Projects

Access to high quality STEM education is highly variable depending on where one lives. In addition, early career teachers need support during their first years of teaching to be successful and help them stay in the profession. This project aims to provide in-service and beginning elementary school teachers increased opportunities to refine their mathematics teaching to support minoritized youth in racially diverse rural communities in Georgia that have less access to elementary mathematics specialists. This project follows and supports both beginning teachers (BTs) and elementary mathematics coaches (EMCs) over 5 years to develop and refine their mathematics teaching and coaching, respectively, using equity-based tools to guide reflection and conversations about both the BTs’ instructional practices and the EMCs’ coaching practices.

This project involves a longitudinal, ethnographic study of children's mathematical performances from preschool to first grade in both formal classroom settings and informal settings at school and home. The study seeks to identify opportunities for mathematical learning, to map varied performances of mathematical competence, to chart changes in mathematical performance over time, and to design and assess the impact of case studies for teacher education.

This project investigates the STEM teacher pipeline and examine qualifications, from teacher candidates who express interest in teaching STEM through to the eventual career paths of teachers in the workforce. In doing so, the project examines how the supply of STEM teachers has changed over time, whether the supply is adequate in meeting the needs of a changing nation, the qualifications and credentials of STEM teachers, and the implications of the STEM teacher career paths for equity and serving high needs contexts and students.

This project will address the need to educate teachers and students to engage in asking questions, collecting and interpreting data, making claims, and constructing explanations about real-world problems that matter to them. The study will explore ways to enhance youths' learning experiences in secondary school classrooms (grades 6-12) by building a sustainable partnership between researchers and practitioners.

Research increasingly provides insights into the magnitude of mathematics teacher turnover, but has identified only a limited number of factors that influence teachers' career decisions and often fails to capture the complexity of the teacher labor market. This project will address these issues, building evidence-based theories of ways to improve the quality and equity of the distribution of the mathematics teaching workforce. 

This project investigates and expands teachers' learning to notice in two important ways. First, the research expands beyond teachers' noticing of written and verbal thinking to attend to gesture and other aspects of embodied and multimodal thinking. Second, the project focuses on algebraic thinking and seeks specifically to understand how teacher noticing relates to the content of algebra. Bringing together multimodal thinking and the mathematical ideas in algebra has the potential to support teachers in providing broader access to algebraic thinking for more students.

This CAREER project explores interrelated research questions: (1) What understandings of variability can provide conceptual support for the scheme of ideas that underlie statistical inference--making claims about a population on the basis of samples? (2) What conceptions about variability do students bring to study of data analysis and statistical reasoning in middle grades? (3) How can instruction support students in coming to develop understanding and skill in reasoning about variability?

This project will develop and study co-learning, community-engaged educational programs that center STEM education pipelines and pathways for gifted Black girls. The central aim is to bring about an actionable theory of change at the elementary level to foster a sense of belonging in STEM, early STEM exploration and development, and nurturing a STEM identity, through critical and culturally relevant experiential learning. The project will also develop curricular materials for gifted Black girls and their families (See Me in STEM) as well as professional development materials for teachers (Teachers as Talent Catalysts) as part of the educational integration plan.

This project is documenting how students with learning disabilities (LD) access and advance their conceptual understanding of fractions.  Rather than focusing on the knowledge students do not have, this work is focused on uncovering students' informal knowledge that can bridge to fractions and how instruction can be used to promote conceptual change. 

This project advances the understanding of teaching and learning of algebra in grades 6 through 12 by using a methodology that leverages the cumulative power of an analysis of many studies on a topic. This work will synthesize results aggregated from 40 years of research in the field of mathematics education and develop a unified framework to inform parents, students, teachers, other educators, and researchers.

Despite years of research and interventions to address inequities that are largely related to race, science education continues to perpetuate these inequities in both participation and outcomes in science. This CAREER project will address the need to provide science teachers with a framework for considering race and racial dynamics in science teaching as well as exemplars in science teaching and professional development to support teachers’ teaching identities and praxis.

This project will support teacher capacity for implementing mathematical modeling lessons by engaging teachers in co-planning and co-teaching with researchers skilled in Emergent Bilingual (EB) mathematics instruction. The outcomes of this project will be a framework for teaching mathematical modeling to EB students, teacher professional development materials that can be used widely to support EB mathematics teachers, and a massive open online course (MOOC) for teachers to support their continued learning about teaching mathematics modeling to EB students.

