Projects

This project is assessing the capacities needed by elementary teachers for productive use of mathematics curriculum materials. The project is guided by the assumption that well-designed curriculum programs have the potential to contribute to improvement in mathematics learning opportunities in K-12 classrooms. Yet, minimal research has examined the kind of knowledge and capacities necessary for teachers to use these resources productively. The project will undertake such research and develop tools to assess these capacities.

This project is exploring how curricula and assessment using dynamic, interactive scientific visualizations of complex phenomena can ensure that all students learn significant science content. Dynamic visualizations provide an alternative pathway for students to understand science concepts, which can be exploited to increase the accessibility of a range of important science concepts. Computer technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to design curricula and assessments using visual technologies and to explore them in research, teaching, and learning.

The overriding goal of this project is to strengthen the “T” and “E” components of STEM in high school courses taken by a majority of students. Our hypothesis is that increasing the presence of engineering and technological design at the high school level, specifically by incorporating engineering activities in high school biology and chemistry classes, will improve students’ understanding of science concepts and strengthen students’ 21st century skills more than traditional methods.

The Service, Teaching, and Research (STaR) Project supports networking of early career professionals in mathematics education in higher education. Summer conferences and academic year networking allow time for trust and collegiality to develop, and thereby provide opportunities for important issues/challenges to be identified and addressed. This sustained effort promotes networking, constructs an environment that allows working research groups to be established, and provides time for significant professional growth and leadership capacity to flourish.

This project hypothesizes that learners must have access to the real work of scientists if they are to learn both about the nature of science and to do inquiry themselves. It explores the question "How can informal science education institutions best design resources to support teachers, school administrators, and families in the teaching and learning of students to conduct scientific investigations and better understand the nature of science?"

This project investigates how high school students' understanding about design thinking compares to that of experienced practitioners and whether participation in a multiyear sequence of courses focused on engineering correlates with changes in design thinking. The project builds upon the Standards for Technological Literacy and courses developed at the University of Colorado and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Founded on ethnomathematics research findings, this project aims to increase the mathematics learning of first-, fourth-, and seventh-grade elementary school Micronesian students. Plans are to develop and field-test culturally and linguistically sensitive grade-level curriculum units in specific mathematics topics, such as number and counting, division of whole numbers and fractions, and elements of geometry, focused on the indigenous mathematics learning experiences of eight distinct islands in the Pacific region.

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 is carrying out a research and development initiative to increase the success rates of our most at-risk high school students—ninth-grade students enrolled in algebra classes but significantly underprepared for high school mathematics. It will also result in new understandings about effective approaches for teaching mathematics to struggling students and about effective ways for implementing these approaches at scale, particularly in urban school districts.

This project is studying effects of linguistically sensitive science instructional materials by translating, enhancing, and evaluating culturally relevant and linguistically appropriate Collaborative Online Projects (originally written in Spanish) for middle school Spanish-speaking English Language Learners.

This project is designed to enhance and study the development of elementary science teachers’ skills in managing productive classroom talk in inquiry-based physical science studies of matter. The project hypothesizes that aligning professional learning with conceptually-driven curricula and emphasizing the development of scientific discourse changes classroom culture and increases student learning. The project is developing new Web-based resources, Talk Science PD, to help elementary teachers facilitate scientific discourse.

This research and development project provides resources for ninth-grade mathematics students and teachers by developing, piloting, and field-testing intervention modules designed as supplementary materials for Algebra 1 classes (e.g., double-period algebra). Rather than developing isolated skills and reviewing particular topics, these materials aim to foster the development of mathematical habits of mind—in particular, the algebraic habit of abstracting from calculations, a key unifying idea in the transition from arithmetic to algebra.

This exploratory research and development project addresses the question, "Can students develop an understanding of the ecological nature of science (ENOS) in high school biology and environmental science classes that is useful and productive in environmental citizenship?" To address this question, the project will identify the essential elements of ENOS, investigate how these can be taught and learned, and explore how ENOS skills and understandings are used to enhance environmental citizenship.

