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Search, browse, and contribute to our library of tools, publications, presentations, organizations, and perspective pieces from the CADRE blog about all things related to K-12 STEM education. CADRE staff and your DR K-12 colleagues hand-picked these resources to support and enhance your work. DR K-12 project members: log in or register to gain full access to resource materials.

On becoming the next new smartphone: The life and times of educational innovations

Submitted by Camillia Matuk on Sat, 01/15/2011 - 4:55pm

We all tend to recognize innovation when we see it. It’s not just the development of new products and services. It’s the sort of thing that crosses boundaries once faced and that takes the field beyond where it’s previously been. It introduces new ways of thinking about old problems, and may even bring to light issues never before considered. But as keynote speakers Sue Allen and Joan Ferrini-Mundy emphasized the first night of this year’s DR K-12 PI meeting, even this newness contributes to only part of the success of an innovation—the other part is sustainability. The sustainability of innovation underscored the theme of their presentation, Crossing Abysses. By abysses, Allen and Ferrini-Mundy meant the gap between funders, researchers, developers, and their audiences. The gap is not, as the recent PCAST report suggested, due to our emphasis on research at the expense of development. In fact, we do attend to issues of processes, models, and tools in development. Rather, as Allen and Ferrini-Mundy insisted, the problem is that we lack a language to describe how our development efforts get taken up at a wider level—how our impacts move beyond singular research publications and are sustained in the communities they intend to serve.

What may hinder us is that we consider ourselves foremost as researchers and educators. We value the more abstract impacts our products have on learning, on policy, and on infrastructure, and so we struggle to represent ourselves to a funding agency that rather views our ideas as financial investments. And when support for our ideas depends upon the promise and evidence of their commercial success, we come to face all the same challenges as commercial product developers. Suddenly, such terms as “marketability,” “product uptake,” and “customer loyalty” become relevant and, suddenly, we must reconcile these vastly different self-representations, which keeps our efforts from being recognized by those who would fund them and prevents us from actualizing their value.

Abyss number one: Communicating the value and success of our innovations to stakeholders. 

To begin, Allen and Ferrini-Mundy suggested we must decide how innovation looks in a program such as DR K-12, if it is not the same as commercial innovation. How do we demonstrate progress compared with our commercial relatives? And what should count as evidence of the success of a DR K-12 product, if it is different from that of a commercial product? As Allen and Ferrini-Mundy argued, we need a new language to describe our efforts, because terms such as promotion, uptake, and adoption are not appropriate for what we do. But I will return to this issue later.

Before Allen and Ferrini-Mundy spoke that evening, I found myself sharing a dinner table and conversation with two evaluators of technical support. If, as you read this, you share the same blank expression at this term as I had at the time, you can hardly be blamed. No doubt, all would agree that evaluation is to the success of a research and development project what assessment is to the success of student learning. But where researchers and developers tend to position themselves at the forefront of a project, evaluators typically work behind the scenes. They check that decisions are justified and that actions have the impact intended; and they suggest ways to improve on the next round, packaging all in a neat report that regrettably few people beyond the project read. And where aspiring researchers have access to many public role models, evaluation is a profession someone tends to fall into after a meandering string of pursuits. In other words, a career in evaluation is not typically sought with planned purpose but rather is discovered by chance.

Along the route to becoming an evaluator, perhaps there is an experience of frustration over a lack of accountability in the course of research and development projects. This might be followed by realizing the necessity of taking stock of progress and of delivering a clear story of lessons learned for posterity. Eventually, it dawns upon the would-be evaluator that substantial impacts on educational innovations can be made through evaluation, by overseeing their progress, ensuring that expensive decisions are cross-checked and justified, and disseminating reports so that future efforts can pick up where others left off. In fact, as my dinner companions confided, they wished more people were aware of what evaluators did and of how their skills could help improve research and development projects.

As it so happened, one of my two dinner companions was a new PI of a project evaluating the effectiveness of interactive whiteboards in mathematics classrooms in the UK. His major finding so far? The whiteboards were not being used. Short of actually causing damage, neglect is surely the worst fate an innovative idea can suffer. 

This conversation, and the meeting’s theme, Crossing Abysses, set the tone of the next few days. In the evenings, I wandered between sessions and through the ballrooms, decked to showcase promises of innovation—of social games that would teach a generation of more politically conscious consumers; of programs that would place the power of large datasets into the hands of middle school students; of hand-held data-capturing devices that would turn the world into a laboratory and encourage children to peer through scientists’ eyes. Here were the projects the NSF deemed worthy financial investments. And, certainly, the air around them was tangibly charged with hope and expectation, as veterans and newbies alike excitedly exchanged their visions for righting the wrongs in the world. But an investment is always a risk, and I could not help but also feel a tinge of uncertainty at the lifecycle of these innovative ideas. What, in two to five years’ time, would be their fates?

