Research

Computational Thinking Counts in Elementary Grades: Powerful STEM Teaching and Learning for the 21st Century
  • Collaborators:
    • CoPIs: Dr. Shakhnoza Kayumova (UMass Dartmouth) & Dr. Ram Bala (UMass Dartmouth)
    • Postdoctoral Fellow: Lukas Liu
    • Project Manager: Kym Welty
    • Graduate Research Assistants: Zarina Gearty & Eleanor Richard
    • PD Partner: Eduscape (https://eduscape.com)
  • Funded by National Science Foundation STEM+C Grant DRL-1934111

Summary

This 4-year STEM+C grant aims to develop a professional development model for bringing computation thinking into the formal mathematics and science curriculum for grades 3-5 in one district. To achieve this goal, we will implement a three-year professional learning model that includes summer workshops and ongoing support throughout the year. Teachers will co-design and implement projects-based lessons and design-thinking projects that they have designed to integrate computational thinking into math and science. The research will focus on the professional learning model in which teachers will be creating project-based units that incorporate computational thinking into math and science. We have chosen to partner with schools in one urban district to engage in design-based implementation research in which we work closely with a group of teachers to examine and refine our model of professional learning. Given the research at the elementary level, and studies in language, culture and linguistics, we argue that it is important to engage children in computational thinking and disciplinary content and practices early in their academics through project-based and design-thinking projects and activities. Until now, most computational thinking projects have been limited to informal learning environments because of constraints teachers face. By working with teachers as co-developers, we raise the relevance and “fit” of the units for the schools.

Advancing Middle School Teachers’ Understanding of Proportional Reasoning for Teaching
  • Collaborators:
    • PI: Yasemin Copur-Gencturk (Univ of Southern California) & CoPIs Ben Nye (Univ of Southern California) and Allan Cohen (University of Georgia)
    • Graduate Research Assistants at UMass Dartmouth: Marty Epstein, Hamza Malik, & Kun Wang
  • Funded by the Institute of Educational Sciences

Summary:

The goal of this four-year project is to develop and test an interactive, personalized computer-based professional development program for middle school teachers. The system will be usable for teachers, feasible for use in various settings including the home, and easily accessible for all end users. The purpose of the program is to increase middle school teachers’ content and pedagogical content knowledge of proportional reasoning and, in turn, improve their students’ understanding of proportional reasoning. This proposal responds to the needs facing middle school students and their teachers in multiple ways and has the potential to contribute to an improvement in student mathematics outcomes by enhancing teachers’ knowledge associated with the core tasks of mathematics teaching and student mathematics achievement. Importantly, the project will contribute important findings to professional development research regarding the effectiveness of a computer-based program that provides interactive, virtual facilitation.

Usable Measures of Teacher Understanding: Exploring Diagnostic Models and Topic Analysis as Tools for Assessing Proportional Reasoning for Teaching
  • Collaborators:
    • PI: Yasemin Copur-Gencturk (Univ of Southern California) & CoPIs Allan Cohen (University of Georgia) & Jonathan Templin (University of Iowa).
    • Graduate Research Assistants at UMass Dartmouth: Marty Epstein, Hamza Malik, & Kun Wang
  • Funded by the National Science Foundation

Summary

The overall goal of this project is to pursue a potentially transformative approach to assessing teachers’ knowledge by developing a measure that is closely aligned with the content and skills taught in PD programs. This instrument will employ emerging psychometric models. Specifically, we aim to blend features of diagnostic classification models (DCMs) and statistical topic models (STMs) to provide informative feedback about teachers’ learning and to identify patterns in their knowledge growth. Using DCMs involves specifying the fundamental components of reasoning in a particular domain, and then constructing test questions systematically to correspond to reasoning with a different combination of those components. In contrast, STMs involve analyzing the patterns in responses to provide insights into the reasoning teachers use in giving their answers. By developing open-ended items, we will create items that capture the key components of teachers’ content and pedagogical content knowledge in proportional reasoning, and then identify the characteristics of reasoning among teachers with different levels of content and pedagogical content knowledge.

Proportions Playground: A Dynamic World to Support Teachers’ Proportional Reasoning (Ended Feb 2020)
  • Collaborators:
    • Rachael Brown (Penn State Abington)
    • Postdoctoral Fellow: James Burke
    • Project Manager: Kym Welty
    • Graduate Research Assistants: John Millett, Jinsook Park, Marty Epstein, Hamza Malik, & Akira Harper
  • Funded by the National Science Foundation – DRK-12 program

Summary

This project explored how we might be able to promote mathematical reasoning about proportional situations in dynamic environments. We were interested in promoting 6th and 7th grade teachers’ proportional reasoning through a six-hour professional development experience focused on using the dynamic “toys” as the basis for rich conversations about mathematics.

Proportions Playground “Toys”: http://kaputcenter.org/proportions-playground/

Proportions Playground Tasks: http://kaputcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Proportions-Playground-Tasks.pdf