Projects

This project will investigate the potential benefits of interactive, dynamic visualization technologies in supporting science learning for middle school students, including ELLs. This project will identify design principles for developing such technology, develop additional ways to support student learning, and provide guidelines for professional development that can assist teachers in better serving linguistically diverse students. The project has the potential to transform traditional science instruction for all students, and to broaden their participation in science.

This project will investigate whether six urban middle schools are implementing highly effective science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs based on factors identified through relevant research and national reports on what constitutes exemplary practices in 21st century-focused schools.

This project addresses the need for a computationally-enabled STEM workforce by equipping teachers with the skills necessary to prepare students for future endeavors as computationally-enabled scientists and citizens, and by investigating the most effective ways to provide this instruction to teachers. The project also addresses the immediate challenge presented by NGSS to prepare middle school science teachers to implement rich computational thinking experiences within science classes.

This project will integrate Native Hawaiian cross-cultural practices to explore ways to help teachers know about and know how to connect resources of students' familiar worlds to their science teaching. This project will transform the ways teachers orient their teaching at the upper elementary and middle grades through professional development courses offered at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

This project will use video case studies to identify key strategies used by exemplary teachers to guide class discussions. The project will study teachers in the areas of high school mechanics and electricity, and middle school life sciences, and is designed to develop the constructs and language that will enable us to describe key discussion leading strategies.

The production of news stories and student-oriented instruction in the classroom are designed to increase student learning of STEM content through student-centered inquiry and reflections on metacognition. This project scales up the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs (SRL), a model that trains teens to produce video reports on important STEM issues from a youth perspective.

This project brings together leaders in simulation design and accessibility to develop and study interactive science simulations for diverse middle school students including those with sensory, mobility, or learning disabilities. The resulting simulations and research findings will help to address the significant disparity that exists between the achievement in science by students with and without disabilities.

This project will develop and study three week-long middle school lab units designed to teach spatial abilities using a blend of physical and virtual (computer-based) models. "ThinkSpace" labs will help students explore 3-dimensional astronomical phenomena in ways that will support both understanding of these topics and a more general spatial ability. Students will learn both through direct work with the lab unit interface and through succeeding discussions with their peers.

This project will convene stakeholders in STEM and early childhood education to discuss better integration of STEM in the early grades. PIs will begin with a phase of background research to surface critical issues in teaching and learning in early childhood education and STEM.  A number of reports will be produced including commissioned papers, vision papers, and a forum synthesis report.

This project investigates how real time formative feedback can be automatically composed from the results of computational analysis of student design artifacts and processes with the envisioned SmartCAD software. The project conducts design-based research on SmartCAD, which supports secondary science and engineering with three embedded computational engines capable of simulating the mechanical, thermal, and solar performance of the built environment.

This project directly addresses middle school teachers' understanding, practice, and teaching of modern scientific practice. Using the Project GUTS program and professional development model as a foundation, this project will design and develop a set of Resources, Models, and Tools (RMTs) that collectively form the basis for a comprehensive professional development (PD) program, then study teachers' experiences with the RMTs and assess how well the RMTs prepared teachers to implement the curriculum.

This project aims to build elementary age students' content knowledge in robotics and computer science more broadly by fostering their disciplinary engagement and participation within a humanoid robots-programming environment. Fourth and fifth grade students will participate in a semester long course with a final project that involves bringing the robot to classrooms of first and second grade students to demonstrate the robot's capabilities and promote their disciplinary engagement with robotics and computer science.

This project seeks to find ways to make the measurement sciences more useful to the production of intellective competence in diverse students of the STEM disciplines. A Study Group on Diversity, Equity and Excellence in Achievement and Assessment in STEM Education will be established to address a set of issues posed as critical to the future of assessment for education and will undertake a series of activities culminating in the production of a report.

This project builds on prior efforts to create teaching resources for high-school Advanced Placement Statistics teachers to use an open source statistics programming language called "R" in their classrooms. The project brings together datasets from a variety of STEM domains, and will develop exercises and assessments to teach students how to program in R and learn the underlying statistics concepts.

The Graphing Research on Inquiry with Data in Science (GRIDS) project will investigate strategies to improve middle school students' science learning by focusing on student ability to interpret and use graphs. GRIDS will undertake a comprehensive program to address the need for improved graph comprehension. The project will create, study, and disseminate technology-based assessments, technologies that aid graph interpretation, instructional designs, professional development, and learning materials.

This project will develop a modified virtual world and accompanying curriculum for middle school students to help them learn to more deeply understand ecosystems patterns and the strengths and limitations of experimentation in ecosystems science. The project will build upon a computer world called EcoMUVE, a Multi-User Virtual Environment or MUVE, and will develop ways for students to conduct experiments within the virtual world and to see the results of those experiments.

Computational and algorithmic thinking are new basic skills for the 21st century. Unfortunately few K-12 schools in the United States offer significant courses that address learning these skills. However many schools do offer robotics courses. These courses can incorporate computational thinking instruction but frequently do not. This research project aims to address this problem by developing a comprehensive set of resources designed to address teacher preparation, course content, and access to resources.

Using design-based research, with teachers as design partners, the project will create and refine project-based, hands-on robotics curricula such that science and math content inherent in robotics and related engineering design practices are learned. To provide teachers with effective models to capitalize on robotics for elucidating science and math concepts, a design-based Professional Development program will be built using principles of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK).

This project responds to the need for technology-enhanced assessments that promote the critical practice of scientific argumentation--making and explaining a claim from evidence about a scientific question and critically evaluating sources of uncertainty in the claim. It will investigate how to enhance this practice through automated scoring and immediate feedback in the context of two high school curriculum units--climate change and fresh-water availability--in schools with diverse student populations. 

This project will develop curricula for environmental/geoscience disciplines for high-school classrooms. The Model My Watershed (MMW) v2 app will bring new environmental datasets and geospatial capabilities into the classroom, to provide a cloud-based learning and analysis platform accessible from a web browser on any computer or mobile device, thus overcoming the cost and technical obstacles to integrating Geographic Information System technology in secondary education.

Computational and algorithmic thinking are new basic skills for the 21st century. Unfortunately few K-12 schools in the United States offer significant courses that address learning these skills. However many schools do offer robotics courses. These courses can incorporate computational thinking instruction but frequently do not. This research project aims to address this problem by developing a comprehensive set of resources designed to address teacher preparation, course content, and access to resources.

This Engineering Teacher Pedagogy project implements and assesses the promise of an extended professional development model coupled with curriculum enactment to develop teacher pedagogical skills for integrating engineering design into high school biology and technology education classrooms. 

In this project, researchers will collaborate to enhance understanding of influences on learning, and improve teaching and learning in high school and middle school STEM classes. They will leverage the latest tools for data processing and many different streams of data that can be collected in technology-rich classrooms to (1) identify classroom factors that affect learning and (2) explore how to use that data to automatically track development of students' understanding and capabilities over time.

This project will (1) develop and test a modeling tool and accompanying instructional materials, (2) explore how to support students in building and using models to explain and predict phenomena across a range of disciplines, and (3) document the sophistication of understanding of disciplinary core ideas that students develop when building and using models in grades 6-12. 

SciMath-DLL is an innovative preschool professional development (PD) model that integrates supports for dual language learners (DLLs) with high quality science and mathematics instructional offerings. It engages teachers with workshops, classroom-based coaching, and professional learning communities. Based on initial evidence of promise, the SciMath-DLL project will expand PD offerings to include web-based materials.