Science and Math Education

�� study links access to new AP computer science course to a jump in participation, especially among underrepresented students

Carrie Spector — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 18:32:45 +0000

�� study links access to new AP computer science course to a jump in participation, especially among underrepresented students

Carrie Spector Mon, 04/07/2025 - 11:32

The number of students taking an AP computer science exam more than tripled after schools in the study began offering the new course, a �� study finds. Access to the newer course also appears to have a spillover effect, increasing participation in other AP subjects. (Photo: iStock)

Curriculum and Instruction | Race and Equity | Science and Math Education

A college-level option focused on concepts in computing draws more female, Black, and Hispanic students without affecting participation in the original course, �� researchers find.

April 10, 2025

In a bid to engage more U.S. high school students in computer science, the College Board introduced a new Advanced Placement (AP) course in 2016: Computer Science Principles, which explores a range of topics in technology and computation, in contrast to the original AP course’s strict focus on programming skills.

A new study by �� researchers, analyzing changes in the population of students taking AP computer science exams before and after the launch of the alternative course, shows a direct link between access to the course and a sharp increase in participation, with a sizable jump for traditionally underrepresented students.

After schools in the study began offering CS Principles, the number of students taking an AP computer science exam more than tripled overall, the researchers found. Exam counts for female, Black, or Hispanic students more than quadrupled.

What’s more, schools that adopted the new course expanded participation in AP computer science without drawing students away from the original, programming-focused course. Access to the newer course also appears to have a spillover effect, increasing student participation in other AP subjects.

“Computer science education is valuable at so many levels, giving students a set of skills that apply across countless domains,” said Daniela Ganelin, a doctoral student in education data science at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), who coauthored the study with Thomas S. Dee, the Barnett Family Professor of Education at the GSE. “Computing in general, and AI in particular, are so influential right now, and it’s important for students to learn about it so they can understand it, use it responsibly, and be part of guiding its transformation over the course of their careers.”

The analysis, published April 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that access to CS Principles could account for roughly two-thirds of the growth in AP computer science exams taken nationally over the past decade.

“We’re finding a dramatic take-up of academically rich content at the high school level, without crowding out kids from taking the pre-existing course,” said Dee, who is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the �� Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and faculty director of the GSE’s John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. “This is a rare and compelling example of an educational reform that appears to be driving improvement on a nationwide scale.”

GSE Professor Thomas S. Dee

A reflection of national trends

While the original AP computer science course focuses on teaching students how to write and test code in the Java programming language, the CS Principles course introduces students to programming as well as a wide range of concepts involving computers and technology, with an emphasis on creativity and collaborative problem-solving.

To assess the impact that access to the newer course has had on students’ engagement with advanced-level computer science, the researchers drew on data from all public high schools in Massachusetts – the only state that researchers found publicly provides data on AP participation at the level of detail they sought, separated by subject, school, and student characteristics such as gender and ethnicity.

Massachusetts is a state with an unusually high AP participation rate to begin with, the researchers noted. “Because Massachusetts leans into AP so much, you might expect to see more of an effect there,” Ganelin said. “On the other hand, if the state is well saturated with AP already, you might expect more dramatic effects in other states where the room for growth is higher.”

The state’s overall growth in AP exam-taking during the time period of the study mirrors trends in national data, the researchers said, which points toward the generalizability of their findings.

GSE doctoral student Daniela Ganelin

The researchers drew on data from the state’s nearly 300 traditional public high schools over a 15-year period, from the 2006-07 school year through 2020-21. They found that after a school introduced CS Principles, its exam count in any AP computer science course jumped by an estimated 16 exams, more than tripling participation for the average school that adopted the course.

Analyzing the uptake for different demographic groups, the study found that the number of AP computer science exams taken by female, Black, or Hispanic students more than quadrupled: average female exam counts went from a baseline of 1.3 exams per school to about 6, while average exams for Black or Hispanic students went from 0.7 to about 3.

The new exams were concentrated in CS Principles, with no statistically significant drop in students taking the exam for the original AP computer science course.

The study also found that the initial spike after the course’s introduction was followed by further growth over time, a trend the researchers said suggest that factors supporting students’ participation – like staff capacity, the quality of the class, and awareness among students – strengthened after the course was adopted. That could be due in part to the standardization of content within the AP program, they said.

“When you have an intentionally designed course that’s being offered in a relatively similar way throughout the country,” said Dee, “it creates better opportunities for supporting teachers’ capacity to deliver that content effectively, as well as student-focused learning supports.”

The College Board has released descriptive findings in the past indicating similar patterns of growth, but the independent study by the �� researchers goes further to support a cause-and-effect relationship between increased participation and the introduction of CS Principles in individual schools.

A spillover effect

In addition to expanding participation in AP computer science, the launch of the new course appeared to boost engagement in other AP subjects. The study found that after introducing CS Principles, a school’s total AP exam count grew by an estimated 33 yearly exams, representing a 9% increase for the average adopting school.

The gains were concentrated particularly in AP Environmental Science and English Language and Composition, which the study noted often serve as introductory college-level courses for their respective subject areas.

“I can imagine a situation where students taking one AP course might say, ‘I felt successful here,’ and want to take more in other subjects,” said Ganelin, a former computer science teacher and curriculum specialist. “Or where a school might say, ‘We’re having success in getting kids from a variety of backgrounds into this AP course. Let’s see if we can encourage them to take others as well.’ ”

Given the advantages AP courses offer in preparing students for college and the ongoing challenge schools face in recruiting computer science teachers, the researchers said the AP program’s standardized approach offers a promising model with economies of scale.

