The Children's Measurement Project examines children's developing knowledge from PreKindergarten through Grade 5 as they develop the capacity and strategies they need to measure geometric space (length, area and volume), investigating number concepts, early algebra, or variability. We investigate ways children learn to use measures as evidence for scientific or mathematical claims. We began by examining the literature on learning trajectories and progressions to interpret existing research on children's understanding of length, area and volume. Our work engages both Rasch modeling and learning/teaching experiments within clinical and classroom contexts to collect data for longitudinal accounts of children's development of measurement concepts and strategies. The work is being conducted as a collaboration of Illinois State University and the University at Buffalo (State University of New York). We are beginning the fourth year of our project (2010).

            CLUSTER (Collaboration for Leadership in Urban Science Teaching, Evaluation and Research) is an NSF-funded TPC project. Its partners are The City College of New York (CCNY), New York Hall of Science (NYHS), and City University of New York’s Center for Advanced Study in Education (CASE). It aims to develop and research a model designed to increase and improve the pool of secondary science teachers who reflect the ethnic distribution of city students and who are prepared to implement inquiry-based science instruction.

            CLUSTER Fellows are undergraduate science majors in New York City. They are recruited, trained, and certified to teach science in New York City middle and high schools. They participate both as students in the CCNY Teacher Education Program and as Explainers in the NYHS Science Career Ladder. Their experiences in class and at the NYHS are integrated and guided by a conceptual framework, which emphasizes science as an active process of discovery where ideas are developed and constructed through meaningful experience.

            CLUSTER aims to produce generalizable knowledge of interest to the field regarding the growth and development of perspective teachers in an experiential training program and to assess the impact and value of the CLUSTER model.