Supporting Teachers in Responsive Instruction for Developing Expertise in Science (Collaborative Research: Linn)

This project takes advantage of advanced technologies to support science teachers to rapidly respond to diverse student ideas in their classrooms. Students will use web-based curriculum units to engage with models, simulations, and virtual experiments to write multiple explanations for standards-based science topics. The project will also design planning tools for teachers that will make suggestions relevant research-proven instructional strategies based on the real-time analysis of student responses.

Full Description

Many teachers want to adapt their instruction to meet student learning needs, yet lack the time to regularly assess and analyze students' developing understandings. The Supporting Teachers in Responsive Instruction for Developing Expertise in Science (STRIDES) project takes advantage of advanced technologies to support science teachers to rapidly respond to diverse student ideas in their classrooms. In this project students will use web-based curriculum units to engage with models, simulations, and virtual experiments to write multiple explanations for standards-based science topics. Advanced technologies (including natural language processing) will be used to assess students' written responses and summaries their science understanding in real-time. The project will also design planning tools for teachers that will make suggestions relevant research-proven instructional strategies based on the real-time analysis of student responses. Research will examine how teachers make use of the feedback and suggestions to customize their instruction. Further we will study how these instructional changes help students develop coherent understanding of complex science topics and ability to make sense of models and graphs. The findings will be used to refine the tools that analyze the student essays and generate the summaries; improve the research-based instructional suggestions in the planning tool; and strengthen the online interface for teachers. The tools will be incorporated into open-source, freely available online curriculum units. STRIDES will directly benefit up to 30 teachers and 24,000 students from diverse school settings over four years.

Leveraging advances in natural language processing methods, the project will analyze student written explanations to provide fine-grained summaries to teachers about strengths and weaknesses in student work. Based on the linguistic analysis and logs of student navigation, the project will then provide instructional customizations based on learning science research, and study how teachers use them to improve student progress. Researchers will annually conduct at least 10 design or comparison studies, each involving up to 6 teachers and 300-600 students per year. Insights from this research will be captured in automated scoring algorithms, empirically tested and refined customization activities, and data logging techniques that can be used by other research and curriculum design programs to enable teacher customization.


 Project Videos

2021 STEM for All Video Showcase
 

Title: Web-based Personalized Science Units Empowering Anti-Racism

Presenter(s): Marcia Linn, Sarah Bichler, Kelly Billings, Allison Bradford, Libby Gerard, Rui Li, & Jonathan Lim-Breitbart

2020 STEM for All Video Showcase
 

Title: STRIDES: Customizing Online Curricula for Distance Learning

Presenter(s): Libby Gerard, Sarah Bichler, Phillip Boda, Allison Bradford, Emily Harrison, Jennifer King Chen, Jonathan Lim-Breitbart, Marcia Linn, & Korah Wiley


Publications:

Presentations:

  • Bradford, A., Bichler, S., & Linn, M.C. (2021). Designing a Workshop to Support Teacher Customization of Curricula. Proceedings of 15th International Conference of the Learning Sciences – ICLS 2021. International Society of the Learning Sciences, 2021 https://repository.isls.org/bitstream/1/7506/1/482-489.pdf

  • Gerard, L., Bichler, S., Billings, K., & Linn, M.C. (2022). Science Teachers Use of a Learning Analytics Dashboard To Design Responsive Instruction. Paper accepted for presentation at the American Education Research Association annual meeting

  • Billings, K., Gerard, L., & Linn, M.C. (2021). Improving teacher noticing of students’ science ideas. In E. de Vries, J. Ahn, & Y. Hod (Eds.), Proceedings of 15th International Conference of the Learning Sciences – ICLS 2021 (pp. 100–115). International Society of the Learning Sciences, 2021 https://repository.isls.org//handle/1/7379

  • Riordan, B., Bichler, S., Bradford, A., King Chen, J., Wiley, K., Gerard, L., & Linn, M.C. (2020). An empirical investigation of neural methods for content scoring of science explanations. Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, Association for Computational Linguistics, Seattle, WA.

  • Gerard, L., Wiley, K., Bradford, A., Chen, J. K., Lim-Breitbart, J., & Linn, M. (2020). Impact of a Teacher Action Planner that Captures Student Ideas on Teacher Customization Decisions. In Gresalfi, M. and Horn, I. S. (Eds.), The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences, 14th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2020, Volume 4 (pp. 2077-2084). Nashville, Tennessee: International Society of the Learning Sciences. [https://repository.isls.org//handle/1/6496 ]

  • Riordan, B., Cahill, A.,Chen, J. K., Wiley, K., Bradford, A., Gerard, L., & Linn, M. C. (2020). Identifying NGSS-Aligned Ideas in Student Science Explanations. In Paper presented at the Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2020, Volume 34, Palo Alto, CA. Awarded Best Paper for the Artificial Intelligence for Education Workshop (AI4EDU)

  • Gerard, L., & Linn, M.C., (2020). Improving Guidance for Classroom Argumentation in Science.  Paper accepted for presentation at the annual international conference of the National Association of Research in Science Teaching (NARST), Strand: Science Teaching, Middle and High School, Portland, OR

  • Linn, Marcia C. “Enhancing Teacher Guidance with an Authoring and Customizing Environment (ACE) to Promote Student Knowledge Integration (KI)” 20th Shanghai International Curriculum Forum. Shanghai, China (November 11, 2022). [by Zoom]

  • Linn, Marcia C. "Leveraging Digital Technologies to Promote Knowledge Integration and Strengthen Teaching and Learning” International Conference on Digital Transformation in K-12 Education, Shanghai, China (November 2022). [by Zoom]


PROJECT KEYWORDS

Project Materials