Projects

This study examines the impact of the newly revised Advanced Placement (AP) Biology and Chemistry courses on students' understanding of and ability to utilize scientific inquiry, on students' confidence in engaging in college-level material, and on students’ enrollment and persistence in college STEM majors. The project provides estimates of the impact of students' AP-course taking on their progress into postsecondary educational experiences and their intent to continue to prepare to be future engineers and scientists.

This project will engage teams of students and teachers of grades 7-12 in four competitive Challenges to design innovative strategies for carbon mitigation in areas such as transportation, agriculture or energy use. The project expands the typical boundaries of schools by enabling teams of students in multiple locations to collaborate in model-based reasoning through online discussion forums, using social media, and crowdsourcing ideas to construct possible solutions to environmental challenges. Project research will examine the impacts of the project on student learning and engagement.

This project envisions a future of work where advanced technologies provide automated, job-embedded, individualized feedback to drive professional learning of the future worker. To achieve this goal, it addresses a fundamental question: Are evaluative or non-evaluative feedback systems more effective in driving professional learning? This question will be tested on professionals where objective, fine-grained feedback is especially critical to improvement--the teaching professions. This research will be situated within English and language arts (ELA) instruction in middle and high school classrooms, where underperformance and inequality in literacy outcomes are persistent problems facing the U.S. Current methods of supporting teacher learning through feedback are sparse, cumbersome, subjective, and evaluative. Thus, a major reconceptualization is needed to provide feedback mechanisms that- meaningfully affect teacher practice and are accessible to all. In partnership with TeachFX, an industry leader in technology-enabled instructional feedback, this project will work with teachers to design and test systems of automated feedback. Insights from the study will lead to feedback systems that empower teaching professionals, generate continued professional learning, and ultimately, increase student achievement.

This conference focuses on the use of virtual/mixed reality simulation in the preparation of secondary science teachers. The conference convenes experts in simulation in teacher preparation, practicing high school teachers, and teacher candidates to engage in a design process related to mixed reality simulations. Conference attendees will identify important gaps in science teacher preparation and design prototype simulation environments for addressing those gaps.

This project will develop and test a digital platform for middle school mathematics classrooms to help students deepen and communicate their understanding of mathematics. The digital platform will allow students to collaboratively create representations of their mathematics thinking, incorporate ideas from other students, and share their work with the class.

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. 

This project is developing lessons to engage students in grades 1-5 in engineering activities integrated with their science lessons. The project addresses the need to develop a broad understanding of what engineers do and the uses and implications of the technologies they create. The goals of the project are to increase the technological literacy of the students and to increase elementary teacher’s understanding of technology and engineering, to enable them to teach these subjects.

Project staff are developing modular instructional materials for students. The materials are designed to increase the awareness of and interest in career opportunities in engineering and technology. The modules use authentic, real-world engineering applications and hands-on experiences to build problem-solving skills and contribute to the technological literacy of secondary students. The modules specifically target the ITEA Content Standards for Technological Literacy and related benchmarks.

This project creates, tests and revises two-six week prototypical modules for middle school technology education classes, using the unifying themes and important social contexts of food and water. The modules employ engineering design as the core pedagogy and integrate content and practices from the standards for college and career readiness.

This project is revising and field testing six existing modules and developing, pilot testing, and field testing two engineering modules for required middle school science and mathematics classes: Catch Me if You Can! with a focus on seventh grade life science; and Creating Bioplastics targeting eighth grade physical science. Each module addresses an engineering design challenge of relevance to industries in the region and fosters the development of engineering habits of mind.

Society has grown to rely on smart, embedded, and interconnected systems. This has created a great need for well-qualified and motivated engineers, scientists, and technicians who can design, develop, and deploy innovative microelectronics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, which drive these systems. This project will address the need for a more robust computer science and engineering workforce by broadening access to microelectronics and AI education leveraging the cutting-edge technologies of Tiny Machine Learning and low-cost microcontroller systems in diverse high schools. The goal of this project is to engage high-school students and teachers from underresourced communities in the design and creative application of AI-enabled smart, embedded technologies, while supporting their engineering identity development and preparing them for the STEM jobs of tomorrow.

Society has grown to rely on smart, embedded, and interconnected systems. This has created a great need for well-qualified and motivated engineers, scientists, and technicians who can design, develop, and deploy innovative microelectronics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, which drive these systems. This project will address the need for a more robust computer science and engineering workforce by broadening access to microelectronics and AI education leveraging the cutting-edge technologies of Tiny Machine Learning and low-cost microcontroller systems in diverse high schools. The goal of this project is to engage high-school students and teachers from underresourced communities in the design and creative application of AI-enabled smart, embedded technologies, while supporting their engineering identity development and preparing them for the STEM jobs of tomorrow.

