Projects

07/01/2022

Covariational reasoning, or the ability to reason about relationships as quantities change together, is one way of thinking that can provide a foundation for students to build their more abstract algebraic knowledge. This research builds a foundation for integrating education and research at the intersection of students’ developing algebraic knowledge, covariational reasoning, and new educational technologies to create a new path into algebra. This path can help remove barriers that have historically restricted access to mathematics and STEM coursework and careers.

07/01/2022

This project examines the development of statistical literacy that combines statistical reasoning and thinking. The project will use professional learning communities for teachers to learn about statistical literacy and develop learning experiences for their students. The project will engage students and teachers in finding meaningful ways to use statistical reasoning to make data-based arguments and reason about patterns they observe in society.

07/01/2022

This project connects interdisciplinary researchers and experts from four tribal nation partners to develop and implement an in-service teacher professional certificate program that integrates Indigenous Knowledge into STEM teaching. This multi-sited teacher professional development model will enroll K-12 teachers in four different Native-serving regions of the rural West into a 12-month certificate program that combines Indigenous science, Coupled Human and Natural Systems, and Land education concepts into an experiential learning cycle with local and broad study of learning with the Land. The project will add knowledge about the transferability of local epistemologies and practices and national science standards within four specific Indigenous contexts and expand space for tribal-lead professional development to transform teacher classroom practice.

07/01/2022

Students of color must have access to robust and meaningful opportunities to learn science in classrooms that center their assets and humanity. This project aims to cultivate such spaces through designing and studying teacher professional learning focused on pedagogical practices that engage students of color meaningfully in science learning. These practices leverage students’ assets to foster growth in science and scientific habits of mind. This project will support pre-service and practicing teachers in developing tools for practice and reflection that focus on equity and highlighting the assets of students of color in secondary science.

07/01/2022

This project aims to create and study an Equitable and Interactive Mathematical Modeling (EIM2) program that positions students as decision makers in their own learning. Despite the value of connecting students’ life experiences with their mathematical learning, the practical implementation of this strategy has proven challenging in a classroom setting. EIM2 addresses this issue by supporting students to engage in equitable mathematical modeling, a process of using mathematics to analyze and quantify scenarios through a lens of equity.

07/01/2022

This project builds on a successful introductory computer science curriculum, called Scratch Encore, to explore ways to support teachers in bringing together—or harmonizing—existing Scratch Encore instructional materials with themes that reflect the interests, cultures, and experiences of their students, schools, and communities. In designing these harmonized lessons, teachers create customized activities that resonate with their students while retaining the structure and content of the original Scratch Encore lesson.

07/01/2022

This project aims to meet this need by developing PreK-5, equity-oriented, field-based, interdisciplinary curricular materials that support students' socioecological reasoning and sustainable decision making. The science learning experiences will be integrated across disciplines from literacy to civic and social studies lessons. The curricular materials will be part of a science education model that facilitates family engagement in ways that transform relations between educators, families, and students' science learning. The curricular activities will be co-designed with teachers while using local nature and culture as a resource.

07/01/2022

With increased focus on STEM education for students with extensive support needs ESN, engineering practices highlight the importance of problem-solving skills (e.g., systems thinking, creativity), and engineering lessons/units may provide a viable format for systematically planned math and science instruction that naturally embeds opportunities to teach students skills promoting increased self-regulated learning. Due to lack of prior experience teaching engineering, little is known about how teachers of students with ESN scaffold instruction to build their students’ engineering practices. Thus, this project focuses on teachers’ development of engineering practices, including how teachers support their students’ development of engineering-focused behaviors and mindsets through instruction.

07/01/2022

This project is working to develop, implement, and research the introduction of data experiences and practices into a series of interdisciplinary, middle school project-based learning modules. The project examines how interdisciplinary data education can provide opportunities for students to take more control of their own learning and develop positive identities related to data, through integration with social studies and science topics. Curriculum modules and teaching resources produced by the project serve as guides for subsequent efforts at integrating data science concepts into teaching and learning in various subject areas.

07/01/2022

This project will develop and investigate mathematics language routines focused on data science topics in middle and high school. The study will investigate teachers’ use of mathematics language routines and a professional development model to support teachers’ learning. The educational integration plan in the project will build mathematics teacher expertise and create video cases to support teacher professional development.

07/01/2022

This project builds on a successful introductory computer science curriculum, called Scratch Encore, to explore ways to support teachers in bringing together—or harmonizing—existing Scratch Encore instructional materials with themes that reflect the interests, cultures, and experiences of their students, schools, and communities. In designing these harmonized lessons, teachers create customized activities that resonate with their students while retaining the structure and content of the original Scratch Encore lesson.

07/01/2022

This project aims to meet this need by developing PreK-5, equity-oriented, field-based, interdisciplinary curricular materials that support students' socioecological reasoning and sustainable decision making. The science learning experiences will be integrated across disciplines from literacy to civic and social studies lessons. The curricular materials will be part of a science education model that facilitates family engagement in ways that transform relations between educators, families, and students' science learning. The curricular activities will be co-designed with teachers while using local nature and culture as a resource.