“There was a lot of work involved upfront in putting this course together, but now, if you’re a principal or a teacher who wants to bring computer science to your school, this option exists,” Ganelin said. “There are curriculum materials out there, there are training resources for teachers, so any principal can bring it to their school. And what we’re seeing is that there’s a good chance that if you offer it, kids will come. There will be take-up across demographic groups.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Thomas S. Dee

AI helps math teachers build better ‘scaffolds’

Carrie Spector — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 19:22:10 +0000

AI helps math teachers build better ‘scaffolds’

Carrie Spector Tue, 03/25/2025 - 12:22

A paper by �� researchers, including GSE Assistant Professor Dora Demszky (pictured), introduces the first evaluation framework for lesson scaffolding grounded in expert teachers’ processes and the first experiments that test and adapt LLMs for this task. (Photo: Trevor Tachis)

Science and Math Education | Teaching | Technology

Education researchers have evaluated the ability of large language models (LLMs) to help middle school math teachers structure tiered lessons to reach varied skill levels.

March 14, 2025

By Andrew Myers

To those outside of education, it may come as a surprise that the hardest aspect of teaching is often not what happens in the classroom, but the preparation that must happen outside it, beyond normal work hours. The toughest work is in the planning and structuring of lessons for classes with students of varying knowledge and skill levels. And, with the learning loss of the pandemic, America’s classrooms — particularly middle school classes — are more than ever filled with students of diverse skill levels.

Against that backdrop, education and computer science researchers at �� University have evaluated large language models’ ability to help middle school math teachers create tiered lessons that allow them to nurture those who might have fallen behind while simultaneously holding the interest of more advanced students. Everyone wins, the researchers say, most of all the teachers for whom the model is a tremendous thought partner surfacing ideas that they might not have considered themselves.

“Teachers spend so much time adapting curricula to their students’ needs, but no one is really asking — how can we support them in that process?” says Rizwaan Malik, a Knight-Hennessy Scholar studying education data science at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE). Malik is first author on a new study, published in the British Journal of Educational Technology, introducing the task and evaluation framework.

The paper introduces the first evaluation framework for lesson scaffolding grounded in expert teachers’ processes and the first experiments that test and adapt LLMs for this task.

"The idea of scaffolding is trying to put in supports to the curriculum that help all students, regardless of where they are, to access the content in the curriculum," says Dora Demszky, an assistant professor at the GSE and senior author of the paper. Their work was supported by the �� Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) seed grant program.

Studying teachers to train the model

Before they began experimenting with LLMs, Malik, Demszky and their colleagues analyzed teachers’ lesson planning to understand the fundamentals of scaffolding. This is perhaps the hardest part of lesson planning, says Malik, a former math teacher familiar with the vagaries and the time commitment of lesson planning.

“The premise of the project was to see what technology can do to help teachers with that process of taking a curriculum and making it classroom ready,” Malik says. “We’re not just creating a tool, but a framework that helps teachers scaffold curriculum effectively, ensuring AI-generated content aligns with real classroom needs.”

In their analysis, they identified three steps teachers go through in creating lesson plans: observation (evaluating their students’ skill levels), formulation of an instructional strategy, and implementation though a scaffolded lesson plan that meets the needs of all students.

Figure 1: Framework showing the stages of curriculum scaffolding found in the cognitive task analysis (CTA). Expert teachers described first making observations about the existing curriculum materials, then crafting strategies to address these observations, and finally implementing these strategies through adaptations or modifications at the resource level. LLMs can potentially support teachers at each of these steps.

A better warmup

The AI model was designed to generate “warmup” exercises that help students activate prior knowledge. In user evaluations, these AI-generated exercises were rated better than human-created ones in terms of accessibility, alignment with learning objectives, and teacher preference.

The highest-rated approach fed the model an additional dataset of original curriculum materials and used complex and nuanced prompts informed by an expert educator.

“Maintaining rigor while supporting students with different needs is crucial — simplifying too much only increases learning gaps,” says Demszky.

AI is not without limitations, the researchers stress. LLMs are quite good at generating text-based content — story problems and written descriptions — but they struggle with visual approaches, diagrams, graphs, and so forth, which are an essential component of math instruction. The researchers are working to address these limitations now. Their most recent paper, under review, seeks to address the specific challenges of diagram generation with the first benchmark for K-12 math diagrams.

Figure 2: For each of the 10 lessons, evaluators were shown two warmups, one created by an expert and one created in one of the model conditions. The order of expert and model were randomized each time.

Next steps

In future iterations, the research team plans to expand the dataset to include instructional scaffolds beyond warmups. To further hone the tool, they would also like to pilot it in a real classroom. Finally, they are looking into personalized scaffolding strategies tailored to specific classrooms and, perhaps, even individual students.

Despite the promising results, however, neither researcher imagines a day when AI replaces teachers as lesson planners; instead, they expect AI to serve as a valuable thought partner for educators to help them work more efficiently while improving student learning.

“The key thesis underpinning all our work is that nothing can ever replace a teacher,” Malik concludes. “AI should augment, not substitute, their expertise.”

Additional �� authors include Dorna Abdi, a graduate of the Education Data Science master’s program, and Rose Wang, a doctoral candidate in computer science, both members of the EduNLP lab.