The Data Games project has developed software and curriculum materials in which data generated by students playing computer games form the raw material for mathematics classroom activities. Students play a short video game, analyze the game data, develop improved strategies, and test their strategies in another round of the game.

This project is developing and testing assessments for improving instruction, exploring how students can learn challenging content, and enhancing the ability of teachers to provide this content. The guiding question is, Can students develop an understanding of the ecological nature of science (ENOS) in high school biology and environmental science classes that is useful and productive in environmental citizenship?

This project is using data from interviews with 160 K-12 students and 20 adults to describe common understandings and progressions of development for negative number concepts and operations. The project is motivated by the widely acknowledged finding that students have difficulty mastering key concepts and skills involved in work with integers.

This project convenes K-12 teachers working with underrepresented populations of students at the 2009 Grace Hopper Celebration and produces a workshop and white paper designed to (1) instigate discussion of equity and computer science curricula; (2) create knowledge sharing opportunities on concrete solutions grounded in teachers’ articulated needs; (3) disseminate these solutions to a broad audience of teachers, STEM practitioners, and interested stakeholders; and (4) evaluate the effectiveness of these solutions in classrooms.

SmartGraphs activities run in a web browser; there is no software to download or install. SmartGraphs allows students to interact with on-screen graphs to learn about linear equations, the motion of objects, population dynamics, global warming, or other STEM topics that use scatter plots or line graphs. Teachers and students may also use and share existing activities, which are released under a Creative Commons license (see http://www.concord.org/projects/smartgraphs#curriculum).

This project is producing research syntheses that summarize and make available to practitioners results from research on effective mathematics curricular interventions, teaching practices, and teacher professional development that have been designed to improve achievement by students in Title 1 programs. The project’s goal is to bring together the best resources in both mathematics education and Title I so that programs are better able to serve the mathematical learning and instructional needs of Title I schools.

This project is developing, designing, and testing materials for professional development leaders (e.g., teacher educators, district mathematics specialists, secondary mathematic department chairs) to use in their work with secondary mathematics teachers. The aim is to help those teachers analyze the discourse patterns of their own classrooms and improve their skills in creating discourse patterns that emphasize high-level mathematical explanation, justification, and argumentation.

This project will develop video-case modules for use in pre-service teacher preparation programs. Modules will target specific grade bands (K-3, 4-5, 6-8) and address standards-based content domains, to help future teachers deepen their content knowledge, pedagogic skills and ability to analyze student thinking. The cases will illustrate reform classroom practices and more traditional instruction, include interviews with teachers and students, and incorporate a set of analytic tasks that promote users' critical observations of the cases.

This project is developing new instructional materials for middle school earth science classes that incorporate emerging cyber-enabled technologies such as Google Earth as a transformative data analysis tool. The materials emphasize the use of claims, evidence, and reasoning in the exploration of volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, leading students through a process of discovery to help them build a deeper understanding of the driving forces and resulting manifestations of plate tectonics.

This project draws from the expertise of a fully collaborative educator-scientist team to create learning progressions, curricular units and assessment instruments towards large scale research on the teaching and learning of climate change and impacts by 7-12^th graders in primarily under-resourced schools. Products include eight week curricular units, IPCC-compliant simplified future scenarios, an online interface with guided predictive distribution modeling, and research results.

Current curriculum materials for elementary science students and teachers fail to provoke the following essential questions during science instruction: What is evidence? Why do you need evidence? The goal of this project is to identify whether and how elementary school students formulate answers to these questions and develop concepts of evidence and understandings of the nature of scientific evidence.

This project builds and tests applications tied to the school curriculum that integrate the sciences with mathematics, computational thinking, reading and writing in elementary schools. The investigative core of the project is to determine how to best integrate computing across the curriculum in such a way as to support STEM learning and lead more urban children to STEM career paths.