Middle School

This design-based research project investigates ways to understand and cultivate science and mathematics teachers’ “epistemic empathy”—their capacity for tuning into and valuing students’ intellectual and emotional experiences in constructing, communicating, and critiquing knowledge. The project team develops educative experiences aimed at cultivating teachers’ epistemic empathy, examines the role of such empathy in facilitating responsive teaching, and explores how epistemic empathy can promote more equitable and humanizing learning environments.

Project CARe’s goal is to explore how new technologies create a path into algebra that allows students to build algebraic reasoning and knowledge from their intuitive covariational reasoning, which entails conceiving two quantities changing together. For example, Project CARe explores how students can learn to solve equations by comparing two changing quantities in a dynamic digital depiction of a real-life situation.

In this project, we investigate haptic systems that are readily available for rendering visual STEM content through sight, sound, and touch. We use combinations of visual display, text-to-speech, vibrations, and the movement of one’s hands for interacting with STEM content (such as charts and graphs in math and science-based simulations) multimodally on touchscreens. Our investigations extend into "smart" tangible manipulatives that pair with interactive PhET simulations and enable rich kinesthetic manipulation of on-screen content through touch.

The “Genes, Traits & Change over Time” middle school curriculum unit integrates core ideas in genetics, heredity, and natural selection. This 4-5 week, NGSS-friendly unit includes scaffolded practice in working with models, crafting explanations, and identifying cause and effect relationships. We will report findings from a nation-wide efficacy test of the unit as well as case studies of classroom implementation and individual students’ learning.

Building Insights through Observation is an early stage design and development project that is studying the application of arts-based approaches to support students in observing and analyzing visual information, and to improve teachers’ knowledge and practice related to teaching with scientific data. This design-based research, conducted over four years, will iteratively develop, test, and refine a cross-disciplinary instructional framework and professional development model with two cohorts of middle school science teachers.

Our work focuses on developing teacher knowledge within a PLC that uses the AIM-TRU learning cycle to support teachers’ engagement with mathematical tasks and video cases. The learning cycle is grounded in the Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) framework (Schoenfeld, 2014) and utilizes Charles’s (2005) Big Mathematical Ideas within Formative Assessment Lesson (FAL) content. Teacher conversations were analyzed with respect to congenial and collegial characteristics with the latter resulting in greater alignment with TRU.

Boosting Data Science Teaching and Learning in STEM (aka “Data Fluency”) is a project that seeks to improve teachers’ and students’ “data fluency,” which includes understanding sources of data, structuring data for analysis, interpreting representations of data, inferring meaning from data, and explaining data and findings to diverse audiences. We will accomplish this goal by iteratively developing research-based professional learning that prepares teachers to offer next generation data-rich learning.

This project aims to examine how teachers' beliefs about the origins of mathematical excellence, which might be attributed to genetic, social, or personal characteristics, affect racial and gender equity in their classrooms. A three-part study will create, validate, and apply the Attributions of Mathematical Excellence Scale (AMES), correlating scores with race, gender, and achievement equity.

Wright maps can provide psychometricians with information about validity based on internal structure, by allowing us to look for banding based on score levels across items. We recently interviewed teachers and trainers about the use of these maps, along with learning progressions and sample student responses to find what was more and less useful, and what features should be added. In this presentation, we will discuss these methods and feedback from teachers.

In this design-based research project, we are refining a model for mathematics professional development. We engage middle grades teachers in playful, discussion-based exploration of fractions and proportions through tasks and dynamic "toys” as well as planning for classroom implementation. We are now adding “Connections”, designed to support participants in transitioning from learners to teachers during the PD. For one group, Connections are reflection on paper, for the other, they are part of the PD discussion.