This story was originally published by the �� Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Dora Demszky

Education Professor Jo Boaler and �� Women’s Basketball team up for new sports data unit

Olivia Peterkin — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:42:28 +0000

Education Professor Jo Boaler and �� Women’s Basketball team up for new sports data unit

Olivia Peterkin Thu, 01/23/2025 - 16:42

Students raise their hands in a classroom in Dublin, Calif. where middle school teacher Shelby Craig is teaching the new Basketball Data Analytics Unit.

K-12 | Science and Math Education | Teaching

The online math lessons feature a series of activities to help students in grades 4 through 10 learn about data science through sports.

January 28, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

For anyone serious about becoming a top athlete, well-known steps to success include intense conditioning, a health-conscious diet, and grueling hours of practice.

However, a unit developed by �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) Professor Jo Boaler highlights a variable often overlooked in the formula for athletic achievement: the ability to use data to identify pain points in performance and adjust accordingly.

For the new Basketball Data Analytics unit — published on youcubed, a GSE research center aimed at improving math education by creating math activities, courses and teaching resources — Boaler teamed up with ��’s Women’s Basketball team to connect love for the game with the statistics that help players improve.

“The impetus for developing this was the realization that students really need experience with data,” said Boaler, the Nomellini & Olivier Professor of Education at the GSE. “Making sense of data visuals and being able to analyze data ties in very nicely with a lot of mathematics in their school curriculum, yet for most students their experience with data is very uninspiring.”

From calculating percentages for shots taken versus shots made, to evaluating players’ heights and comparing them through the use of mean, median, and mode — Boaler says lessons included in the unit help students connect math concepts to real-world applications in new and engaging ways.

“I think it’s exciting because it’s an interactive lesson plan that exposes students to learning data science in a way that incorporates math with sports, which means getting up out of your seat,” said Mahi Jariwala, a �� freshman in Boaler’s “How to Learn Math” course, who helped work on the unit.

“As someone who loves math and played high school basketball, I know I would have loved to have something like this when I was younger,” Jariwala said.

A student in Shelby Craig's middle school math class works on an assignment in the basketball data analytics unit.

A team effort

The lessons, created for students in grades 4 through 10, allow learners to explore and make decisions with data through basketball, the end result being the formation of a dream team based on stats they’ve collected throughout the unit.

“It was cool to see the different data points each group chose to look at, whether it was height, rebounds, or 3-point shots, in determining which players they would build into their team,” said Shelby Craig, a math teacher at Fallon Middle School in Dublin, Calif., who piloted the course before its official release. “They got passionate about defending their teams and using mathematical language to explain why their team was better.”

To make it accessible for students and teachers less familiar with basketball, the unit kicks off with an introduction to the game that includes what the names of positions are, how points are scored, different moves that can be made, and the general rules of the game.

A big part of the lesson plans were videos recorded by the �� Women’s Basketball team featuring players Mary Ashley Stevenson and Nunu Agara.

“I’ll be the first to say that I’d never had a particularly great relationship with math,” said Stevenson, a forward on the team who transferred to �� from Purdue University for her sophomore year.

Her main role was explaining the key facets of the game, first to the youcubed team and then to students and teachers using the unit, through the videos attached to courses.

“Despite not identifying as a math kid from a young age, I was inspired by the idea that the game I love can be used to teach it,” Stevenson said. “If I was a sixth grader and someone gave me this unit to work on, I would’ve thought this was the best thing in the world.”

Training for a data-filled future

Beyond the classroom, Boaler says she hopes the unit will broaden the scope of what students can do with math later in life.

“We want them to get from this unit that you don’t have to be an athlete to be involved in basketball,” Boaler said. “There are lots of people who are doing sports analytics for the coaches, for the competition, for the players themselves to learn — it plays a really important role.”

Last fall, at a pre-season game at �� versus the University of California, Davis, children were invited to be sports data analysts for the day by filling out data cards with graphics to record the number of 2-pointers, 3-pointers, rebounds, blocks, and assists that happened during the game.

“It was a cool opportunity for students to come out to the basketball game and be the data keepers and statisticians by taking notes on what was going on,” said Jariwala, who, along with her classmates, distributed the data cards to children at the game.

“I mostly watched the players and recorded on my card, but I learned that they make and miss a lot of shots,” said Ruthie, 10, who attended the game with her mother and grandmother as part of a family tradition.

Boaler hopes to incorporate the data cards and other tools at future �� games.

“Having that collaboration with the team was really great, and my favorite part is seeing the activities in classrooms, and how much the teachers and students enjoy the unit,” Boaler said.

Watch a video below of a sixth grade class using the unit.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Jo Boaler

Tackling a math problem

Carrie Spector — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 23:48:13 +0000

Tackling a math problem

Carrie Spector Tue, 11/19/2024 - 15:48

A �� study found that ninth graders who struggled in math but took Algebra 1 with peers at grade level went on to earn higher test scores than students who had been placed into a remedial course. Teachers were also equipped through an intensive program to support all students in a mixed-level classroom. (Photo: Allison Shelley for EDUimages)

Curriculum and Instruction | Research and Practice | Science and Math Education

�� scholars work with a Bay Area school district on a novel approach to algebra instruction that yields academic gains for struggling students.

November 21, 2024

By Carrie Spector

For high schoolers, there’s a lot riding on whether they pass Algebra 1 by the end of ninth grade. Students who fail the course are unlikely to meet college admissions requirements by the end of their senior year, and they’re less likely than others to graduate at all.