But back to my dinner companion. Perhaps, I suggested, the interactive whiteboards were not being used because the appropriate needs analysis was not done beforehand—those crucial extra steps taken to identify the end users’ needs and to determine how they might best be addressed. Perhaps the whole idea of interactive whiteboards was dangerously pushed by seductive new technologies rather than driven by any genuine need of the audience. At least in other situations, this would explain the mushrooming of useless gimmicks, rather than useful tools.

A needs analysis is one thing, the evaluator said, but another is that the benefits of the technology were not properly communicated to the teachers. Purchases were made by the techies of their departments, eager to try the next best thing. But teachers’ priorities are far more practical and their practices deeply ingrained in what’s worked in the past. Overwhelmed as they are by the everyday pressures of classroom teaching, they sometimes need help thinking outside the box. In teachers’ hands, these new toys were nothing more than expensive chalkboards, often not used at all.

This leads to abyss number two: Communicating innovation to end users.

Here, the difficulty for we researchers and developers is in balancing our place ever at the forefront of innovation, even as we respond to the everyday needs of our audiences. On this note, Allen and Ferrini-Mundy proposed gathering a group of teachers to be initial test beds of new products as they are developed. This way, we can be sure to align our ideas with the needs of our audience before too much effort is invested in trying to be the next new thing.

But if we’ve learned anything from the rapid spread of modern technology, it’s not simply that we don’t know what we need until we see it; it’s that sometimes, we must be taught to need it. Consider the current ubiquity of smartphones, microwave ovens, credit cards, and dishwashers. No one, protest now as they may, really needed these products. In fact, it’s not inconceivable that the initial reaction of some was resistance to accommodating these products into their habits. What we did need, however, was for marketers to tell us we needed them, and why. And now that we have them, it’s hard to deny that these products do make our lives better. Likewise, interactive whiteboards may very well be the next smartphone or dishwasher, as may be educational social games and hand-held data-collection devices designed for middle schoolers. The problem may be that teachers just don’t know it yet. Moreover, researchers and developers haven’t yet found a way to convince them.

This brings us back to abyss number one: The challenge of reconciling our dual identities as educational researchers and as product developers worthy of financial investment. Again, the solution proposed by Allen and Ferrini-Mundy was to find new terminology to distinguish what we do from commercial product developers. Indeed, appropriate language is important if our funding agencies are to better recognize the value of our innovations and the successes of our efforts. But while we like to believe that we have nobler priorities in supporting learning, we also face the same challenges of commercial product developers. Regardless of the terms we use, we must still market our products to consumers; we must persuade stakeholders of their worth; and we must promote their adoption among wider audiences. And so, even as we seek to distinguish ourselves as developers of educational rather than of commercial products, we may do well to also count the ways in which our efforts are similar. It may be that to succeed as commercial businesses requires that we think of ourselves in their terms.

Consider the potential: What if we took a page from companies such as Apple, and alongside theories of learning and instruction, we allowed our designs to be guided by principles of aesthetics and user experience? What if we promoted them according to product attachment theory? Would doing so really compromise the educational integrity of our work? Would an effort to market our products in the manner of commercial developers really amount to selling out? And if ultimately, these strategies result in such innovative ideas as interactive whiteboards becoming usefully integrated into teachers’ instructional practices, as well as in their sustained uptake among broader communities of learning, would these concerns really matter?

Even in considering these possibilities, it becomes clear that the skills of evaluators, such as those who were my dinner companions that first evening, are shamefully overlooked in our efforts. Evaluators may well be the ones to bridge the abysses between researchers, developers, stakeholders, and audiences. But perhaps we may all do well to come to the same realizations as evaluators did when they first fell upon their professions—that is, to become aware of the broader reaches of our projects within and across communities, over time, and in addition to our own places and roles within them. Not only might this help us find better ways to communicate our skills and contributions; it may also help us take advantage of the skills of others; to learn from those embarked in similar ventures; and to ensure the sustainability of our innovations.

My First PI Meeting

Submitted by Chao Wang on Fri, 01/14/2011 - 5:22pm

Participating in the 2010 DR K-12 PI meeting was an informative, inspiring, and unforgettable experience. I have never been so actively involved in an academic conference. I had numerous opportunities to interact with professionals of diverse research backgrounds of STEM education in various meaningful ways. What I heard and saw in the meeting have pushed me to think hard about the meaning and role of knowledge, language, and learner in STEM educational research projects.

