Christine Massey - US grants

Constructing Science: Materials and Activities for kindergarten and First grade will use a collaboration of classroom teachers, science educators, university psychology and education researchers, and university scientists to develop, implement, evaluate and disseminate on a national basis model sets of instructional methods and materials for the active engagement of kindergarten and first-grade children in science learning and exploration. This process for curriculum development has been successfully piloted through a colloquium series initiated by the Citizens' Committee for Public Education in Philadelphia and facilitated by directors of PENNlincs with funding from PATHS/PRISM, ARCO and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, U of P. The proposed program will improve the quality of science education and at the same time ensure that more time is spent on science education in kindergarten. This project will bring developmentally appropriate science content and science processes to primary grade children in such a way (a) that scientists, educators and parents will be assured that children are truly learning important science concepts and processes, (b) that the methods have applicability to the realities of classrooms, and (c) that children's initial school experiences in science are rich and that children gain positive attitudes, motivation and vocabulary that will serve as a strong foundation for more formal science study. The methods will enhance any science curriculum available or under development.

The Philadelphia Zoo proposes a design and evaluate a series of carry-along kits for families to use during Zoo visits and at home afterwards. The materials and devices in the kits will help all members of the family strengthen their science process skills and upgrade their knowledge. Evaluation will be a key part of the design process as materials are mocked up and tested, with results feeding directly back into the design process. A design team will integrate scientists, educators, cognitive development researchers and designers who will work collaboratively to develop the kits, drawing on the resources of a diverse advisory committee.

9907724
Bierman

Human hands have changed dramatically the New England landscape over the past 250 years. Only 100 years ago, much of now-forested New England was cleared of trees as agriculture and development drove the rapid conversion of forest to farmland. The bare hills of post-colonial Vermont eroded rapidly and sediment surged down hillslopes, choking the region's rivers. Just as importantly, landscape response to natural events including floods and windstorms affected post-colonial settlers and their livelihood. Currently, geologic archives of landscape response to climate change and human impact (pond and alluvial fans sediments) are being read by NSF CAREER-funded graduate and undergraduate students pursuing a variety of research projects at the University of Vermont. The investigators will integrate this funded research with the hands-on education of high school students and explore another archive, one that preserves evidence of human-induced landscape change at an instant of time. In an integrated research and education program designed to involve high school science students and their teachers directly in active, on-going geologic research, the project will build a digital library of photographs documenting two centuries of landscape change. Specifically, students across Vermont will compile historic photographs that show first hand, human/landscape interaction in New England including clear-cutting, gully erosion, storm damage, and landslides. Students will scour their own community and personal resources locating images that show Vermont landscapes as they were 75 to 150 years ago. Such photographs can be found in the student's homes, in the homes of their older relatives, in local historical societies, and in local libraries. The investigators will work directly with teachers and their classes in 18 different Vermont high schools. Using for guidance a standards-based manual, teachers will assist students as they find at least two historic photographs clearly showing human/landscape interaction. The students will attempt to relocate the place from which each photo was taken. The site will be mapped using hand-held GPS and the scene rephotographs in detail using local reference sources including interviews, library research, and field observations. All images will be brought to the students' schools and scanned using equipment that will be loaned to each school for 6 to 8 weeks. The final result will be a pair of photographs, new and old, georeferenced and captioned by the student to explain the historic impact and the landscape response. As each class finishes its town, a statewide database, housed and available publicly on the Web, will grow. Created by students involved in on-going research using modern technology, this photo archive will be a digital resource for people around the world. The impact will be long lasting in terms of both formal and informal science education. The long-term goal is for the archive to include photographs from every town in Vermont showing human-induced geologic change. The effort will be supported by the University and local foundations interested in education reform.