One school district in San Mateo County, Calif., is taking a novel approach to support students struggling in math. Instead of being put on a remedial track, those who enter ninth grade below grade level join their peers who are already at grade level in the same Algebra 1 classroom — with teachers who’ve been equipped through an intensive training program to help them all improve.

A study of the initiative, which was piloted at the Sequoia Union High School District (SUHSD) through a randomized controlled trial, showed that ninth graders in mixed Algebra 1 classes who entered below grade level went on to do substantially better on 11th grade math tests than their peers who were placed into a remedial course.

The study found that the initiative also increased attendance, the likelihood of staying in the district for all four years, and take-up of other college-ready math courses for the students who struggled initially. There was no indication of negative effects for the students who were at grade level in the mixed groups.

“We’ve had highly contentious debates about math pathways that simply accelerate or decelerate students, but much less attention on supporting teacher practice in ways that might broaden our sense of what’s possible,” said Thomas Dee, the Barnett Family Professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), who conducted the evaluation with Elizabeth Huffaker, PhD ’24, now a research fellow at the GSE. “This study is a nationally relevant proof point of what high expectations and instructional differentiation in the classroom can achieve.”

Rethinking placement policies

The district, which serves a diverse body of nearly 9,000 students across four high schools, began re-examining its math placement policies in 2018 as part of a larger effort to promote critical thinking and collaborative skills, and to address achievement gaps across the curriculum.

“We wanted to create problem-solving classrooms where you can walk in and see students grappling with big ideas, and where they’re able to communicate their reasoning,” said Victoria Dye, executive director of curriculum, instruction, and professional development at SUHSD. “And crucially, we wanted to remove the racial and socioeconomic predictability of ninth-grade math placements.”

Enrollment in advanced high school math courses is highly stratified by race and socioeconomic status, with evidence showing that Black, Hispanic, and poor students complete fewer college-prep classes than their white, Asian, and affluent peers.

Since 2016, the GSE has partnered with nine San Mateo County school districts through the ��-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative, conducting research on various educational challenges and opportunities. At the start, researchers at the GSE’s John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities built a massive database to track student outcomes from elementary to high school, bridging gaps in knowledge about students’ progress from one level of schooling to the next.

The data archive makes it possible for all nine districts to see students’ experiences across districts and over time, and it allows researchers to study learning patterns and factors that predict different academic outcomes.

GSE Professor Guillermo Solano-Flores

For SUHSD’s math initiative, researchers were able to study links between math course pathways and other measures, such as how students scored on state exams and whether they were able to complete college-eligible math courses. A project led by GSE Professor Guillermo Solano-Flores studied the paths taken by English learners (ELs) in particular — especially long-term English learners (LTELs), or students classified as ELs for more than six years.

Different combinations of the math courses offered could result in about 80 possible trajectories — a number of which would leave students falling short of college admission standards, despite satisfying their high school graduation requirements. Solano-Flores and his team found that LTELs were significantly underrepresented in trajectories that would make them eligible for competitive colleges, even if they had already taken Algebra 1 in middle school.

The discrepancy between graduation requirements and college entry standards is often not clear to students and their families, especially those from other cultures, Solano-Flores said. “In Latin American and other countries, if you pass your mandated math courses in high school, you’ll be eligible for college. You don’t need to take extra classes to become eligible.”

Solano-Flores’ team recommended expanding efforts to communicate with families, especially with visual and interactive tools, to make sure multilingual students understand the consequences of certain course paths. SUHSD is now piloting a web-based dashboard that shows parents whether their student is on track for graduation and college readiness.

The researchers also raised concerns about national assessments used partly to inform ninth-grade placement decisions, because the tests weren’t designed for that purpose and, given the time it took for the district to receive the results, were administered about a year before the students entered high school.

“A lot can change in nine or ten months,” said Solano-Flores, who recommended the district use tests based on its own curriculum and population, timed more closely to the start of ninth grade.

His team also recommended more heterogeneous classrooms that combined students with different levels of English proficiency across math courses. This would provide more opportunities for ELs to simultaneously develop English and learn mathematics, Solano-Flores said.

GSE Professor Thomas Dee

Raising the floor and adding supports

The district piloted the Algebra 1 initiative in the 2019-20 school year, addressing the concerns Solano-Flores and his team raised about the placement test and class composition while making advanced pathways more accessible to all students, including ELs.

The initiative “raised the floor” by eliminating remedial algebra for students in the treatment arm of the study and implementing a robust preparation program for those teachers. (Ninth graders who entered high school above grade level had completed Algebra 1 in middle school; they were placed in geometry and not affected by the initiative.)

To start, teachers participated in two week-long intensive trainings over the summer with the district’s instructional coach and outside consultants. During the year, the teachers received on-site coaching, had an extra planning period each day to prepare for the mixed-level class, and met regularly as a cohort to learn and practice instructional strategies for “teaching at the speed of learning,” to help all students in differentiated classrooms improve.

“This study is a nationally relevant proof point of what high expectations and instructional differentiation in the classroom can achieve.”

Thomas Dee
Professor, �� Graduate School of Education

GSE Research Fellow Elizabeth Huffaker, PhD ’24

Many of the students in the study who initially tested below grade level in middle school matriculated to geometry in tenth grade, which wouldn’t have even been an option had they been in the remedial algebra class. Some students in the treatment arm did have to repeat Algebra 1 in tenth grade.

