Researching the impact of an online course designed to transform student engagement and achievement in mathematics
PI: Jo Boaler
An online course called “How to Learn Math” through Stanford’s OpenEdX platform (http://scpd.stanford.edu/ppc/how-learn-math-teachers), taught by Professor Jo Boaler, translates important research on mathematics teaching and learning, mindset and brain science into practical teaching ideas, using technology to reach over 50,000 teachers over the last 3 years. The most successful cases of teacher change come about when teachers are supported by administrators, colleagues and resources. Thus, TELOS funding will help Dr. Boaler and her team study system wide support for using the online course as a basis for instructional change. Starting in the summer of 2016 (Phase 1), they will begin to study the course in operation and analyze 100 teachers’ practices after taking the course in Manhattan Beach district and in the Tulare County Office of Education. They will also gather data from 150 school leaders participating in our Summer Math Leadership Summit. The group is also p lanning and seeking additional research funding for a second phase: a controlled experiment in the 2017-18 school year with approximately 300 teachers, to gauge the impact of the online course, comparing teachers’ practices and student learning after taking the course with more traditional forms of professional development.
A Design Experiment for Teaching Students to Take Bearings on the Web
PI: Sam Wineburg
Although the Internet has the potential to democratize access to information, it puts enormous responsibility on individuals to evaluate the trustworthiness of information. If young people are not prepared to critically evaluate the content they encounter online, they are apt to be duped by false claims and misleading arguments. To improve equitable access to online information, the Stanford History Education Group will conduct a two-year design experiment to create and field-test curriculum that helps young people become thoughtful consumers of digital content. The d.school's K12 Lab Network will support the creative process of designing new materials, which will be refined through iterative rounds of collaborative piloting with San Jose high school teachers and students. During year two of the project, teachers will integrate lessons into their social studies classes and student progress will be tracked. At the project’s conclusion, these materials will be free to downloa d from t he Stanford History Education Group’s website (sheg.stanford.edu).
Eye Tracking and Lacuna Stories
PI: Sarah Levine
In the U.S., students of color who attend high-poverty schools are less likely than their white wealthy counterparts to have engaging and challenging literary reading experiences. One of the many reasons for this inequity is English Language Arts teachers' lack of understanding of their students' cognitive and affective reading processes, and the related tendency to assume that they are "struggling readers." The TELOS grant allows us to use new reading platforms and eye-tracking technology, along with more traditional think-aloud interviews, to better understand how high school students deemed struggling readers approach not only canonical literary texts but also "everyday," popular literary texts. We will use the same design to study those deemed expert literary readers. We hypothesize that struggling readers may read more like experts, depending on text and context. We hope to learn more about students as literary readers, and we hope also to help teachers leverage their st udents' everyday literary practices to support more canonical literary reading.
Development of a Searchable Repository of Language-Based Interactions: A Tool for Research on Equity and Fairness in Linguistically Diverse Classrooms
PI: Guillermo Solano-Flores
Leveraging the technology of MOOCs and crowd sourcing, our team will build a research-oriented, searchable repository and platform that collects, archives, and engages with language-based interactions from linguistically diverse classrooms across the K-12 sector. A repository and platform of this kind has great potential to aid and inform the study of student language development, and to help generate techniques and practices that address concerns surrounding language-based inequity in classrooms. The data collection and storage dimensions of the repository will present a clearer picture of the actual language used by students and the ways in which interactions take place in classrooms. It will also lay the necessary foundation for researchers to engage with the data—using specialized analytic tools to interrogate the data according to a variety of research topics and methodologies—to deepen the understanding of classroom language at every level. By exposing the patterns of langu age actually used by school children, it will be possible to gain new perspectives on the nature of language itself; more practically in the immediate future, insights gained from such research will help to answer and address, from a sociolinguistics perspective, the connection between language and equitable learning opportunities.
Scaffolding Peer Engagement for Learning Literacy (SPELL)
PI: Bruce McCandliss
This project sets out to explore the potential role of educational technology to provide freely accessible tools help address the needs of children who are struggling readers, and to study how such tools may be effectively adopted by communities of learners. We aim to build on previous work in the McCandliss lab to address the needs of children in low SES environments who struggle with early literacy acquisition. The aim is to create technology that is particularly well suited to introducing literacy to children who may have limited phonological skills, in a manner that encourages high levels of engagement by including game-like social interactions and dynamic adaptation to a child’s emerging mastery of the material.
