This study explored how two professional development approaches to reforming math instruction with different mechanisms for fostering change might have valuable synergies when used in tandem to support take-up, i.e., teachers' acceptance, adoption, and incorporation of ideas into practice. This investigation of Practice-Based Professional…

Graduating high school seniors who are college and career ready has become a focal point of our nation. The Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program has been preparing college and career ready students who are first generation college-going students, from subgroups traditionally underrepresented in higher education, and from…

In this mixed methods study we examined students' science engagement in relation to classroom opportunities to participate in science practices in a sample of middle school (N = 1613) students from 28 socioeconomically diverse schools in the western region of the United States. Students from high socioeconomic status (SES) schools reported…

The Computational Thinking recently has been recognised as one of the basic knowledge to be developed since childhood. Coding and computers are not just programming, but tools that help students to develop problem solving skills and more deep understand of the way things work. For these reasons, great attention has been focused on this topic both…

We have extended two perspectives of proportional reasoning to solve problems based in probability. Four future middle grade teachers were enrolled in a mathematics content course that emphasized reasoning about multiplication with quantities. The course expected future teachers to generate and explain methods for solving proportions. Probability…

In this working group, we continue with previous efforts to consider design and research methodologies related to teacher learning in online professional development contexts. We then describe an innovative project designed to support the development of middle school mathematics teachers, with a focus on three distinct forms of online learning:…

Informal inference is a critical practice for students to engage in if they are to understand formal statistical methods. However, during informal inference students often utilize complex ideas that many in-service teachers are not prepared for as they have not had the opportunity to think deeply about statistics and develop statistical knowledge…

Similar content has tremendous utility in classroom and online learning environments. For example, similar content can be used to combat cheating, track students' learning over time, and model students' latent knowledge. These different use cases for similar content all rely on different notions of similarity, which make it difficult to determine…

Effective middle leading of mathematics is a complex task as it requires a focus on improving learning outcomes for students. This study gathered information about the activities of middle leaders of mathematics using a survey of primary and secondary mathematics leaders. Both primary and secondary mathematics leaders more often focussed on…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) Game activities supported micro-teaching practices on middle school preservice mathematics teachers' TPACK self-efficacy perception levels. A single group pretest-posttest experimental design was employed. One hundred middle-school…

A challenge in digital learning games is assessing students' learning behaviors, which are often intertwined with game behaviors. How do we know whether students have learned enough or needed more practice at the end of their game play? To answer this question, we performed post hoc analyses on a prior study of the game "Decimal Point,"…

In this qualitative study, semi-structured interviews were done with middle school students. Questions were asked about their teachers' classroom management. Coded transcriptions showed that participants primarily described talk in the classroom. Analysis of talk in the transcripts resulted in four themes: Controlling the talk, Getting Off-Task…

In the present study, we first examined the formality and use of academic language in students' scientific explanations in the form of written claim, written evidence, and written reasoning (CER). Middle school students constructed explanations within an intelligent tutoring system after completing a virtual science inquiry investigation. Results…

This study investigates how well Saudi pre-service teachers feel prepared to teach mathematics at secondary or middle schools through an interview-based exploration. The participants, a sample of 16 female mathematics pre-service teachers, were near the end of the final year of their 4-year education degree. Key findings show that these graduate…

Critical thinking and STEM career perception are important in 21th century and STEM education is necessary to promote middle school students' critical thinking skills and STEM perception. In this research we aim to research the effects of engineering design-based STEM education on the middle school students' critical thinking skills and STEM…