“This was a very challenging course for them, much more rigorous material than they would’ve been exposed to in the pre-algebra course,” Huffaker said.

But by the end of 11th grade, students from the mixed-level Algebra 1 classes were 14 percent more likely than those in the control group to have completed Algebra 2, the next step toward college readiness.

When preliminary data showed progress for struggling students without any negative impact on the others, the district ended the randomization after one year and implemented the initiative for all students, extending the professional development program to all math teachers.

The district also worked with a consultant to develop a new math readiness assessment. Because the remedial course has been eliminated, the district no longer requires a placement test for students to enroll in Algebra, said Diana Wilmot, director of research and evaluation at SUHSD. “But we wanted to make sure we still could identify the kids who need more support, so we can allocate funding in a targeted way and for classroom composition, to ensure a heterogeneous group.”

The findings on improved attendance and students’ likelihood of staying in the district are consistent with other studies on school initiatives that promote a sense of belonging, the researchers said.

“Our teachers worked hard to disrupt the existing patterns of status that exist in the classroom,” Dye said.

As district leaders continue to track the effects of the initiative, the researchers expressed hope that the findings will draw attention to other dimensions of math policy beyond detracking.

“So much of the contentious math discourse is stuck on this ‘accelerate for all’ or ‘decelerate for all’ binary,” said Dee. “This research suggests that also being attentive to instructional core can be really impactful and unlock some of the false tensions that reductive framing has created for us.”

Guillermo Solano-Flores is also a faculty affiliate of the �� Accelerator for Learning. Thomas Dee is also the faculty director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, and a senior fellow at both the �� Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Hoover Institution.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Thomas S. Dee , Guillermo Solano-Flores

�� education scholar uses AI to help medical students hone diagnostic skills

Carrie Spector — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 22:58:38 +0000

�� education scholar uses AI to help medical students hone diagnostic skills

Carrie Spector Fri, 09/27/2024 - 15:58

A new AI-based tool for medical education is designed to help students improve their ability to determine an initial diagnosis and treatment. (Photo: iStock)

Innovation | Science and Math Education | Technology

GSE doctoral student Marcos Rojas bridges education, medicine, and computer science with a platform that simulates patient-physician interactions.

September 30, 2024

By Carrie Spector

When Marcos Rojas started medical school at the University of Chile in 2011, he was surprised to find there were no teaching assistants (TAs) for any of his classes – in fact, there was no TA program for the medical school at all. So he joined forces with some of his fellow med students to create one. Within three years, they’d trained some 700 peers to support faculty across the medical school, and even won an international award for innovation in medical education.

Teaching had always come naturally to Rojas: As a kid in Puente Alto, a high-poverty community in Chile, he often helped his classmates with their schoolwork, finding that explaining the material in his own words improved his own understanding of it.

That interest never went away – and once he finished his medical training and began working as a physician in Santiago, Rojas decided that in addition to seeing patients, he wanted to keep teaching. He was particularly keen on exploring ways to use leading-edge technologies to improve medical education.

Now a doctoral student at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), Rojas is piloting a web-based platform he created to help medical students improve their ability to determine a patient’s initial diagnosis and treatment, a process known as clinical reasoning. The tool, called Clinical Mind AI, uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate real-world interactions between a physician and a patient, and to provide feedback on the exchange and the validity of the diagnosis.

“The best way to learn about clinical reasoning, other than with actual patients, is through in-person simulations, with trained actors who are hired to act out scenarios,” said Rojas, who is in his third year in the GSE’s Learning Sciences and Technology Design PhD program and developed the the platform with Chinat Yu, who graduated from the GSE’s Learning Design and Technology master’s program this year. “But that’s expensive, and it’s not something you can scale. With AI, I saw a way to overcome these challenges, to create a cost-effective, scalable tool.”

The platform was born in the IDEAL Research Lab at ��, where researchers study barriers to equity in various learning environments and develop instructional tools to address them. The lab is directed by GSE Assistant Professor Shima Salehi, Rojas’ advisor, who serves as co-principal investigator on the project along with Thomas Caruso, a professor at the School of Medicine and co-director of the �� Chariot Program, a lab that works on immersive technologies for medical education.

GSE doctoral student Marcos Rojas

A flexible teaching tool

Rojas began his PhD program at the GSE in 2022, intending to study the use of virtual and augmented reality in medical education. But two months after he arrived, the launch of the AI chatbot ChatGPT took the world by storm, prompting him to shift direction.

“I didn’t know anything about AI, but I was here at ��, which is a very rich environment for studying it, and I didn’t know anyone else who was using it in medical education,” he said. “I decided to jump into it.”

He signed up for a computer science course on AI and its potential applications in health care, where he created a rough prototype for his idea. He developed it further through the Learning Design Challenge, a two-quarter program of the �� Accelerator for Learning that leads students through the process of investigating a problem in education and designing a technology solution.

Rojas had identified several problems with existing ways of teaching clinical reasoning. Given the cost of hiring actors for in-person medical simulations, he said, instructors often present students with written summaries of a clinical case, a far cry from the experience of talking with a patient to collect the appropriate information to develop a working diagnosis.

Tech firms have developed more interactive approaches, but those carry their own drawbacks, he pointed out. For one thing, they come with preset case studies reflecting certain demographics and epidemiological scenarios that might not be culturally relevant, with limited options for language. What’s more, they can’t account for the different theoretical frameworks of clinical reasoning, making it harder to assess students on a particular approach.