First, I wonder how we should view and treat the existing knowledge generated by our research. What is our most current knowledge about STEM education? How many kinds of knowledge have been explored? To what extent does this body of knowledge have a positive influence on real teaching and learning? How should both researchers and policymakers respond with knowledge to challenges grown within certain social, cultural, and historical contexts? How should teacher preparation and education programs utilize this knowledge?

Second, I wonder what could be the fairest way to view and treat children who are not yet proficient in English in the STEM research studies. How we view these children can significantly affect the reasons why we include them in our research, and how the findings will be interpreted and implemented. Throughout the history of education, a variety of terms have been used to describe or characterize these students, such as limited English proficient (LEP), language-minority, culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD), English as a second language (ESL), second language learners (SLLs), heritage language speakers, bilinguals, and emerging bilinguals. In NSF-funded projects, they are usually referred to as English language learners (ELLs). However, the term ELLs carries negative connotations. It consists of “English” and “learners,” which tends to lead people to think of ELLs as “one-dimensional on the basis of their limited English proficiency” (Short & Echevarria, 2004/2005, p.9) and simultaneously to ignore the fact that those children usually are emerging bilinguals, representing myriad national, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds with a huge range of abilities and needs.

Finally, among a small sample of innovative projects I observed, I noticed there were usually some teacher or student participants who were regarded (measured) as low performers. I wonder how we should interpret this phenomenon and deal with the challenge? What can we learn from those “negative” cases? 
Short, D., & Echevarria, J. (2004/2005). Promoting academic literacy for English language learners. Educational Leadership, 62(4), 8-13.

Learning Progressions - A Help or Hindrance?

Submitted by Jamie Mikeska on Fri, 01/14/2011 - 4:54pm

Recently, I attended the DR K-12 PI meeting in Washington, D.C., and was surprised to hear so much controversial discussion surrounding the development and use of learning progressions. In my work at Michigan State University, I have been immersed in learning about what learning progressions are, how they can be used by teachers and teacher educators, and their potential to positively impact students’ learning—all in science education. For the most part, the conversations I have been a part of (up until this point) have always cast learning progressions in a positive light. However, I have started to wonder about their potential drawbacks and limitations.

To be upfront, I am much enamored of the research that shows how learning progressions can be used by teachers to pinpoint students’ understanding of various science concepts and to assess their own teaching strategies and behaviors. The development of learning progressions for various science topics and concepts seems to be a promising way to help teachers, especially those with little science background or who teach multiple science topics, learn about how students think, and point to productive directions that teachers would want to move students towards (the same can be said about teacher learning progressions). However, I heard many conversations where participants asked questions about whether there is even such a “thing” as a learning progression—that is, are there really patterns and stages for how students think about particular scientific ideas (or how teachers learn how to enact specific teaching strategies or methods)? Does the notion of learning progressions even make sense, or is there something else that would more accurately represent students’ thinking/teachers’ practice? If so, what might that look like? 

I look forward to continued conversations on this matter and hope to hear from others who have been pondering similar questions.

Polish and Parents: Reflections on the 2010 DR K-12 PI Meeting

Submitted by Vishakha Parvate on Fri, 01/14/2011 - 1:54pm

The two memorable revelations for me of the 2010 DR K-12 PI meeting were the exceptionally polished software products on display and the lack of discussion about parental responsibility for learning. 

Speaking as a software developer, the quality of the software products was an awakening in that projects are no longer content to create materials that are not commercial production quality. This is a really heartening development because, after all, if our goal is to make the most difference to the most number of students ,then we must look beyond our conventional avenues of dissemination and distribution. As an aside—“publisher” should not be a dreaded word—why should the avenue of dissemination be treated like a condition to be tolerated rather than a partner to be embraced? The presence of the more than a couple of "research products" in the App Store is a good start. Perhaps CADRE can do well to establish a SIG that focuses on product development. Often, when we are presented with the product of a research project, as an emerging researcher you wonder what went into this product. Similarly, when a research project creates a software product, for other projects it is beneficial to be able to discuss issues of how to recruit programmers, graphic designers, and project managers on an NSF budget where you cannot match an industry salary. It was very apparent, at least in a couple of the projects, that the software was not the output of a technically savvy grad student. So, I'd love to see not only more such products emerge but also see a community develop that provides support to projects creating software products.

To move onto my second revelation, I want to begin by saying that at education conferences, I avoid sessions that focus on equity. Equity for me is a topic that should deal with teachers working in heterogeneous classrooms where the heterogeneity is a function of differences in learning styles of students rather than of differences in home environments and parental engagement. It is really strange to me that in this climate of strong calls for teacher accountability there is not an equivalent call for parental accountability. It is not a 10th grade math teacher's job to deal with the fact that a student in her class is failing in math because they cannot read the content—that may seem harsh but I am sorry, that's just not her job. Cathy Black, chancellor of schools in New York City, when touring schools that work said, "Where there’s a strong and effective principal, where parents are committed, you have great schools.”

