Making Cardinal Service Effective: Supporting Volunteer Tutors in Teaching ESL to Adult Latino Immigrants
PI: Guadalupe Valdés
Undergraduate volunteer programs focused on teaching underserved populations are an important tradition at Stanford. This project will expand Education 148, Critical Approaches to Teaching and Tutoring English Language Learners, into an online Cardinal Course that ideally will be recommended to all Stanford students who wish to support vulnerable, adult, English-language learners in their acquisition of every-day English. When fully developed, the course will also be available to other universities that are committed to preparing undergraduates to engage in knowledge-informed volunteer practices. The principal purpose of the existing face-to-face and the proposed online course is to assist volunteers in developing their own ability to structure lessons and activities for English language learners so that they can best support their tutees’ specific goals and needs in the use of English.
Tablet‐Based Assessments of Elementary Students’ Intrapersonal Social and Emotional Learning
PI: Jelena Obradović
Social and emotional learning (SEL)—an umbrella term for the malleable, non‐academic
skills that support educational outcomes—is challenging to measure due to limitations of existing assessments. This project seeks to address this challenge and related equity concerns by developing a battery of SEL tasks that can be administered using tablet computers in both individual and group settings. The assessment battery will include measures of seven intrapersonal SEL skills in children aged 5‐12. This innovative tablet‐based assessment will enable scalable, pragmatic, and cost effective administration in group settings, which is necessary for large, school‐based descriptive and program evaluation studies. This work seeks to benefit students, families, and educators by advancing scientific understanding of how individual SEL skills are interrelated and how they change during elementary school in diverse groups of children. The assessments developed will address the need for objective data that can be used to better understand teachers’ biases and minimize their effects on teacher assessment and behavior. Finally, the assessments will also provide objective information about disparities, facilitating evaluations of policies and classroom practices intended to promote SEL and narrow the achievement gap.
Networking Civic Innovation: Sustaining Youth Participatory Action Research Through Digital Dialogue and Multimodal Production
PI: Antero Garcia
This year long case study of six classrooms across the United States explores how a digital communicative platform and multimodal production can support in-school inquiry into topics of equity and youth civic engagement. Building from a youth participatory action research (YPAR) methodological approach, this study seeks to understand how existing classroom technologies and youth expertise can foment critical engagement with localized issues of equity. Theoretically, this work is grounded in Dr. Garcia’s previous scholarship focused on in-school conceptualizations of civic engagement and the connected learning framework that emphasizes what youth learning can look like today. Through regular use of an online digital platform created by the National Writing Project and two in-person workshops with teachers, this study seeks to sustain YPAR work that remains in critical and timely dialogue over space and time.
The Measure of a MOOC: Piloting Procedures for Rigorously and Scalably Assessing the Impact of Teacher Professional Development MOOCs
PI: Jonathan Osborne
This study seeks to directly measure changes in the classroom practices and student outcomes of participants in a teacher PD MOOC. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are an increasingly common medium for teacher professional development (PD). They have the potential to greatly expand equitable access to teacher PD by making free courses available anywhere in the world to participants of any income level. However, just because PD is accessible does not mean it is effective. Existing research on MOOCs has measured effectiveness through outcomes such as the knowledge gained by participants--but in teacher education, knowledge gained is only important insofar as it leads to changes in teacher practices and student outcomes. These outcomes are expensive and time-consuming to measure, and their use is virtually nonexistent in the research literature on MOOCs. In this research, this project investigates changes in teaching practice by re-offering a pre-existing and popular MOOC for science teachers, and collecting classroom video recordings and student assessment data to measure the MOOC’s impact. Furthermore, the project will pilot new, scalable analytical procedures that could make such rigorous research commonplace in the future.
Dynamic school-based applications for screening, intervention, and monitoring of mathematical abilities in children with and without learning disabilities
PI: Jo Boaler & Vinod Menon
The goal of this project is to develop and implement tablet-based rapid diagnostic and intervention software to identify, characterize, and remediate math performance in children with mathematical learning disabilities (MLD) on a large-scale. Using a multidisciplinary collaboration between the schools of education and medicine at Stanford, local elementary schools, and industry partners, this will be the first systematic large-scale math screening and intervention studies in children with and without MLD. TELOS funds will support design, development, and implementation of these screening and training materials (in the form of child-friendly tablet games) to gather big data on children’s mathematical abilities and learning profiles. These studies will be the first of their kind to use big-data science-driven approaches and exploit accessible tablet-based designs to the assessment and intervention of math disabilities. Results of these studies will provide the ground to iterate different intervention designs and assess retention through follow up testing. This study is focused upon developing training programs that could change the pathways of underachieving students who are affected by learning disabilities and significantly disrupt inequities in schools.