“Different instructors understand clinical reasoning and learning outcomes in different ways,” he said. “These platforms are just too rigid in language, in content, and in understanding of the cognitive task that is being carried out.”

With generative AI, Rojas saw a way to create a more flexible platform that could adapt to any context. Instead of being equipped with pre-programmed case studies, the platform prompts educators to input their preferred content and demographic profiles, based on their own setting and what they want to teach. And the chatbot, as the patient, can converse in whatever language the student uses to start the interaction.

Educators can also choose the type of feedback they want the chatbot to provide, after the student has gathered enough information to make a diagnosis and explained their assessment. Insights highlight areas of improvement for students, such as the relevance of their questions, the use of straightforward language instead of medical jargon, and opportunities to give a more thorough explanation for a recommended course of action.

A convergence of disciplines

The project embodies a rare convergence of education, medicine, and computer science at ��, said Salehi, who herself pursued a career in electrical engineering before changing her focus to the science of learning. “At the IDEAL Research Lab, we want everyone to have equal access to fields that can be engines for social mobility, and that includes equity in science education and medical education,” said Salehi. “The beauty of Marcos’ project is that the solution is applicable across culture and language, and it doesn’t require much in the way of resources for the institutions that implement it.”

Caruso, a physician and pediatric anesthesiologist who earned his doctorate in education from the GSE in 2023, attributes the success of the collaboration in part to keeping the focus on the outcome, with scholars contributing expertise from different fields.

“In interdisciplinary research, people sometimes lose sight of the mission, which in this case is providing better medical education and, ultimately, better care for patients,” he said. “It’s easy to get hung up on who paid for what, who gets the credit, what’s in it for me. But this collaboration worked because we’re all mission-focused, we all have the same motivation, we all want to create a good product and get it out to where it can affect the most number of people.”

Rojas first piloted the platform with a focus group of med students, instructors, and attending physicians, whose input informed decisions about making the chatbot’s dialogue more realistic and the type of feedback the platform could provide about students’ performance. He is currently testing it with 100 medical instructors across the United States and plans to pilot it internationally in 2025.

As an education scholar, Rojas emphasized his commitment to research to assess the tool’s effectiveness, something he said distinguishes it from many edtech products on the market.

“We’re in an era where whatever you can imagine with technology, we can make it happen,” he said. “It’s not a question of whether it’s possible. The important question is about the impact. Are people learning? Is it better than the traditional way of doing something? Is it more efficient? We need evidence, and that’s the direction we’re taking with this – to make sure it serves an educational purpose.”

The IDEAL Research Lab and the �� Chariot Program have both contributed resources for the platform’s development, and the project has also received funding from �� HAI and �� Impact Labs. In addition, Rojas won two student awards through the Learning Design Challenge at ��, as well as another student award from the �� Accelerator for Learning to explore ways to connect the platform with a virtual reality simulator.

Going forward, the team plans to expand the platform to include the ability to conduct physical exams and medical tests, and to incorporate more metrics for assessing students’ skills. They hope to eventually provide the tool at no cost to institutions with limited resources around the world.

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�� GSE partners with Biology Department to bring Bay Area science teachers into the lab

Olivia Peterkin — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 17:50:29 +0000

�� GSE partners with Biology Department to bring Bay Area science teachers into the lab

Olivia Peterkin Fri, 09/06/2024 - 10:50

INSPIRE co-director Lauren O'Connell (left) works with Jesus Rojas, a teacher at Hillview Middle School, in the lab. (Photo: Jennifer Ray)

Science and Math Education | Teaching

A new program at �� connects local middle and high school science teachers with research experience and professional development.

September 10, 2024

By Olivia Peterkin

When Jose Lopez moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles earlier this year, he was looking for a way to grow as a teacher and reconnect with his lost love for science.

“I think it’s really easy as a teacher, despite what we do, to feel very disconnected from science research,” said Lopez, who teaches physics at San Mateo High School and participated in �� Graduate School of Education’s (GSE) Hollyhock Fellowship for high school teachers in 2022.

“I’ve done a lot of teaching-related professional development, and through Hollyhock I really started to think about the science part of my science teaching job, which I honestly really hadn’t been in touch with.”

It’s why he applied to the BioRETs INSPIRE program at ��, a collaboration between the GSE’s Center to Support Excellence in Teaching (CSET) and the Department of Biology at the �� School of Humanities and Sciences. The program, supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), connects Bay Area middle and high school teachers with �� scientists for research experiences and teaching support.

Through INSPIRE, teachers spend a summer working in science labs with �� biologists, develop their teaching skills with CSET, and build community with other educators.

“Programs like INSPIRE are important because they give teachers the opportunity to enhance their research skills, content knowledge, and pedagogical approaches by spending extended time immersed in laboratory experiences,” said GSE Associate Professor Janet Carlson, who co-directs the program.

“As scientists and researchers, it’s our responsibility to engage the broader public with what we’re doing because we’re using taxpayer dollars to do science,” said Lauren O’Connell, an assistant professor of biology at �� and co-director of INSPIRE. “We wanted to focus on teachers because the impact of our time spent is much more given the number of students they’re teaching.”

2024-2025 INSPIRE cohort members Jaime Vasquez, MA '22 (left), Jesus Rojas (center), and Jose Lopez (right) work together in the lab in June. (Photo: Jennifer Ray)

Bringing research to practitioners

O’Connell got the idea to start INSPIRE at �� after seeing that the NSF offered grants to institutions of higher learning and other nonprofits to provide research experience for teachers (RETs) within a department.