Why is it OK for a parent to send a child to school with little or no preparation in terms of motivation to learn but not OK for that child's teacher to send that child back home with little or no learning? What’s true of Shanghai's schools, which just outshone American schools in international testing, is also true of the schools that turn out the best (top 2%) talent in Asian countries: families will go to great lengths to ensure that the children have everything they need for doing well in school, and students will put their lives on hold to do well in school. There are no discipline issues; students are in school for exactly one thing and that is to learn. This system of schooling does stifle creativity, and it does ignore those students who cannot keep up, but on the whole, the system raises the level of respect that schools command amongst students. In story after story from teachers, I have noticed that there is a direct correlation between parental involvement and student success. 

Sure, it is the job of a school to teach, but then it is the job of parents to provide a safe and encouraging family that prepares the student to learn. Somewhere in all this rhetoric about success for all and differentiated instructions and constructivist learning, we are unfortunately in a state where we are almost afraid to ask parents to hold up their side of the social contract. 

Access to challenging and engaging mathematical problems for students with mild disabilities

Submitted by Casey Hord on Fri, 01/14/2011 - 1:51pm

As a researcher who studies mathematics interventions for students with mild disabilities, the principles of universal design presented in the SmartGraphs software by the Concord Consortium were encouraging to me. Considering the difficulties that students with learning disabilities in mathematics and students with mild intellectual disabilities have with working memory, the multiple, user-friendly representations of math and science concepts presented in this software could potentially be valuable for these students. The software used concise text as well as tables and graphs that could effectively help these students organize and store information. Students with working memory deficits often lose important information from memory storage as they process text with multiple ideas. With key information stored and organized in tables and graphs in the software, students with deficits in working memory have a much better opportunity to process, understand, and solve complicated, multi-step problems. Unfortunately, curricula sometimes do not follow this format, and we lose sight of the true reasoning and processing abilities of students with mild disabilities. These students sometimes appear to be incapable of solving complicated problems when they are actually struggling due to working memory issues, often related to excessive text and a lack of user-friendly representations of concepts, rather than the ability to use reasoning skills to solve challenging problems. By following the principles of concise text and pictorial, graphical, and schematic representations of concepts, students with mild disabilities can be given the access they deserve to challenging and engaging mathematics.

 

Research through Partnerships

Submitted by Jessica Tybursky on Fri, 01/14/2011 - 10:36am

A primary goal of education research is to inform and benefit the everyday work of practitioners; yet, often it is hard to establish and maintain partnerships between groups. What is so difficult about building relationships to bridge this divide?

Teachers and administrators have demanding schedules and responsibilities, so it is hard for schools to take the time and energy to work with researchers. However, by establishing partnerships, schools can gain invaluable resources that can ultimately help them do their jobs more effectively. 

Researchers want to be able to control situations as much as possible. However, by working completely in context, and thus not having control, researchers are provided the opportunity to situate their problems and come to a realistic understanding of possible solutions. Great difficulty in partnerships arises when balance between the parties is lost, or when there was never a chance for balance to exist. What elements are essential to keep in mind before, during, and after a practitioner/researcher partnership?

Before: Take steps to ensure that the relationship and project are feasible and realistic. When writing a proposal, you should essentially already be doing the work. Consider whether the participants are ready for change, and whether there is infrastructure that has the potential to support and sustain the work. Examine the relationship structures that are established at various levels of the project to determine how durable they are and the extent to which the project can move forward if structures change.

During: Although most partnership research work physically takes place in schools, the onus is not on the schools to drive the project; researchers must take responsibility for adapting to the existing atmosphere. Furthermore, it is the obligation of the researcher to demystify the research process: to be clear about what the plan is, and what possible outcomes are. Consequently, practitioners should be able to benefit from their participation rather than feel as though they are being used by the researcher. Although it is hard work, by being explicit in your communication, by keeping organized documentation of progress, and by avoiding making assumptions, researchers and practitioners can move forward together in a positive light.

After: As the research project comes to a close, the partnership does not similarly dissolve. Practitioners are looking for both closure through reflection and for what the next steps are. Researchers should be clear in communicating what follow-up they will provide and whether there are future projects for their partnership. Sustainability, scale, and dissemination of the resulting knowledge or product of the project are to be considered at every stage of the research process.

