Mathematics

This project has developed and studied multi-week curriculum modules for high school non-AP mathematics classes to promote interest and skills in statistics and data analysis among diverse student populations. Using large-scale data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the online platform CODAP, students gain experience with multivariable thinking as they investigate questions focused on social justice issues in U.S. society. This poster shares strengths and challenges in students’ abilities to reason with multivariable data.

The STEM SEALs program at North Florida College explores methods for improvement of teaching and learning STEM in rural areas. It consists of three disciplines, “Sea”, “Land”, and “Air”, and three phases, design, review and summer institute for each of the disciplines.
 

The poster will look at the impact of the annual STEM for All Video Showcases as well as the STEM for All Multiplex. It will discuss implications for knowledge sharing among grantees and dissemination efforts in the future.

We investigate teacher beliefs about discourses employed with equation solving and the challenges these beliefs might pose for the implementation of instructional practices that promote deductive reasoning in algebra. To reveal these beliefs, we recorded three explanations of solving a linear equation that each had distinct discursive characteristics, and then analyzed teachers’ small-group critical discussions of these explanations.

Professional Development Supports for Teaching Bioinformatics through Mobile Learning

How do we design small meaningful suggestions for instructional improvement that are easy to implement, rooted in teachers' existing practice, and have a high rate of uptake? That's the question we explore on this poster.

Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS) is a partnership between the University of Illinois Physics Department and 40 high school physics teachers representing 38 schools across Illinois. The holistic goal of the program is to develop a physics teaching Community of Practice that supports high school physics teachers from diverse school contexts in the design and implementation of high-quality, university-aligned instructional materials, such that their students experience fewer barriers in transitions to post-secondary STEM programs.

This project uses design-based research to develop, pilot, and refine a set of complementary online activities for preservice teachers to engage in approximations of practice to develop their ability to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions in mathematics and science. The effort has produced an integrated online practice suite (OPS) containing a coordinated and scaffolded collection of approximation of practice activities using game-based practice spaces, simulations, and virtual reality coupled with targeted feedback and support from teacher educators.

This project modifies an assessment system to provide ongoing, instructionally productive evidence to teachers about student learning and to link student work products and formative assessments with summative assessments in models that generate useful estimates of student growth. In this iteration, the assessment system is refined as we with K-5 teachers in two schools to develop a learning progression that guides our collaborative work foster student thinking about spatial measurement in the elementary grades.

In MS-GGU, we attend to middle-school students’ understandings of coordinate systems and frames of reference prior to examining their graph construction and interpretation. The project goals are to advance knowledge of students’ developing understandings of graphs “from the ground up” with attention to underlying coordinate systems and frames of reference that comprise the coordinate systems and (b) design and empirically test tasks to support students’ learning of coordinate systems and graphs to enhance graph literacy.