“I thought this was perfect because it was a chance to have eight teachers in labs across the whole department, while building a great community and engaging with CSET to do professional learning,” she said.

As part of INSPIRE, teachers spend six weeks working with �� biology researchers on campus and meet weekly to work on educational transfer plans (ETPs), which outline how they will translate their lab experiences into classroom use.

CSET staff and faculty also introduce them to key research findings related to how students learn, ideas to encourage academic discussion in the classroom, ways to support student understanding, and strategies to integrate state and national science education standards into their lessons.

“The goal of the program is really to bridge classroom teachers with biology research experience in ways that transform their teaching for students,” said Rachel Zulick, a professional development facilitator with CSET and program coordinator for INSPIRE.

Lia Kim, MA '23, a recent graduate of the �� Teacher Education Program (STEP), says that INSPIRE reconnected her to her love for science, something she plans to pass on to her students. (Photo: Jennifer Ray)

Bringing teachers to the lab

For Lia Kim, MA ’23, a ninth-grade biology teacher at James Logan High School in Union City, joining INSPIRE this summer was a way for her to tap back into research.

“The ability to work with a �� professor to conduct research in the biological realm is what really attracted me to the program,” said Kim. “My interest in science came before my desire to become a teacher, which is why INSPIRE is a dream come true.”

Kim says that INSPIRE — and the assistance it affords her and her cohort, which includes stipends paid throughout the program — has reaffirmed her commitment to teaching.

“Being plugged into resources and having a support system that encourages and helps to fund our classrooms, makes this the greatest job in the world for me,” she said.

The 2024-2025 cohort of the INSPIRE program includes Aayesha Nangia, MA '22, (bottom left), an eighth-grade science teacher at Dolores Huerta Middle School; Lia Kim, MA '23 (bottom center), a ninth-grade biology teacher at James Logan High School; Jaime Vazquez, MA '22 (bottom right), a biology teacher at East Palo Alto Academy; Jesus Rojas, MA '20 (top right), a science teacher at Hillview Middle School; Jose Lopez (top center), a physics teacher at San Mateo High School; and Tess Carlson, MA '20, (top left), a science teacher at Mission Bay Hub.

Bringing the lab to the classroom

Once the summer portion of the class is complete, teachers continue to get professional support the following school year in the form of a stipend to cover some classroom supplies and a visit to their classrooms from �� biology researchers, who talk about their work with the students.

“The researchers who came in did a really good job of collaborating with me to make it interactive for the students and we picked topics that the students were interested in,” said Shannon Mueller, a biology teacher at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, Calif., who was part of INSPIRE’s first cohort last year. “A couple of the students afterward were asking about what it’s like to be a researcher and began considering that as part of their career path.”

Enasia McElvaine, a middle school biology and earth science teacher at Westlake Middle School in Oakland, Calif., said that the visits from researchers sparked students’ curiosity and helped them realize that what they were learning in class was relevant to real-world science applications.

“Researchers came in and spoke to the class about cancer, which was relevant as it had affected some people they knew,” said McElvaine, who was also in INSPIRE’s first cohort. “They were very receptive to the researchers coming in, and it was a great experience for them.”

Jose Lopez (right) presents his project, which involved research on proteins in the bacteria in ticks infested with Lyme disease, at the poster presentation on Aug. 29. (Photo: Joleen Richards)

Bringing science to the broader community

The INSPIRE program’s summer activities culminate with a poster presentation at the end of August, where the cohort presents research findings along with �� biology students.

At the science fair–style event, students, family, friends, and community members can ask questions about the individual projects.

Mueller, whose project studied how herbivores and drought affect oak trees, says she still shares her project poster with students.

“I think programs like this are beneficial because they allow teachers to better understand applications for what they’re teaching, and it translates into something we can pass on to students,” she said.

Zulick, INSPIRE’s program coordinator, said she particularly enjoys seeing teachers build their confidence in conducting scientific research and then relate it to their teaching.

“There’s something really beautiful about seeing teachers be inspired and connected to science, to feel like scientists again,” she said. "And it immediately transitions to them wanting their students to feel this way too.”

Lia Kim (center) presents her project, which involved research on fungal associations in the root structure of a specific portion of the Bishop Pine Forest, at the poster presentation on Aug. 29. (Photo: Joleen Richards)

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Softening the sharp edges in mathematics

Carrie Spector — Mon, 13 May 2024 17:02:26 +0000

Softening the sharp edges in mathematics

Carrie Spector Mon, 05/13/2024 - 10:02

Students experience different ways of learning about math and engineering at a Youcubed workshop for middle schoolers. (Photo: Marc Franklin)

K-12 | Science and Math Education | Teaching

In a new book, �� education professor Jo Boaler argues for creativity and ‘ish’ thinking to transform students’ relationship with math.

May 15, 2024

By Carrie Spector

For everyone whose relationship with mathematics is distant or broken, Jo Boaler, a professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), has ideas for repairing it. She particularly wants young people to feel comfortable with numbers from the start — to approach the subject with playfulness and curiosity, not anxiety or dread.

“Most people have only ever experienced what I call narrow mathematics — a set of procedures they need to follow, at speed,” Boaler says. “Mathematics should be flexible, conceptual, a place where we play with ideas and make connections. If we open it up and invite more creativity, more diverse thinking, we can completely transform the experience.”