Partnerships must be developed over time, at a local level, through trust in each other. What have you learned from your experiences in partnerships with schools? Are there components that are necessary in particular conditions? By purposefully examining the relationships situated within our work, meaningful partnerships can be developed to build the bridge between researchers and practitioners.

This response was informed by the presentations and discussion at the session on “Fostering Knowledge Use in STEM Education through R&D Partnerships with Schools and School Districts” at the DR K-12 PI Meeting on December 2, 2010.

Are We Throwing Out the Baby with the Bath Water?

Submitted by Irving Brown on Wed, 01/12/2011 - 11:51am

Shortly after my 10th birthday, Neil Armstrong took “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” This was a short 11 years after the creation of NASA, which was just one of the political-technical reactions to the successful Soviet launch of the first Earth satellite, Sputnik 1. How were these brilliant American and Russian scientists and engineers educated in the mathematical sciences?

We know the only “computers” available to them were slide rules—two measured and marked interlocking bars of steel or wood. (That’s right, plastics were not in commercial production.) How about classroom instruction? Did they use manipulatives to learn to multiply? Did their textbooks have more photos than text or numbers on each page? The classroom has changed over these years, but was all the change necessary? How, then, were they able to learn enough math to put a man on the moon? Could it be that there are in fact benefits to direct instruction in the math classroom?

I’m being a bit facetious with that last question, but several brilliant discussions during the 2010 DR K-12 PI meeting caused me to ponder it. Today’s youngest mathematics education scholars, born about 10 years after the first lunar landing, are being taught “the perils of direct instruction” and cautioned against its use. This was evident during some of the presentations related to mathematics education research, so I have to ask, “Are we throwing out the baby with the bath water?” By repudiating direct instruction and other “classic” methods in the math classrooms, are we able to offer the best curriculum possible?

Okay, before you start throwing rotten fruit and vegetables at me, let me make clear that I am not trying to start a new battle in the “math wars” but, rather, ask a few questions to help me (us) better understand our goals for mathematics education. My personal teaching philosophy is informed by a philosophy composed primarily of cognitive constructivism, with an ample portion of social constructivism, and enough behaviorist theory to give an effective balance between lecture and group work in the classroom. But, then again, I was first educated and trained as a chemical engineer, which may explain my particularly bent perspective! (I’m not sure most engineering faculty knew that various learning theories and teaching strategies existed 20 years ago!)

I believe that inquiry-based and active learning strategies should be the cornerstone of our educational system but that they should not be the only building blocks we use. If we truly want to create the best mathematics curriculum for ALL students, and if we truly want to find ways to effectively educate a diverse student population, then we should avail ourselves of all of the proven tools at our disposal. If we dismiss the use of a method that works for a subset of students, are we able then to effectively reach all students? If we wash our hands of direct instruction and other “classic” methods, are we throwing out the baby (mathematics for all) with the bathwater (selected teaching and learning methods and styles)? After all, direct instruction and other “classic” methods were good enough to launch the Space Age. Considering the plummet of U.S. students’ global ranking in math and science since abandoning direct instruction, maybe we should reconsider all of our curricular options.

A new way of thinking?

Submitted by Mario Martinez-Garza on Tue, 01/11/2011 - 5:30pm

It's been a little over a month since the DR K-12 PI meeting in Washington, D.C. It's been a busy time for me, but a productive one, which has allowed me to put thoughts and impressions of that meeting into perspective.

As a CADRE Fellow, I attended the DR K-12 PI meeting, which was the first PI meeting of my career. I was not sure what to expect... perhaps a kind of smaller-scale research conference? My team even prepared posters anrad materials for this meeting, as if it were a conference. As it were, I was not too far off, but the differences I noted were very instructive. While research conferences are geared towards the dissemination of research, the DR K-12 PI meeting seemed better suited as a forum for discussing future trends in research and for discussing how these trends respond to the greater interests of society as represented by the various funding agencies. I got a real sense of how funding agencies communicate their changing priorities to the research community, and how the community responds to those changes. This was a new mode of thinking for me, one that I had only encountered rarely and informally at research conferences.

As guests to the meeting, we had no set agenda, but that fact didn't get in the way of having a great professional learning experience. The greatest take-away for me was a reminder that educational research does not exist in a vacuum; it is a part of a greater ecology with many stakeholders. In our daily work as researchers, it's easy to be consumed by the vicissitudes of academia and completely lose sight of the greater forces at play, namely governments and the societal ideas they represent. Public education is a huge endeavor, and educational research is, in no small way, led by the needs of society as a whole.

These types of insights, I feel, are invaluable to me as a researcher at the beginning of my career. I see the value of keeping in mind, when planning research, not only the near effects (Will this get funded? Will this get published?), but also the ultimate benefits of contributing to the development agenda of public education.