This 3-year project involves a collaboration among the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, including the GRASP robotics lab, at the University of Pennsylvania and two Clusters in the School District of Philadelphia. In response to current statistics documenting the extreme underrepresentation of girls and women in physical science and technology fields, the Agents for Change: Robotics for Girls Project undertakes to develop school-based and informal education projects and curriculum materials for middle school students designed to increase girls' participation rates, achievement, and motivation in these domains. Robotics is the organizing theme that provides a progressive sequence of hands-on learning experiences; has interesting and comprehensible applications; and integrates multiple areas of science, math, and technology in a seamless fashion.
Project activities will a) emphasize connections to role models and mentors, b) provide extensive professional development for teachers and support staff to create equitable learning environments for underrepresented students, and c) involve families and community organizations in a support system helping girls to pursue education and careers related to science, mathematics, engineering, and technology. The project will also be used as a research site to study current questions in gender and education with a large, multicultural pool of participants.

ABSTRACT

Looking Forward --Scaling Up the Digital Image Archive of Landscape Change

This is phase two of work begun under an earlier award. Geologic archives of landscape response to climate change and human impact (pond and alluvial fan sediments) are the subjects of this project. The first phase demonstrated the feasibility of the project, the high level of interest in the high school community, and the value of the resulting image bank to a variety of constituencies. Phase two of the pilot project continues to bridge gaps both between university research and high-school education and between history and science. The program connects high-school students and teachers, University of Vermont faculty, staff, and students, museum curators, town officials and librarians, and the Education Specialist for the Perkins Geology Museum at the University of Vermont. Townspeople work with each student to find at least two historic photographs clearly showing human/landscape interaction and assist the students as they attempt to relocate the place from which each photo was taken. Students and townspeople submit their work over the web using templates developed under this funding project.

Perceptual learning is defined as experience-induced changes in the way information is extracted by these researchers who intend to investigate how perceptual learning occurs and whether it has implications for mathematics and science learning. It is the process by which learners differentiate relevant structure from irrelevant variation. The methods of research involve experimental investigations of conditions affecting perceptual learning, effects of structure discovery, and structure mapping variants of learning procedures on transfer. Experiments will employ objective measures of learning such as speed, accuracy, and transfer to novel problems. They will test and apply new learning technology such as automated sequencing algorithms that use a learner's speed and accuracy to assess learning and to sequence events for optimal efficiency.

The panel reviewers noted that an investigation that might clarify perceptual learning might help supplement or even challenge prevailing constructivist theories of learning. This way of thinking about learning could be an important discovery for mathematics and science learning.

To increase student interest in Earth Science, this project is developing four learning modules that teach fundamental concepts in Geology by demonstrating their relevance to society. The catalyst for this work is a 10,000+ image collection of current and historical photographs contained in the NSF-supported Landscape Change Program digital archive. The project objective is to demonstrate that student interest and learning increase when Earth Science is taught and learned visually in the context of the human experience. The outcome of this work will be students who recognize the relevance of Earth Science as a discipline and its ability to inform debate on a variety of pertinent societal issues.

The intellectual merit of this project lies in the developing, testing, and evaluating of four instructional modules, each focused on different ways in which the Earth and people interact. Each module includes image-rich interactive web-based introductory learning tools as well as a PowerPoint template and accompanying active learning exercises for use in the classroom. This project targets the Earth Science (Geology and Geography) student population at the advanced high school and introductory college level in order to make the broadest possible impact. Collaborations with other institutions and with the University of Vermont Center for Teaching and Learning assure that the materials we develop are tested using a cross-section of the student population.

The overarching goals of the proposed project are to characterize the nature of early cognition as well as to continue the development of curricular and assessment tools. It will yield knowledge about how to design learning environments to nurture young learners in science and how to diffuse innovative science programs in early childhood settings. It will also provide the field with diagnostic research-based assessments that will enable us to understand starting points of different groups of learners, to track individual children's progress, and to assess the cumulative impact of high-quality science programs over time.