Society has grown to rely on smart, embedded, and interconnected systems. This has created a great need for well-qualified and motivated engineers, scientists, and technicians who can design, develop, and deploy innovative microelectronics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, which drive these systems. This project will address the need for a more robust computer science and engineering workforce by broadening access to microelectronics and AI education leveraging the cutting-edge technologies of Tiny Machine Learning and low-cost microcontroller systems in diverse high schools. The goal of this project is to engage high-school students and teachers from underresourced communities in the design and creative application of AI-enabled smart, embedded technologies, while supporting their engineering identity development and preparing them for the STEM jobs of tomorrow.

This research investigates how state-of-the-art creative and pedagogical agents can improve students' learning, attitudes, and engagement with computer science. The project will be conducted in high school classrooms using EarSketch, an online computer science learning environments that engages learners in making music with JavaScript or Python code. The researchers will build the first co-creative learning companion, Cai, that will scaffold students with pedagogical strategies that include making use of learner code to illustrate abstraction and modularity, suggesting new code to scaffold new concepts, providing help and hints, and explaining its decisions.

This project develops and assesses the effectiveness of integrating three computation-based technologies into curricular modules: agent-based modeling (ABM), real-world sensing, and collaborative classroom networks. The STEM disciplines addressed are life sciences and physical sciences at middle and high school levels, specifically Evolution, Population Biology/Ecology, Kinetic Molecular Theory, and Electromagnetism.

Providing students with exposure to high quality computational thinking (CT) activities within science classes has the possibility to create transformative educational experiences that will prepare students to harness the power of CT for authentic problems. By building upon foundational research in human-AI partnership for classroom support and effective practices for integrating CT in science, this collaborative research project will advance understanding of how to empower teachers to lead computationally enriched science activities with adaptive pedagogical tools.

Providing students with exposure to high quality computational thinking (CT) activities within science classes has the possibility to create transformative educational experiences that will prepare students to harness the power of CT for authentic problems. By building upon foundational research in human-AI partnership for classroom support and effective practices for integrating CT in science, this collaborative research project will advance understanding of how to empower teachers to lead computationally enriched science activities with adaptive pedagogical tools.

This project builds on a successful introductory computer science curriculum, called Scratch Encore, to explore ways to support teachers in bringing together—or harmonizing—existing Scratch Encore instructional materials with themes that reflect the interests, cultures, and experiences of their students, schools, and communities. In designing these harmonized lessons, teachers create customized activities that resonate with their students while retaining the structure and content of the original Scratch Encore lesson.

This project conducts interdisciplinary research to advance understanding of embodied learning as it applies to STEM topics across a range of current technology-based learning environments (e.g., desktop simulations, interactive whiteboards, and 3D interactive environments). The project has two central research questions: How are student knowledge gains impacted by the degree of embodied learning and to what extent do the affordances of different technology-based learning environments constrain or support embodied learning for STEM topics?

This is a planning effort to explore future directions and innovations related to educational design in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education in partnership with the International Society for Design and Development in Education. The planning activity will engage a core group of ISDDE principals in the articulation and examination of design processes for the Transforming STEM Learning program at NSF with a goal of developing an agenda for further discussion and research conceptualization.

In this project, over 500 elementary education majors will team with engineering majors to teach engineering design to over 1,600 students from underrepresented groups. These standards-based lessons will emphasize student questioning, constructive student-to-student interactions, and engineering design processes, and they will be tailored to build from students' interests and strengths.

This project is conducting repeated randomized control trials of an approach to high school geometry that utilizes Dynamic Geometry (DG) software and supporting instructional materials to supplement ordinary instructional practices. It compares effects of that intervention with standard instruction that does not make use of computer drawing tools.

This project will investigate how complex systems concepts supported by innovative curricular resources, technology applications and a comprehensive research and development structure can assist student learning in the domain of biology by providing a unifying theme across scales of time and space. The project seeks to address four areas of critical need in STEM education: biological sciences, complex systems, computational modeling, and equal access for all.

Twelve fifth and sixth grade science teacher specialists and their students in a high needs district in Ohio are engaged in a design-based research project within a three-year professional development effort with faculty in several departments at the University of Cincinnati to study how the engineering design process can be used effectively as a pedagogical strategy in science instruction to improve student interest, learning and skill development.

This project represents a new approach to quality assessment of K-12 science and engineering learning experiences. By updating and expanding the Dimensions of Success (DoS) observation tool initially established for informal science learning settings to middle school science and engineering classrooms (DoS-MSSE), the project will create and implement a sustainable and scalable system of support for teachers who are learning how to implement the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Framework for K-12 effectively and equitably.