To build, sustain and expand...

Submitted by Uma Natarajan on Mon, 01/10/2011 - 7:57pm

I’d like to start off by thanking my project principal investigator and CADRE for the great opportunity to be part of the large gathering of researchers at the 2010 DR K-12 Meeting. It was a place where I observed how easily great researchers and early career researchers like myself equally participated and engaged in discussions around topics that are of critical importance in the field. The discussions were not just centered on the successes of some projects but were works in progress that highlighted barriers to research implementation, methodological issues, dissemination issues, curricula, and professional developmental work. The discussions informed my own work as well as helped me understand how there is a group of people working around similar issues that I need to connect and collaborate with.

What surrounded the entire meeting was the desire for more current, relevant, and impactful research around the STEM areas. Not only was there an emphasis for more researchers to come forward, but also for the community as a whole to think differently about what education and research in education can be and should likely be in a few decades. The constant exposure to information about available funding avenues and accessibility to people was something that amazed me. As an early career researcher, my thoughts were always about learning the nuts and bolts of funding opportunities and how I could use that to work on meaningful research. But the fact that there were approachable people who I could talk to as well as a flow of ideas that I could tap into helped me immensely.

What do I perceive as an opportunity and a challenge after the meeting? The theme was essentially to bring together people to collaborate and synthesize their work. This was mentioned in group poster sessions and in SIG meetings and elsewhere in the meeting. I think this meeting is and will continue to be a great opportunity for researchers to work together, synthesizing great research proposals and addressing issues in the field. But carrying the networks beyond the meeting to another level of engagement comes to me as a challenge that we need to think about to make it work. I hope the community establishes ways of maintaining this, and that is something I’d like to learn as well!

The water is not so wide, after all

Submitted by Jennifer Hope on Mon, 01/10/2011 - 4:21pm

Accountability has certainly become a theme in educational pursuits, and so when I write that I found it to be a thread running through and connecting my experiences at the December meeting of DR K-12 project principal investigators, you may not be surprised—but I was. I am talking here not of accountability in terms of completing the many reports required of National Science Foundation (NSF) grantees in a timely fashion, but of a call to action on behalf of our collective projects. At the Nuts & Bolts meeting for new grantees, Program Director David Campbell suggested that NSF program officers as well as congressional representatives really like to receive photos, hometown news clipping, and notices of awards from the projects supported by federal funds. This idea struck me as so simple (like sending a report card or school photo to Grandma), but how many of us, in NSF projects or others, regularly communicate with funders about our day-to-day achievements? How difficult would it really be to drop a line every once in a while in return for the support that makes our work possible? While perhaps such a gesture will not result in refrigerator decoration as it would at Grandma’s house, or even an “atta boy,” Campbell suggested that it is exactly the images and grant products that program officers convey to government leaders that cross decision-makers’ minds when the congressional budget is under consideration.

Throughout the subsequent sessions of the meeting, I became more conscious of the relatively short distance between our projects and congressional decision-makers. This impression was confirmed by James Brown, co-chair of the STEM Education Coalition, in his remarks in the final plenary presentation. Brown’s description of the current state of STEM education policy emphasized the importance of personal interactions between constituents active in STEM and lawmakers, especially as national priorities for STEM education are being set within the reauthorization of the America Competes Act. Considering the current economic climate alongside the fact that the NSF Educational and Human Resources budget has not grown at the same rate as the R&D directorate, Brown suggested that STEM professionals should hope for the best—a flat budget—but be vocal as a community by working within our universities to promote our programs within the community and by visiting the district offices of our representatives once each year to share with them what we do and how it depends on their budgetary decisions. Doing so, according to Brown, enables “the people who agree with you to do something about it.” In response to this call to action, the PI of the project on which I work and I spent the hours between the meeting adjournment and our flight back home navigating Capitol Hill to find the office of our senator in order to share news of our project with one of her staffers. Doing so gave me a feeling of true participation in my democracy, as well as even more pride in the work that we are doing in the SciJourn project. What will you do, this year, to cross the short divide between your project and our government and strengthen the bridge to a stronger STEM future for our country?

Beyond standards, curriculum, and teaching: Attending not just to supply, but to demand

Submitted by cadre-admin on Thu, 06/24/2010 - 3:06pm

Editor's Note: People like us (DR K-12) are primarily funded to understand and/or fix parts of the supply chain in education. If something isn't working well, we fix standards or testing or administration or curriculum or teaching, etc. Goldenberg suggests that, in addition to thinking about the supply side of education, we research and think about influencing the demand side as well.

