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This project develops tools and materials that address the need schools have to implement results-oriented teacher learning programs that ensure highly qualified science teachers in every classroom. The project will (1) develop and disseminate the Building Systems for Quality Teaching and Learning in Science Simulation and Facilitator Guide, and (2) develop and disseminate three Building Systems for Science Learning Modules.

The primary purpose of this international conference was for participants in the US to exchange views and discuss the latest research findings on (primary) science assessment. The conference focused on research around building assessment systems that help teachers diagnose student learning in the classroom but also link meaningfully to large-scale accountability systems (in districts or national levels). The project resulted in a report, proceedings, journal publications.

This project has pioneered simulation-based assessments of model-based science learning and inquiry practices for middle school physical and life science systems. The assessment suites include curriculum-embedded, formative assessments that provide  immediate, individualized feedback and graduated coaching with supporting reflection activities as well as summative end-of-unit benchmark assessments. The project has documented the instructional benefits, feasibility, utility, and technical quality of the assessments with over 7,000 students and 80 teachers in four states.

This project covers participants' costs to attend a national conference series focusing upon supporting incipient science education research projects. A primary objective is to provide a venue in which researchers can describe their lines of inquiry and to then receive guidance and input about refining those ambitions. The other primary objective is to promote an innovative conference design in which a structured presentation format serves as an incubator for scholarly work.

This exploratory project aims to develop a community of individuals and organizations working together to address critical issues in K-12 computer science education by broadening the awareness of the need for curriculum computer science standards, providing multiple levels of professional development, conducting and disseminating research in computer science education, and promoting this subject as a unique field of study in schools.

This project is developing an 8th-grade assessment for proportional reasoning from a cognitive diagnosis model (CDM) framework. CDMs are psychometric models developed specifically for diagnosing the presence or absence of fine-grained skills or processes required in solving problems on a test. Assessments based on CDMs can provide information deemed more diagnostic and descriptive, and therefore, more relevant in applied instructional settings.

This project studies teaching practices in a year-long high school algebra course that integrates hand-held and other electronic devices. Of particular interest is how these technologies can support learners' capacity to efficiently and effectively draw on the distributed intelligences that technical and social networks make available. The investigation focuses on collaborative learning tasks centered on collective mathematical objects, such as functions, expressions, and coordinates that participants in a group must jointly manipulate through networked computers.

This project conducts a systematic and empirical (both quantitative and qualitative) longitudinal study of the factors that influence students' decisions at critical junctures in the educational pipeline. The goals are too (a) broaden participation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and (b) improve the recruitment, retention, and success of minority undergraduate men in STEM and STEM-related fields across colleges and universities in the United States.

This project integrates educational and research activities with the ultimate goal of improving the mathematics education of students in high poverty, urban high schools. The project focuses on developing secondary mathematics teachers‘ capacity for implementing culturally relevant mathematics pedagogy (CuReMaP). CuReMaP consists of teaching mathematics for understanding; centering mathematics instruction on students; and providing opportunities for students to develop critical consciousness about and with mathematics.

This CAREER proposal has four objectives: 1) examine the nature of mathematics teachers' learning opportunities for instructional improvement, 2) examine how work contexts influence the quality of teacher learning opportunities, 3) examine the impact of teacher learning opportunities on changes in student mathematics achievement over four years, and 4) work with district and school administrators to promote instructional improvement and student achievement by effectively providing learning opportunities to mathematics teachers.

Researchers are developing a practice-based curriculum for the professional education of preservice and practicing secondary mathematics teachers that focuses on reasoning and proving; has narrative cases as a central component; and supports the development of knowledge of mathematics needed for teaching. This curriculum is comprised of eight constellations of activities that focus on key aspects of reasoning and proving such as identifying patterns; making conjectures; providing proofs; and providing non-proof arguments.

The Conference Board for the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) is organizing and hosting a National Forum on the Content and Assessment of School Mathematics. The conference is intended to provide an opportunity for policy makers and the broad mathematics education community to provide input into the standards development process. CBMS will produce a white paper on the key issues.

This project establishes a Center to conduct research and education on the interactions of nanomaterials with living systems and with the abiotic environment. The research combines high throughput screening assays with computational and physiological modeling to predict impacts at higher levels of biological organization. It will unite the fields of engineering, chemistry, physics, materials science, cell biology, ecology, toxicology, computer modeling, and risk assessment to establish the foundations of a new scientific discipline: environmental nanotoxicology.

This project provides middle school students and teachers access to live scientific data from the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, and curriculum modules built around sensor networks that target core life science content and inquiry standards. This Web-based architecture allows students from ethnically diverse urban schools, typically underserved by technological innovation, to explore the same data that scientists use, and develops and evaluates fading technological and pedagogical scaffolds for inquiry as students gain competence.

This project performs integrated research on emergent materials and phenomena in magnetoelectronics. The aim of the research activities is to advance understanding of the emergent materials and phenomena and to develop highly sophisticated experimental and theoretical tools required to study them. Project activities include an innovative education research program aimed at cognition of materials science concepts, K-12 outreach and visitation programs, undergraduate research programs, and graduate-education enhancement programs.

In its first five years, this project established a durable and vibrant learning community of high school teachers, high school students, university students, scientists, faculty, and associated stake-holders that continues to attract science and math students, using the project’s cutting-edge science and advanced cyberinfrastructure as compelling elements of study. This project continues by providing an education and research partnership derived from basic research in particle physics, grid computing, and advanced networking.

This study brings together researchers from education, psychology and the sciences and scholar-practitioners to examine the factors that can be addressed in the preparation of both pre-service and in-service teachers to guide elementary children in exploratory and inquiry-based science lessons. The goal is to develop models that describe the interconnections among key constructs in order to reexamine the content of elementary science methods courses, mentoring for early career teachers, professional development opportunities and coaching.

This project draws from the expertise of a fully collaborative educator-scientist team to create learning progressions, curricular units and assessment instruments towards large scale research on the teaching and learning of climate change and impacts by 7-12^th graders in primarily under-resourced schools. Products include eight week curricular units, IPCC-compliant simplified future scenarios, an online interface with guided predictive distribution modeling, and research results.

This project implemented a facets-of-thinking perspective to design tools and practices to improve high school chemistry teachers' formative assessment practices. Goals are to identify and develop clusters of facets related to key chemistry concepts; develop assessment items; enhance the assessment system for administering items, reporting results, and providing teacher resource materials; develop teacher professional development and resource materials; and examine whether student learning in chemistry improves in classes that incorporate a facet-based assessment system.

The project addresses the relatively poor mathematics achievement of students who are not proficient in English. It includes research on how English language learners in beginning algebra classes solve math word problems with different text characteristics. The results of this research inform the development of technology-based resources to support ELLs’ ability to learn mathematics through instruction in English, including tutorials in math vocabulary, integrated glossaries, and interactive assistance with forming equations from word problem text.