Early State/Exploratory

Based on findings from research on effective science teaching supporting the notion that meaningful learning occurs when teachers attend to students' thinking, this project will conduct an in-depth investigation of teachers' knowledge of noticing students' science thinking in terms of what they do and say, to not only attend to their ideas, but also to make sense of and respond to those ideas. The work will be grounded on the premise that there is a relationship between teachers' practice and knowledge, and that it is possible to observe practice in order to infer knowledge. The project will examine teacher noticing in practice, use empirical evidence to model the specialized teacher knowledge involved, and design teacher learning materials informed by the model. The setting of the study will include an existing school-university partnership serving diverse student populations in Appalachian communities, where students significantly underperform nationally in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics areas across grades levels. It will target fifth grade science teachers' noticing their students' thinking as they engage in science learning in six rural and semi-rural elementary schools.

The three research questions will be: (1) What disciplinary ideas in students' thinking do elementary teachers notice in practice?; (2) What knowledge do elementary teachers draw on when noticing the disciplinary ideas in students' thinking in practice?; and (3) How does a set of web-based interactive instructional materials support teachers' knowledge construction around noticing the disciplinary ideas in students' thinking in science? In order to investigate teachers' noticing students' thinking, and answer the research questions, the project will use two wearable technologies to collect data of teachers' "in-the-moment" noticing while engaged in planning, instructional, and assessment activities. One is a point-of-view digital video system consisting of three parts: a small video camera, a hand-held remote, and a separate recording module. The other is an audio-recording wristband with a recording mode allowing the user to capture previous one-minute loops of audio data. An audio loop is saved whenever the user taps the wristband. Data will be analyzed for evidence of students' disciplinary knowledge and skills in order to give insight of teachers' knowledge involved in noticing each instance using the three interconnected dimensions featured in "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" (National Research Council, 2012). The project will consist of four strands of work: (1) empirically investigating teachers' noticing of students' thinking; (2) developing an initial conceptual model of teachers' knowledge of noticing students' thinking; (3) conducting design-based research to develop instructional materials supporting teachers' knowledge construction around noticing students' thinking in science; and (4) producing and disseminating these instructional materials through an interactive web-based platform. The main outcomes of this project will be (a) an empirically grounded model of fifth grade teachers' knowledge of noticing Appalachian students' thinking in science; and (b) the design of web-based interactive instructional materials supporting fifth grade teachers' knowledge construction around noticing Appalachian students' thinking in science. These outcomes will serve as the foundation for a more comprehensive future research agenda testing and refining the initial model and instructional materials in other learning environments in order to eventually contribute to a practice-based theory of teachers' knowledge of noticing students' thinking in science to inform and impact science teaching practice. An advisory board will oversee the project's progress, and an external evaluator will conduct both formative and summative evaluation.

The Discovery Research K-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools (RMTs). Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.

Developing Integrated Elementary Science, Engineering, and Language Arts Curricula Aligned with Next Generation Science Standards is an exploratory project to conduct a study to develop and field-test curricula integrating science, engineering, and language arts at the elementary level. Research and Curriculum Development team consisting of master elementary science teachers, university professors including science, engineering, and science teacher education faculty, and a science education post doc or graduate student will engage in developing the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) aligned curricula integrating science, engineering, and language arts, and publishing STEM education research. The importance of this project will be the development of curricula integrating science, engineering, and language arts at the elementary level. Lesson plans or teaching activities in the integrated curricula will be written in practitioner article format. In the NGSS the engineering design is raised to the same level as scientific inquiry and included as a vital element of science education. This integrated approach aims to provide three-dimensional learning experience as specified in the NGSS to elementary students while meaningfully integrating engineering, science, reading, and writing through real life engineering design problems. The NGSS aligned curricula that will be developed in this project can also be used in other states that adopted the NGSS.

An Integrated curriculum for grades 1-2 will be developed in year 1. In year 2, the project will develop a curriculum for grades 3-5. Each year, the project will develop and field-test a new curriculum, and provide professional development organized around the integrated curriculum to 20 elementary teachers at the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Given the changes in instructional practices needed to support high quality mathematics teaching and learning based on college and career readiness standards, school districts need to provide professional learning opportunities for teachers that support those changes. The project will build a coherent and scalable plan for providing these opportunities in high school mathematics departments, a traditionally difficult unit of organizational change. Based on the TRUmath framework, characterizing the five essential dimensions of powerful mathematics classrooms, the project brings together a focus on curricular materials that support teaching, Lesson Study protocols and materials, and a professional learning community-based professional development model. The project will design and revise professional development and coaching guides and lesson study mathematical resources built around the curricular materials. The project will study changes in instructional practice and impact on student learning. By documenting the supports used in the Oakland Unified School District where the research and development will be conducted, the resources can be used by other districts and in similar work by other research-practice partnerships.

This project hypothesizes that the quality of classroom instruction can be defined by five dimensions - quality of the mathematics; cognitive demand of the tasks; access to mathematics content in the classroom; student agency, authority, and identity; and uses of assessment. The project will use an iterative design process to develop and refine a suite of tool, including a conversation guide to support productive dialogue between teachers and coaches, support materials for building site-based professional learning materials, and formative assessment lessons using Lesson Study as a mechanism to enact reforms of these dimensions. The study will use a pre-post design and natural variation to student the relationships between these dimensions, changes in teachers' instructional practice, and student learning using hierarchical linear modeling with random intercept models with covariates. Qualitative of the changes in teachers' instructional practices will be based on coding of observations based on the TRUmath framework. The study will also use qualitative analysis techniques to identify themes from surveys and interviews on factors that promote or hinder the effectiveness of the intervention.

Ensuring that beginning teachers are "classroom-ready" requires assessments that efficiently and validly evaluate proficiency in teaching. This project explores assessments involving simulated students as a way to assess teaching practice, which could provide an important complement, or alternative, to directly assessing teaching practice in classrooms. This form of assessment has the potential to provide a way to avoid onerous expense, logistics, and other difficulties of assessments happening in classrooms. The project will address questions about the development of performance expectations for elementary mathematics teachers, the extent to which the performance of the "student" role can be standardized across different performance contexts, and different approaches for generating teaching scenarios. The assessments will focus on the teaching practices of eliciting and interpreting students' mathematical thinking. The project will support: (1) establishing the validity of the assessment as a means to assess readiness to teach elementary mathematics and (2) providing the necessary foundation for scaling research and the use of simulation assessments. 

The goal of this project is generating, calibrating, and studying standardized simulations of clinical performance of mathematics teaching. The strategy is to investigate three components of the simulation assessment that will enable its broader use in the field. One component will focus on approaches that use different foundations (wisdom of practice, interactions with children, and learning trajectories research) for the design of simulations that are authentic and provide robust information about teaching. Data on the ways in which each approach supplies resources needed for assessment development will be compared. Another component will focus on the degree to which the role of the student can be standardized given the dynamics of teaching. Data on the responses of standardized students, who have similar initial training, to different situational categories will be analyzed. A final component will be establishing a basis for calibrating performance expectations for simulations linked to key points in a teacher's career trajectory (early career teachers, experienced teachers, "accomplished" teachers). Data on the performance of teachers at different points in their careers on the same assessment simulations will be compared. This study of components impacting assessment design will result in a more robust foundation for further development of, and further research on, teaching simulation assessments. The Discovery Research K-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools (RMTs). Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.