 

Why does Japan do better than us in mathematics? (Well, ok, some people argue that they don’t do better than us, but I’ll start by assuming that they do.) People point to curriculum; or teaching and lesson study; or national standards. Surely these all matter, but there may be more to it than that.

I’d never argue that curriculum isn’t of major importance. Curriculum is what I do. The often vitriolic wars over curricula in news and in courts tell us that the public also believes curriculum matters. The NSF funds it, and many of us, devote much of our lives to it, designing new models or analyzing existing ones. People differ about what good curriculum is, but all agree that it matters.

Ditto teaching. People argue about what’s good pedagogy and about the background teachers need; people even still try to finesse the problem of teacher quality by creative use of technologies; but all agree that the teaching is critical.

Sort-of ditto standards. For literally thousands of years, people have deplored the decay of standards (morality, mathematics, whatever). But the notion of The standards—for math ed, at least—is new. After NCTM’s The came many state The’s. NCLB led to nearly ubiquitous The’s. The Common Core effort hopes to reduce that Balkanization, but we don’t yet know what problems it will solve or create. Standards for schools may not be enough to control for the variables: curriculum, teaching, ed schools, and life opportunities (or lack thereof) to study for, but people broadly agree that some form of standards need to exist.

But back to Japan. They differ from us not just in curriculum, teaching, and the coherence that can come from greater centralization. They also differ in culture in ways that plausibly affect the mathematical learning of their children. For one thing, Japan has a lively puzzle culture! A quick web search turns up not only the familiar Sudoku, and increasingly popular KenKen, but a host of other puzzles. Our personal friends from Eastern Europe—Rumania, Bulgaria, Russia—often report how their families would joust verbally with riddles and other puzzles over dinner. We have puzzles, too, and they’re popular enough to appear in our newspapers and on supermarket checkout counters. But I wonder if they’re valued in the same way. Logic puzzles of the form “Amanda, Betsy, Carla…have cats named Eeyore, Fuzzy…. Fuzzy and Betsy eat the same things…. Who likes tuna fish sandwiches?” appear only in specialized puzzle magazines, and occasionally in schools on a rainy Friday afternoon (but only for students who have finished their “real” work). Oh, and in the Law School Admission Test! So, if you want your kid in law school, these puzzles are not dessert, but could be the main course. And what about KenKen? Nobody puts up with the same amount of arithmetic practice in a battery of arbitrary exercises, so curricula include less and less practice, so kids get less practice, so...(you get the idea). But people--even kid people--typically love KenKens. People like the feel of nailing a puzzle! That's why it's economically sensible for supermarkets (not your high-end intellectual bookstores) to stock up with puzzle books.

Japan and Rumania also believe that people can learn mathematics and that success comes from effort, not genes. In the U.S., we tend to talk as if some people have “mathematical minds”—and get it from their parents—and others just don’t.

It would be depressing to conclude that it’s all about culture if we had no control over our culture, but we do. We can change culture partly through schools. Instead of fighting drill-and-kill by eliminating practice, we can adopt drill-and-thrill methods. KenKen won’t solve all problems, but it can do a whole lot for elementary arithmetic computation. And we can treat solid intellectual exercise in the form of (thoughtfully selected!) puzzles not as enrichment for the already-rich—the kids who have finished—but as part of the staple diet of all children, to make them richer. But puzzles do not a whole curriculum make.

A big problem with curricular and pedagogical change is that it requires social change as well. We can’t focus attention just inside the schools: on materials, teachers, frameworks, pacing guides, and so on. We can’t focus only on the supply side of education. We also need projects that focus on the demand side, studying how to change what people expect—they currently expect only some kids to be any good at more than the rudiments of math—and we must change what they want. We must even change the popular definition of the word “math.” If you watch TV or read the Sunday comics, you know that it’s the subject you hate and can’t understand. If a kid happens to be blessed with a curriculum that is designed and taught so that the kid does like and understand it, someone—the kid’s parent or perhaps even the kid—will eventually complain that it can’t be the real thing! Change can’t “take” if the public—the people who staff the schools, vote on local school budgets, support or harass the teachers, stand on the school committee—doesn’t want it.

