enabled and constrained by the school's relations with its external community; (2) The similarities and differences in partnerships across different types of schools in three different urban neighborhoods by mapping networks, and assessing the costs and benefits of creating, maintaining, and dissolving network ties; and (3) How to model school and network decisions, relations, and resources using an operations research framework.

This project aims to: (1) develop, implement and study the impact of a subject matter-focused, Problem-based Learning professional development model; and to (2) design ways of incorporating Problem-Based Learning (PBL) into key subject matter and teacher preparation courses taken by pre-service teachers, and study the impact on pre-service teachers' learning. This project is designed with and for teams of K-12 science and mathematics teachers from school districts of mid-Michigan.

This project is creating and studying a professional development model to support preK teachers in developing culturally and developmentally appropriate practices in counting and early number. The proposed model is targeted at teachers of children in four-year-old kindergarten, and focuses on culturally relevant teaching and learning. The model stresses counting and basic number operations with the intention of exploring the domain as it connects to children's experiences in their homes and communities.

This project will engage science teachers in a sustained professional development (PD) program embedded in an afterschool science program designed for a linguistically diverse group of English learners (ELs).

This project will research and develop instructional materials and conduct professional development for teachers to help students understand energy flow. The project will create a model for secondary science teacher professional development that integrates science concepts with equity education. This model promotes a key epistemological issue: that science concepts are not culture-free or socially neutral ideas, but rather are concepts created and sustained by people in specific times and places for the purposes of addressing specific social needs and empowering people or groups of people.

This project will research and develop instructional materials and conduct professional development for teachers to help students understand energy flow. The project will create a model for secondary science teacher professional development that integrates science concepts with equity education. This model promotes a key epistemological issue: that science concepts are not culture-free or socially neutral ideas, but rather are concepts created and sustained by people in specific times and places for the purposes of addressing specific social needs and empowering people or groups of people.

This project is producing prototype professional development materials to enhance the capacity of middle school teachers to increase students' science knowledge and argumentation skills. The project is also investigating the level of teacher implementation of the professional development materials and documenting the development of scientific argumentation skills of the students. Research data on cognitive strategy, instructional procedures, cooperative discussion, writing protocols and the effectiveness of the professional development support material will be collected.

The investigators propose to characterize the multitude of approaches currently employed in the professional development of K-12 teachers of science, and to measure the effectiveness of such approaches in increasing teacher knowledge in the sciences. The project will result in a website, conference presentations, and scholarly and professional publications.

This project will investigate the professional development supports needed for teaching bioinformatics at the high school level. The project team will work with biology and mathematics teachers to co-design instructional modules to engage students with core bioinformatics concepts and computational literacies, by focusing on local community health issues supported through mobile learning activities. The overarching goal of the project is to help create an engage population of informatics-informed students who are capable of critically analyzing information and able to solve local problems related to their health and well-being.

The project investigates the impact of a professional development program on middle school science teachers' ability to enact pedagogical strategies, learning technologies and materials that align with the current science and technology education standards. The project measures teacher's science content understanding, the nature of the teacher's perceptions of constructivist learning environments, observations of the teacher's pedagogical strategies and students' science content learning.

To help address the need for science classrooms that support language learning for all students, this project will rigorously study the Science and Integrated Language (SAIL) curriculum, a year-long fifth-grade curriculum aligned to current science curriculum standards with a focus on English learners.

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.

The project is designing a web-based, district-led professional development implementation, focusing on improving mathematics discourse practices in K-2 classrooms, with particular attention to emergent multilingual learners. Building on two prior NSF-funded projects, the All Included in Mathematics K-2 New Extensions professional learning program will develop and research the impact of an augmented model for mathematics professional development on K-2 student learning through the addition of supports for coaches and leaders to the existing professional development model.

The project is designing a web-based, district-led professional development implementation, focusing on improving mathematics discourse practices in K-2 classrooms, with particular attention to emergent multilingual learners. Building on two prior NSF-funded projects, the All Included in Mathematics K-2 New Extensions professional learning program will develop and research the impact of an augmented model for mathematics professional development on K-2 student learning through the addition of supports for coaches and leaders to the existing professional development model.

This project will adapt and study successful discourse strategies used during language arts instruction to help teachers promote mathematically-rich classroom discourse. Of special interest is the use of models to promote mathematics communication that includes English language learners (ELL) in mathematics discourse.The project will result in a full 40-hour professional development module to support mathematics discourse for Grade 2 teachers, with an emphasis on place value, multidigit addition and subtraction, and linear measurement.

The project is studying the impact of the mathematics and science intensive pre-service preparation program for elementary school teachers.  The project includes assessments of pre-service teachers' math and science content, teacher performance, self-report surveys, and teacher interviews. Each of the study dimensions (Knowledge Dimension, Teaching Performance, and Perspectives on the Program) will be assessed at three time points across this longitudinal study, providing a model for elementary teacher development of STEM teaching.

This project studies the influence of a professional development program on teachers' PCK and the related impact of PCK on student learning .The proposal team will design and deliver a professional development program for science teachers that is based on the use of curriculum materials, professional development, integrates efforts to improve secondary science teachers' content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and skill, and helps them to apply this knowledge to the context of their own classroom.

The purpose of Project Delta is two-fold: (1) to extend an existing library of 17 interacting CD-ROM digital learning environments on numbers and operations by adding an algebra strand, and (2) to evaluate the impact of the new algebra materials on teacher development. Each of the digital environments features classroom sessions that allow for exploration of a mathematics topic, children learning over time, and teachers? instructional techniques.

This project identifies pivotal experiences of career science teachers that have promoted their advancement along the teacher professional continuum. The goal of the project is to develop an instrument that informs researchers about professional development opportunities that successful, empowered science teachers recall as having impacted their teaching and their overall sense of professionalism. The project is using a methodology in which teachers draw behavior over time graphs while telling their stories of empowerment.

Project M² is producing and disseminating curriculum materials in geometry and measurement for students in grades K-2. This builds on success of the M³ U.S. Department of Education curriculum grant for students in Grades 3-5. (www.projectm3.org). Project M² units are advanced units for all students designed using research-based practices in mathematics, early childhood, and gifted education. Curricular materials focus on promising discourse and hands-on inquiry of rich problem-situations.  

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.