07/01/2022

Teachers’ beliefs influence their instructional decisions and these decisions shape the mathematical learning opportunities for all students. This is particularly important when considering the learning opportunities for groups that have historically been marginalized in mathematics, including girls and students of color. There are few validated, mathematics-specific instruments that measure teachers’ beliefs about mathematics learning related to race, ethnicity, and gender. This project seeks to investigate teachers’ beliefs related to how they explain the systemic racial and gender differences in mathematics education outcomes by developing and validating a survey instrument and to explore how those beliefs might impact their teaching.

06/15/2022

This project is developing curricular materials that utilize best teaching practices in improving student understanding of statistics and data science for use in high school Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry courses.  Although teachers are encouraged to integrate statistics and data science in these kinds of high school courses, teachers do not have sufficient access to resources to accomplish this effectively. The distinctive feature of these curricular materials is the use of simulation-based inference methods, data visualization, and the entire statistical investigation process to improve students’ understanding of the relevance and power of statistics because these approaches are central to statistical thinking and practice.

06/01/2022

In this project, we examine middle-school students’ understandings of coordinate systems and frames of reference prior to examining their graph construction and interpretation. This focus allows us to design instructional materials that can support students’ graphing understandings in ways that avoid or mitigate how persistent challenges in students’ graphing understandings identified in the research literature.

06/01/2022

This project will develop and study co-learning, community-engaged educational programs that center STEM education pipelines and pathways for gifted Black girls. The central aim is to bring about an actionable theory of change at the elementary level to foster a sense of belonging in STEM, early STEM exploration and development, and nurturing a STEM identity, through critical and culturally relevant experiential learning. The project will also develop curricular materials for gifted Black girls and their families (See Me in STEM) as well as professional development materials for teachers (Teachers as Talent Catalysts) as part of the educational integration plan.

06/01/2022

In this project, we examine middle-school students’ understandings of coordinate systems and frames of reference prior to examining their graph construction and interpretation. This focus allows us to design instructional materials that can support students’ graphing understandings in ways that avoid or mitigate how persistent challenges in students’ graphing understandings identified in the research literature.

05/15/2022

This project seeks to investigate the possibilities and challenges of using a participatory approach to research and design, centering Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Hmong students and their families in imagining and creating change. The project will generate new knowledge about the possibilities and limitations of participatory design research (PDR) as a method for advancing equity in mathematics education through PDR cycles at three middle schools over the five years of the project. This approach has the potential to disrupt inequitable practices of mathematics education as well as undemocratic processes for making decisions about mathematics education. Further, it will be a catalyst for developing racially just practices and processes in mathematics education.

05/15/2022

This project will support pre-service and in-service teachers in professional development that will prepare them to teach about climate change in community-specific ways. This project aims to advance elementary teachers’ development in three high-impact areas: (a) their self-efficacy toward teaching climate change science or beliefs and attitudes about teaching climate change science; (b) their science content knowledge around climate change; and (c) their climate change identity, or how they view their agency and role in climate change.

03/15/2022

This project supports school-based science teachers and students in conducting community-based science research on the causes and effects of extreme heat/urban islands in racially and ethnically diverse communities. Teachers will participate in professional learning experiences that support their development of content knowledge, scientific research practices, and critical pedagogies needed to design and implement research projects in their classroom. Students will identify locally-relevant issues related to this phenomenon, conduct investigations to explore the issue, share their findings through arts-based community narratives, and advocate for change. This project will broaden access to empowering youth-centered approaches that support learning and identity construction in science.

03/15/2022

Building on the team's prior research from early in the pandemic, this project team will continue to collect data from families and 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 spring and summer of 2022 and into the 2022-23 school year. The team will analyze student and family overall and for key demographic groups of interest as schooling during the pandemic continues. This RAPID project allows critically important data to continue to be collected and contribute to continued understanding of the impacts of and responses to the pandemic by American families.

03/01/2022

This project will explore how to promote students’ curiosity as a way of supporting science learning. The project will study how curiosity develops, the ways that classroom learning experiences influence curiosity, and how curiosity can be taught so as to support STEM learning. It will include a series of lab experiments and classroom-based studies with 2nd grade students.

02/15/2022

This project advances the understanding of teaching and learning of algebra in grades 6 through 12 by using a methodology that leverages the cumulative power of an analysis of many studies on a topic. This work will synthesize results aggregated from 40 years of research in the field of mathematics education and develop a unified framework to inform parents, students, teachers, other educators, and researchers.

02/01/2022

This study will further the field's understanding of the role that science teachers play in adapting their instruction during a public health crisis, how they address emergent ideas throughout the unfolding of the pandemic, and the impacts that the pandemic has had on science teachers themselves.

10/01/2021

This project addresses a longstanding problem in informal science education: how to increase the likelihood of consequential STEM learning from short duration experiences such as field trips. The project seeks to harness the power and potential of visual representations (e.g., graphs, drawings, charts, maps, etc.) for enhancing learning and encouraging effective reflection during and after science learning experiences, and provide new and actionable informal science learning practices that promote engagement with visual representations and reflection, and science understandings that can be applied broadly by informal science institutions.