Melissa Boston

This project will develop a technology platform that can streamline lesson planning and allow teachers to adapt resources to their students' needs. The project will design and investigate an AI-powered lesson plan tool for middle-grades mathematics teaching called Colleague. Using existing, open-access lesson plans that have been vetted in prior work, the project would refine the tool for generating math lesson plans and supporting teachers to iteratively improve their instruction. Streamlining lesson planning would open more time for teacher creativity and reduce job stress. The study would explore how teachers use Colleague to plan and adapt lessons, the influence on teaching, and the students' learning.

This project will develop a sustainable Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) model between the Worcester Public Schools (WPS) and the Learning Sciences Lab at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Together, WPI and WPS will build the collaborative infrastructure for conducting impactful STEM education research within WPS. Specifically, the RPP will establish and document shared infrastructural systematic processes and materials, brainstorm and facilitate research ideas that address pressing issues in mathematics education, and build a community of trust among researchers, administrators, teachers, and families to make future research and implementation, innovation, and collaboration more impactful, accessible, and efficient.

Scientific argumentation is one of the eight essential practices in the Next Generation Science Standards. Over the past decade, various methods have been employed to help middle-school students develop argumentation skills in formal learning environments. Despite these efforts, teachers continue to face challenges in motivating and engaging students, particularly in addressing the increasingly varied needs of students. Additionally, districts and schools struggle to integrate these research-based methods into their curriculum in ways that gain buy-in from teachers, students, and stakeholders. To address these challenges, this partnership development project brings together the West Aurora School District in Illinois and Northern Illinois University to pursue two primary goals: (1) co-construct a research and development plan focusing on ways to enhance support and effectiveness in the teaching practice of scientific argumentation through technology, and (2) develop a model for building a design research partnership between a school district and a mid-size public university.

Anxiety about math has increased for some students due to disruptions in their learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. This partnership development project involving Portland State University and the Tigard-Tualatin School District addresses pandemic-related learning challenges in middle school mathematics, with a focus on math anxiety. Across the yearlong project, the partners play equal roles in co-developing research, practice, and policy proposals aimed at enhancing math outcomes and reducing math anxiety among the district’s middle school students.

MIST is a five-year study of four large, urban districts implementing ambitious mathematics reform initiatives in the middle grades.  The study uses a mixed-methods research design to investigate how changes in the school and district settings in which mathematics teachers work influence their instructional practices, students' learning opportunities, and student achievement.  

The goals of this project are to 1) develop methods for analyzing data collected to document the institutional setting of mathematics teaching that are specific to equity and access for all middle school students to high quality mathematics instruction; and 2) develop an instrument for assessing the quality of mathematics instruction that focuses specifically on the extent to which all students are supported to substantially participate in academically rigorous mathematics.

Tomorrow's domestic STEM workforce demands that students bring the ability to explain real-world phenomena and solve problems collaboratively. In many school districts, a significant gap persists between this ambitious vision and the realities of current instruction. One promising approach to bridge this gap is the use of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM), which have been shown to improve science teaching and learning. However, school systems often face serious challenges in selecting, adopting, and implementing these materials in ways that lead to consistent implementation across classrooms and lasting change. This project will establish a research-practice partnership between the University of Colorado Boulder and the Weld RE-4 School District in Colorado to better understand and address these challenges. The project will generate new understandings that support the translation of research on how curriculum can improve teaching and learning into practice for a whole school district, and yield insights into how school districts navigate organizational dynamics and competing priorities during curriculum adoption.

The rapid onset of AI, and generative AI tools such as LLMs, amplify the need for AI literacies, including concepts, practices and ethics, for K-12 schools. Some AI literacy resources, such as AI4K12 and AI4ALL, have emerged, but it may be challenging for schools, particularly those in small districts, to navigate these resources. Furthermore, researchers need further guidance on how to support schools for AI literacy. These challenges for schools and researchers include how to coordinate planning across teachers, school leaders and researchers, how to implement across grade levels, classrooms, and content areas; how to provide training and preparation time to support lesson design and implementation; and how to support teachers in their own AI literacy. To address these needs, district leaders and teachers from Forest Park School District and researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago will engage in a one-year research practice partnership development to build a long-term RPP, co-design an AI literacy curriculum, and support professional development to implement the curriculum.