Curriculum & Instruction Active Awards
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Dr. Fran ArbaughNational Science Foundation This project will assess the effectiveness of an early field experience model for secondary prospective teachers (PSTs), initially developed and tested at Michigan State University with prior NSF support. The model, called the University Teaching Experience (UTE), involves mathematics teacher educators serving as mentor teachers for PSTs as they teach in an undergraduate gateway mathematics course. This IUSE Development and Implementation for Engaged Student Learning project will have two broad aims. First, the project will involve collaboration across three different teacher preparation institutions to assess the portability of the UTE model to a wider range of university-based teacher preparation institutions. Second, the project will empirically assess the effectiveness of the UTE model in supporting the development of PSTs' understanding of the practices of eliciting and responding to student thinking, both of which are high-leverage teaching practices (NCTM, 2014; Smith & Stein, 2011) and are essential for achieving ambitious learning outcomes. |
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Dr. Amy CrossonInstitute of Education Sciences The purpose of this project for the English Learners program is to develop and document the feasibility and effectiveness of an intervention for teaching academic vocabulary to English Learners (ELs) in middle school. The key innovation on which the program will be based is instruction is lexical morphology, which is teaching word meanings and relationships between words through their Latin roots. The intervention will draw features from our existing intervention for native English speaking adolescents, Robust Academic Vocabulary Encounters (RAVE), specifically, the use of authentic contexts, friendly definitions, and activities to engage active processing. We will incorporate these features to develop an intervention to teach academic vocabulary and lexical morphology.
Institute of Education Sciences This project will develop and document the feasibility and effectiveness of an instructional intervention designed to support middle school students’ text-based argument writing skills aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Our proposed intervention brings together research on powerful instructional strategies for developing higher-level text comprehension and argument writing. The project builds on a previous Goal 2 study in which we developed and tested the discussion-based Questioning the Author intervention, which promotes comprehension through open, meaning-based queries about the text. The proposed intervention, which we call Triple Q, will use formulations Questioning the Author queries to focus students’ attention at three levels—the “gist” of a text, features of argumentation, and an author’s language choices. These three query types will be used to systematically guide students through the process of comprehending and analyzing argument texts and, then planning, drafting, and revising their own text-based, written arguments.
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Dr. Kathleen HeidNational Science Foundation This program will identify, and prepare as secondary mathematics teachers, undergraduates with interest and ability in mathematics and interest in teaching in high-need rural or urban-centered school districts. Each student who completes the program, a Noyce Scholar, will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics as well as with a bachelor’s degree in secondary education (mathematics) or a master’s degree in mathematics education. The program experience is technology-intensive and includes tutoring of students from high-need schools in an Upward Bound program or a second-language learning program, experience in designing and teaching sequences of lessons in high-need rural and/or urban schools, participation in seminars that focus on place-based teaching in high-need schools, and student teaching in a high-need Pennsylvania school. |
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Dr. Scott McDonaldConcord Consortium (Prime: NSF) The goal of this project is to design a transformational geodynamic simulation combining surface and subsurface processes in a way that supports learning across multiple representations. We will also study the impact of this tool to support student learning, in particular around the nature of uncertainty in scientific modeling, as well as study the practices developed by teachers to support learning in a curricular context integrating this technology tool |
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Dr. Julia PlummerAstronomical Society of the Pacific (Prime: NSF) Two pairs of studies will be conducted for this project. The first will examine ISE practitioners' goals and pedagogical knowledge about astronomy education for early childhood. The second study will focus on children's development of concepts and scientific practices in astronomy. Harvard University (Prime: NSF) Penn State will partner with the core research and development team at Harvard University. The research is designed around implementing modules to support student learning on three astronomical phenomena. |
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Dr. Carla Zembal-SaulU.S. Department of Education |
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