This project explores "backward transfer", or the ways in which new learning impacts previously-established ways of reasoning. The PI will observe and evaluate algebra I students as they learn quadratic functions and examine how different kinds of instruction about the new concept of quadratic functions helps or hinders students' prior mathematical knowledge of the previous concept of linear functions. This award will contribute to the field of mathematics education by expanding the application of knowledge transfer, moving it from only a forward focused direction to include, also, a backward focused direction.

The proposed project initiates new research and an integrated education plan to address specific problems in middle school mathematics classrooms by investigating (1) how to effectively differentiate instruction for middle school students at different reasoning levels; and (2) how to foster middle school students' algebraic reasoning and rational number knowledge in mutually supportive ways.

This project will investigate teachers' knowledge of noticing students' science thinking. The project will examine teacher noticing in practice, use empirical evidence to model the teacher knowledge involved, and design teacher learning materials informed by the model. The outcomes of this project will be a model of teachers' knowledge of noticing Appalachian students' thinking in science and the design of web-based interactive instructional materials supporting teachers' knowledge construction around noticing Appalachian students' thinking in science.

The project will examine how teachers reason about variation subsequent to focused instruction and contribute knowledge to in-service middle and secondary mathematics teacher education by targeting characteristics of professional development that might support teachers' reasoning about variation in increasingly sophisticated ways. The project will produce a coherent collection of shareable instructional materials for use in introductory statistics education and teacher education in statistics.

This project conducts a systematic and empirical (both quantitative and qualitative) longitudinal study of the factors that influence students' decisions at critical junctures in the educational pipeline. The goals are too (a) broaden participation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and (b) improve the recruitment, retention, and success of minority undergraduate men in STEM and STEM-related fields across colleges and universities in the United States.

Realizing the potential of preschool to address historical inequities demands a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the varied ways opportunities to learn play out for individual children within and across classrooms. The goal of this project is to illuminate the variability in opportunities for mathematics learning in early childhood through capturing the experiences of individual children over time. The goal is to understand how these children navigate opportunities to participate in mathematical activity, their perspectives of what knowing and doing mathematics entails, and the resources they draw upon to engage in mathematical practices.

This project aims to develop the knowledge to teach reasoning and proving with secondary teacher candidates, and to follow them into they first years of independent practice to better understand how they are using that knowledge.  The goals of the project are to better understand how beginning teachers' knowledge, dispositions, and proof-related practices evolve over time, and how the sociocultural context and support structures of the schools teachers are in influences their teaching of reasoning and proving.

This project examines student and teacher experiences with the de-tracking of math sequences in a public school district in Western Oregon. It examines how a district-wide cohort of middle school students, as individuals and in groups, identify with and define what it means to be good at math, and how these identities shift over time as they progress through math sequences. It also establishes a partnership between a mathematics education researcher and a school district (Research Practice Partnership) to study changes in pedagogy, define problems of teaching practice, and design solutions as the district transitions to de-tracked classes.

This project will develop a professional development model that allows rural secondary teachers to learn and develop computational thinking related teaching skills with long-term support and scaffolds in place to both build their knowledge and the long-term capacity of their school districts.

One of the most persistent challenges in education is the gap between research and classroom practice, meaning that research-informed recommendations and practices that could support students’ mathematics learning do not always reach the classroom. Improving how mathematics-focused education research is communicated to a teacher audience—using strategies that are useful and valuable from the teacher perspective—is one key avenue for mitigating consequences of the research-practice gap. This project will develop, assess, and refine innovative key abstracts (i.e., concise, infographic-type resources) for communicating mathematics-focused practitioner articles with a teacher audience. Teacher perspectives will be embedded throughout the project to inform key abstract design. The project also involves a collaboration with the university disability center to provide funded research opportunities in STEM education to university students with disabilities.

This program of research will examine how middle school pre-service teachers' knowledge of mathematical argumentation and proving develops in teacher preparation programs. The project explores the research question: What conceptions of mathematical reasoning and proving do middle school preservice teachers hold in situations that foster reasoning about change, proportionality, and proportional relationships, as they enter their mathematics course sequence in their teacher preparation program, and how do these conceptions evolve throughout the program?

This project focuses on how children learn to reason about three aspects of complex causality; probabilistic causation; action at a distance; and distributed causality;and how to best support the development of this reasoning in classrooms. Through microgenetic study across the school year with small numbers of students in grades K-6, the study will characterize children's reasoning at different ages and how it shifts over time and with different learning supports.

The main goal of this mathematics education research project is to determine through experimentation specific teaching strategies that can be used to support middle school students in drawing connections between mathematical representations (fractions and ratios). The potential instructional strategies were identified from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) video analyses study as the ones that best distinguished high performing countries from low performing countries.