Technology for Equity in
Learning Opportunities - Faculty Grantees

2018 TELOS Faculty Grantees

Hiep Ho — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 21:26:51 +0000

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.

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Faculty Grantees

2017 TELOS Faculty Grantees

Hiep Ho — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 19:11:53 +0000

Targeted, Tailored, and Timely Interventions through Mobile Technology

PI: Geoffrey Cohen

Research has made it increasingly clear that brief interventions can have large effects when they are well-targeted, tailored, and timed. That is, the “right” person receives the “right” message at the “right” time (Cohen & Sherman, 2014; Cohen, Garcia, & Goyer, in press). For example, a high school student who is intimidated by the application process for financial aid might receive, a few days before the deadline, a reassuring word of encouragement and a reminder to apply. The intervention seems small but, because it occurs at a critical moment, it can have disproportionate impact. Apps permit a high degree of targeting, tailoring, and timeliness at an unprecedented scale, offering the possibility of large-scale, impactful, and scientifically-informed social change. TELOS funds will be used to complete development of our app, currently a prototype, and to support the experimental evaluation of its efficacy. Once developed, we anticipate the app will offer a cost-effective way to close opportunity gaps at scale while still maintaining the personalization of small-scale psychological interventions.

Playful Science for Families

PI: Shelley Goldman

Ideas about what science is and how to engage in science learning tend to be based on the science people have been exposed to in school. Many parents worry that they do not “know” enough science to be “helpful” and “correct” with their children. Using TELOS funds to design a mobile app called “Playful Science for Families,” we aim to introduce a “playful” version of science for families with children ages 4-9. The app helps families engage science, introducing activities that are easy to carry out in everyday activities and contexts. The activities emphasize exploration, observation, sensemaking, and questioning. The app also enables families to create their own science activities that they can use and submit to us for possible publication to other families in updated versions. The hope is that the app will prompt playful science learning for thousands of families so that children have many opportunities to build foundational practices and dispositions that complement the science they will engage in school. Our team’s research focuses on understanding how families take up and enact science on their own terms and in their own spaces. The app platform enables research with a larger number of families, as we can collect anonymous user data within the app.

Bringing Online Computer Assisted Learning to Rural Areas in China

PI: Prashant Loyalka

We have proven in randomized trials that computer assisted learning (CAL) works. However, we have not proven why it works. TELOS funds will be used to develop and evaluate an online CAL package that is tailored to China’s national curriculum. Since we will have control of the delivery environment and the content of the software, we will be able to determine what mechanism best produces student gains when using CAL. We have thousands of CAL questions provided by the most trusted educational institutions in China and our software allows us to match questions to individual students. This unique capability to adapt learning material allows our software to determine which dynamics are most important to each student, and to respond by driving up exercises according to those parameters. This individualization is important in China’s fast-paced, rigid curriculum. In rural areas, where there is more danger of children falling behind their urban peers, remedial tutoring is often unavailable. Because of this, we want to move CAL forward and make it available and useful for millions of students in rural China to help close the gap.

Science in the City: The Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Approach to Virtual Reality Science Lessons

PI: Bryan Brown

Many of the current projects associated with virtual reality focus on taking students out of their community to explore the possibilities of faraway locations. In contrast, this project proposes taking students through three contexts, including their own community. From a macro perspective we take students to places they are physically unable to experience. On a meso level, students experience locations in their own surroundings to study scientific concepts. Finally, on the micro level students are taken inside micro phenomena to understand how they work. TELOS funds will be used to study the implementation of virtual reality science lessons to understand how students and teachers respond to, and are impacted by, culturally relevant virtual reality in their classrooms. This project furthers the TELOS goals by supporting traditionally underserved communities. The participating schools are minority-serving institutions comprised of mostly low-income African-American and Mexican-American communities. The project anticipates having a lasting impact on these schools even after its completion. We will provide participating teachers with professional development in teaching science, emphasizing how to use technology for science teaching and modeling ways to integrate culturally empowering pedagogy with tech-based education. Additionally, we anticipate a potential product of this project to be a series of culturally relevant science lessons that can be distributed to urban elementary schools nationwide.

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Faculty Grantees

2016 TELOS Faculty Grantees

Hiep Ho — Thu, 15 Sep 2016 20:31:43 +0000

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.

Tags:

Faculty Grantees

Technology for Equity in Learning Opportunities - Faculty Grantees

2018 TELOS Faculty Grantees

Making Cardinal Service Effective: Supporting Volunteer Tutors in Teaching ESL to Adult Latino Immigrants

PI: Guadalupe Valdés

Tablet‐Based Assessments of Elementary Students’ Intrapersonal Social and Emotional Learning

PI: Jelena Obradović

Networking Civic Innovation: Sustaining Youth Participatory Action Research Through Digital Dialogue and Multimodal Production

PI: Antero Garcia

The Measure of a MOOC: Piloting Procedures for Rigorously and Scalably Assessing the Impact of Teacher Professional Development MOOCs

PI: Jonathan Osborne

Dynamic school-based applications for screening, intervention, and monitoring of mathematical abilities in children with and without learning disabilities

PI: Jo Boaler & Vinod Menon

2017 TELOS Faculty Grantees

Targeted, Tailored, and Timely Interventions through Mobile Technology

PI: Geoffrey Cohen

Playful Science for Families

PI: Shelley Goldman

Bringing Online Computer Assisted Learning to Rural Areas in China

PI: Prashant Loyalka

Science in the City: The Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Approach to Virtual Reality Science Lessons

PI: Bryan Brown

2016 TELOS Faculty Grantees

Researching the impact of an online course designed to transform student engagement and achievement in mathematics

PI: Jo Boaler

A Design Experiment for Teaching Students to Take Bearings on the Web

PI: Sam Wineburg

Eye Tracking and Lacuna Stories

PI: Sarah Levine

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

Scaffolding Peer Engagement for Learning Literacy (SPELL)

PI: Bruce McCandliss

Technology for Equity in
Learning Opportunities - Faculty Grantees