The proposed work builds on the PIs' programs for children in the target age range of 3 to 7 years. Gelman's Preschool Pathways to Science (PrePS), aimed at preschoolers, is to be partnered with Massey and Roth's Science for Developing Minds (SDM), aimed at kindergartners and first graders. Both programs are influenced by findings that science knowledge involves coherent and organized content, specialized vocabulary that is tied to the content, and tools of doing and communicating. The PIs will address the issue of diffusion by studying and documenting the introduction of PrePS with new teachers in three new demographically diverse sites. They will also develop sets of tasks, based on published well-tested developmental paradigms, to benchmark competence for ages 3-7 across a wide socioeconomic range of children in domains that are foundational for science and math learning. These include quantity and measurement; animacy, causality, and material kinds; and scientific reasoning. The PIs will conduct experimental studies investigating the learning impacts of re-representational

This planning grant is to redesign the Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) instructional programs at the University of Pennsylvania. Conceived as a "tree of learning," the new program unifies the diverse degree pathways through a common, stable, narrow "trunk" of newly conceived, required courses in the freshman and sophomore years - the focus of proposed effort. "Branching" out into specialties inherited from the various legacy programs in junior and senior years (and beyond), the new curriculum adds continuing attention to the "roots" in the form of a service-based learning component incorporated into key required courses throughout the four years. The dual concerns of this re-invention are to articulate the new intellectual foundations of a 21st Century undergraduate ESE degree and, simultaneously, to coordinate throughout the entire program the careful attention to human resource development (recruitment at the "roots" and retention through the "trunk" of the tree) now widely acknowledged as vital to the national interest.

The new ESE program aims to produce students who develop beyond technical mastery to become innovators, adept enough to lead the global market of ideas and products and adaptable to changing technology throughout their careers because of their comfort with self-directed learning. Adopting a research platform - the RHex robot - as the unifying lab focus in the early "trunk" semesters of the major will increase the rate of undergraduate participation in original research. The diversity of learning styles supported by such project-based, contextualized courses promises an increased retention rate, particularly among women and underrepresented minorities. Group work (project proposals, progress presentations, and so on) addresses the widely perceived need to bolster communication and writing skills in engineering training.

Landscape images are a powerful tool for doing and teaching Earth surface science because they provide a personal and human-scale linkage to geologic processes and the geography of place and time. However, in order for such imagery to be useful, it must be easily findable by those who wish to use it both in and out of the classroom. this proposal provides support targeted directly toward increasing the ability of scientists and educators to find landscape imagery for use in both formal and informal science education as well as scientific research. The work builds directly on the education, research, and outreach success of the Landscape Change Program (uvm.edu/perkins/landscape), a 10,000+ image web-based archive that has been developed over the past 6 years with NSF support The work will prepare the existing image archive for inclusion in the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) as a collection as well as to create, test, and refine finding aids for the Landscape Change Program archive itself. This project builds on work done with imagery over the past six years that has catalyzed both formal and informal science education from K-12, to college, graduate school, and beyond. Specifically, this work will support the standardization of metadata and image descriptions in the database so that the information can be harvested for inclusion as a collection in DLESE. The work will improve the ability of users to find any one of the 10,000+ images within the Landscape Change Program archive by redesigning the current search page and by annotating images in such a way that Goggle-type web crawlers, and thus image and text searches, are more likely to find individual images.