As for you and me, our typical areas of expertise are in mathematics, psychology, teaching, research, and curriculum design, not in changing the public will. But there are people who are experts at changing demand. Marketers and advertisers know how to sell people things they don’t need and don’t even want! Politicians also know how to change the discourse when they need to. Mentioning marketers and politicians invokes a sleazy image—power corrupts—but the same skills also serve good ends. We have projects that focus on change in the schools. What about projects devoted to changing what the public expects of schools? Projects that create a better brand for science and math, a brand that claims, as its sexy property, iPods and cell phones and cameras? And projects that work on adults’ beliefs as well as the beliefs of kids? That “sell” the idea that genes don’t create the bottom third of the class. NPR was recently was saying it was “like school, only fun.” What about selling the idea that school does not have to be boring to be good? And what about projects to inform media people who certainly didn’t intend to hurt education that their totally unconscious digs at math or school might actually be damaging? What about selling science through pediatricians? Or puzzling as part of anti-mental-obesity “get moving” campaigns? Or that valuable work can be play? We’re not the experts who can decide what technique to use, but we can take on this challenge and get the marketing experts to help. What about it?

Reflections on 2010 Conferences

Submitted by cadre-admin on Wed, 05/19/2010 - 1:21pm

Melissa is one of 8 fellows selected by CADRE to represent the next generation of STEM researchers and developers. She is a doctoral student and research assistant at the University of Washington and associated with Tool Systems to Support Progress toward Expert-like Teaching by Early Career Science Educators.

NARST 2010 Philadelphia

   For this year’s NARST conference in Philadelphia I had the opportunity to bring a high school teacher, Bethany Sjoberg, who has been a participant and collaborator on our research projects for the past four years. Having her attend sessions with me allowed me to see research in science education through new eyes as Bethany reflected about connections between conference presentations and her classroom practices. The highlight of NARST for us was a poster symposium: Developing the Skills and Practices of Modeling featuring work from researchers at Vanderbilt, Michigan State, and Northwestern examining how students reason with models and learn about models and modeling both within a specific science content domain and across various science domains. Additionally, these projects raise important questions about supporting teachers who are working to take a model-based approach to science teaching despite their own unfamiliarity with models and modeling.

    In his discussion of the projects, Bill Sandoval pointed to two questions that resonated with the work that I am currently doing with my research team. First, how can we shed light on the day-to-day decisions and practices made by researchers when working to support teachers learning to engage in ambitious pedagogical practices like model-based inquiry? Second, how can we expand our design research to build stronger theory about teacher learning and the development of instructional practices? Our team has learned so much over the past four years by working closely with teachers, listening to how they wrestle with students’ science ideas, and listening to how they talk to one another about their practice. As we listen to our teacher participants, we hear themes that were also raised within the poster symposium:

  • How can we navigate the tensions felt between the norms of taking a model-based approach to science teaching & learning and the norms typical of schooling?
  • How can we help teachers embark on the risky practice of allowing students to theorize and think abstractly for themselves?
  • How can we navigate the tension between working with students to generate consensus models while also supporting the development of students' individual models to explain phenomena?
  • How do we envision teachers working with students to explore competing models and explanations, and what are the roles of multiple, alternative models and explanations in lieu of priviledging normative, consensus models?

 

AERA 2010 Denver

   Two sessions stood out for me from my 2010 AERA experience. Each of these sessions raised questions – and potential lines of research – that are on the horizon for scholars in science and math education working closely with teachers.

Question #1: How can science and technology studies inform science education – and how might science education inform science and technology studies?

A panel of John Rudolph, Phil Bell, and Jonathan Osbourne chaired by Noah Feinstein with Dick Grandy as the discussant raised this question as they explored connections between literature in science studies and projects in science education. The panelists suggest that some major themes within STS may be of use for science education such as helping science educators engage in “boundary work” to re-define for themselves the kinds of ideas and practices that “count” in science and, particularly, in school science. As Phil Bell points out, science educators do not have to start from scratch – frameworks for thinking about scientific ideas and practices already exist in the STS literature and these can be helpful guides for practices such as argumentation, explanation, and modeling. Grandy raised a critical point that STS literature can help inform science education in two seemingly paradoxical ways: 1) it highlights the disunity of practices within the sciences affording broader horizons for science education, and 2) it points to a collection of common practices that unify the sciences informing some potential core practices for science education.

Question #2: How do science and math teacher leaders – people who work to support practicing science and math teachers – learn to become facilitators of teacher collaborative inquiry groups focused on improving reform-oriented practice?

This panel of scholars working with science and math teacher inquiry groups is examining an important question facing any of us who currently serve as the primary facilitator of teacher groups – how do we eventually turn these groups over to teacher leaders in order to scale up and promote self-sustaining teacher networks? The panelists’ projects converged on similar themes about specialized math/science content knowledge, discourse facilitation skills, and the development of an inquiry stance necessary for teacher leaders. Scholars on this panel are just beginning to understand how these teacher leaders learn – it will be fascinating to watch the emerging findings from Kazemi, et al.; Little, et al.; Borko, et al.; and Nelson, et al. As teacher collaborative inquiry groups continue to form, this line of research will become increasingly important.

 

 

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