Geology (42) This project is creating and assessing a new style of textbook - an economical, succinct, and focused guide to the most important tenets of Geomorphology, the study of Earth's dynamic surface. This "Shortbook" is made up of 15 chapters, each 15 to 18 pages long, and each focused specifically on core concepts identified though a process of community consensus building. The goal of this book, and its accompanying public-domain e-media, is to organize and present the most important knowledge about Earth's surface in a concise fashion relevant to the way in which todays students deal with information. This project addresses a dynamic discipline of the geosciences and serves as a model for textbook creation in the STEM disciplines. The textbook is being designed, printed, and distributed by a commercial publisher and is linked to a public-domain website that hosts a suite of e-media, referred to as "Vignettes". These are short (<1000 word) case studies that supplement the text and allow customization of the learning environment. Some vignettes are place-based examples; some are quantitative treatments of significant equations or problems in geomorphology; and others feature videos or animations that clarify difficult concepts. The vignettes are being created by experts, vetted by others, linked to the textbook, searchable on line, and available free, both on line and as PDF versions. The "Shortbook" concept comes from the recommendations of a 2006 NSF/National Academy of Sciences workshop, "Reconsidering the Textbook", which suggested that textbooks of the future would be short, economical, reflect community consensus, be student-centered, and be well and purposefully integrated with e-media. This project is testing the workshop recommendations by creating a new textbook in the growing discipline of geomorphology for which the existing texts were first published between 12 and 30 years ago. The assessment plan, which is integral to this proposal and the textbook development process is designed to improve the quality of the final product and determine whether the project has met its goal of creating a book that is widely accepted and useful for both students and faculty.

The purpose of this project is to increase our understanding of how to optimize the features of learning technology systems, which have the potential to be applied widely across domains, settings, and age groups. The team of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Pennsylvania focuses on learning technology that integrates (1) principles of perceptual learning that accelerate learners' abilities to recognize key structures and relations in science and math domains, and (2) adaptive learning algorithms that use a constant stream of performance data to adapt the learning process to each individual. The collaborating partners include two K-12 schools serving diverse populations and two community colleges.

The researchers will investigate the role of response time data as a novel input into both spacing and the setting of learning criteria in adaptive and perceptual learning systems. Specific hypotheses will be tested in a series of randomized controlled experiments. Students will complete pretests, posttests, and delayed posttests to evaluate gains and long-term durability of learning. The researchers aim (1) to test adaptive sequencing that utilizes learner response times (along with accuracy) to guide spacing in learning; (2) to improve learning systems based on understanding the role of response time in setting learning criteria; (3) to develop integrative adaptive and perceptual learning systems that incorporate best practices for the use of combined speed and accuracy data; and (4) to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of such systems across STEM learning domains and age groups by testing learning modules for elementary mathematics and high school and college chemistry.

This project is a major step in the merging of principles of cognitive science with learning technology in service of STEM learning.

Developmental mathematics remains a critical obstacle to college readiness, involving large majorities of community college students and disproportionately impacting groups of students who are underrepresented in STEM - minority, low-income, and first generation college students. This project aims to improve our understanding of important instructional principles emanating from cognitive science that are related to success in community college mathematics. The studies in this project aim both to advance our understanding of learning and to apply learning innovations to known challenges in authentic learning settings, thus testing and extending the generalizability of laboratory findings to consequential mathematics learning with diverse learners. The team will focus on two areas of research in the cognitive science of learning that have that have important implications for learning complex domains like mathematics and science. The first is perceptual learning, which accelerates learners' abilities to quickly and accurately recognize key structures, patterns, and relationships. The second area is the development of adaptive learning algorithms that utilize real-time performance data in conjunction with principles of learning to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of learning by tailoring the learning process to each individual student. This project is designed both to advance the scientific understanding of perceptual and adaptive learning and to assess their potential to improve learning in community college mathematics.

Several sets of experiments will investigate basic scientific questions regarding 1) whether and how there may be a unified account of the benefits of spacing of learning events that applies across different forms of learning; 2) how intermixing passive and interactive events may improve adaptive learning; and 3) how adaptive methods may be used to enhance the role and benefits of comparisons in perceptual learning. Basic principles will be established through research in controlled laboratory studies. The project will then extend these findings by conducting applied tests of these principles to optimize the effectiveness, efficiency, and durability of learning, and to maintain motivation, with community college students enrolled in remedial mathematics courses.

This project is supported by NSF's EHR Core Research (ECR) program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring: STEM learning and STEM learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development. The program supports the accumulation of robust evidence to inform efforts to understand, build theory to explain, and suggest intervention and innovations to address persistent challenges in STEM interest, education, learning and participation.