“Mathematics should be flexible, conceptual, a place where we play with ideas and make connections," says Professor Jo Boaler. (Photo: Robert Houser Photography)

Boaler, the Nomellini and Olivier Professor of Education at the GSE, is the co-founder and faculty director of Youcubed, a �� research center that provides resources for math learning that has reached more than 230 million students in over 140 countries. In 2013 Boaler, a former high school math teacher, produced “How to Learn Math,” the first massive open online course (MOOC) on mathematics education. She leads workshops and leadership summits for teachers and administrators, and her online courses have been taken by over a million users.

In her new book, Math-ish: Finding Creativity, Diversity, and Meaning in Mathematics, Boaler argues for a broad, inclusive approach to math education, offering strategies and activities for learners at any age. We spoke with her about why creativity is an important part of mathematics, the impact of representing numbers visually and physically, and how what she calls “ishing” a math problem can help students make better sense of the answer.

What do you mean by “math-ish” thinking?

It’s a way of thinking about numbers in the real world, which are usually imprecise estimates. If someone asks how old you are, how warm it is outside, how long it takes to drive to the airport – these are generally answered with what I call “ish” numbers, and that’s very different from the way we use and learn numbers in school.

In the book I share an example of a multiple-choice question from a nationwide exam where students are asked to estimate the sum of two fractions: 12/13 + 7/8. They’re given four choices for the closest answer: 1, 2, 19, or 21. Each of the fractions in the question is very close to 1, so the answer would be 2 — but the most common answer 13-year-olds gave was 19. The second most common was 21.

I’m not surprised, because when students learn fractions, they often don’t learn to think conceptually or to consider the relationship between the numerator or denominator. They learn rules about creating common denominators and adding or subtracting the numerators, without making sense of the fraction as a whole. But stepping back and judging whether a calculation is reasonable might be the most valuable mathematical skill a person can develop.

But don’t you also risk sending the message that mathematical precision isn’t important?

I’m not saying precision isn’t important. What I’m suggesting is that we ask students to estimate before they calculate, so when they come up with a precise answer, they’ll have a real sense for whether it makes sense. This also helps students learn how to move between big-picture and focused thinking, which are two different but equally important modes of reasoning.

Some people ask me, “Isn’t ‘ishing’ just estimating?” It is, but when we ask students to estimate, they often groan, thinking it’s yet another mathematical method. But when we ask them to “ish” a number, they're more willing to offer their thinking.

Ishing helps students develop a sense for numbers and shapes. It can help soften the sharp edges in mathematics, making it easier for kids to jump in and engage. It can buffer students against the dangers of perfectionism, which we know can be a damaging mind-set. I think we all need a little more ish in our lives.

You also argue that mathematics should be taught in more visual ways. What do you mean by that?

For most people, mathematics is an almost entirely symbolic, numerical experience. Any visuals are usually sterile images in a textbook, showing bisecting angles, or circles divided into slices. But the way we function in life is by developing models of things in our minds. Take a stapler: Knowing what it looks like, what it feels and sounds like, how to interact with it, how it changes things — all of that contributes to our understanding of how it works.

There’s an activity we do with middle-school students where we show them an image of a 4 x 4 x 4 cm cube made up of smaller 1 cm cubes, like a Rubik’s Cube. The larger cube is dipped into a can of blue paint, and we ask the students, if they could take apart the little cubes, how many sides would be painted blue? Sometimes we give the students sugar cubes and have them physically build a larger 4 x 4 x 4 cube. This is an activity that leads into algebraic thinking.

Some years back we were interviewing students a year after they’d done that activity in our summer camp and asked what had stayed with them. One student said, ‘I’m in geometry class now, and I still remember that sugar cube, what it looked like and felt like.’ His class had been asked to estimate the volume of their shoes, and he said he’d imagined his shoes filled with 1 cm sugar cubes in order to solve that question. He had built a mental model of a cube.

When we learn about cubes, most of us don’t get to see and manipulate them. When we learn about square roots, we don’t take squares and look at their diagonals. We just manipulate numbers.

I wonder if people consider the physical representations more appropriate for younger kids.

That’s the thing — elementary school teachers are amazing at giving kids those experiences, but it dies out in middle school, and by high school it’s all symbolic. There’s a myth that there’s a hierarchy of sophistication where you start out with visual and physical representations and then build up to the symbolic. But so much of high-level mathematical work now is visual. Here in Silicon Valley, if you look at Tesla engineers, they're drawing, they're sketching, they're building models, and nobody says that's elementary mathematics.

Click to enlarge: A depiction of various ways to calculate 38 x 5, numerically and visually. (Image: Courtesy of Jo Boaler)

There’s an example in the book where you’ve asked students how they would calculate 38 x 5 in their heads, and they come up with several different ways of arriving at the same answer. The creativity is fascinating, but wouldn’t it be easier to teach students one standard method?

That narrow, rigid version of mathematics where there’s only one right approach is what most students experience, and it’s a big part of why people have such math trauma. It keeps them from realizing the full range and power of mathematics. When you only have students blindly memorizing math facts, they’re not developing number sense. They don’t learn how to use numbers flexibly in different situations. It also makes students who think differently believe there’s something wrong with them.

When we open mathematics to acknowledge the different ways a concept or problem can be viewed, we also open the subject to many more students. Mathematical diversity, to me, is a concept that includes both the value of diversity in people and the diverse ways we can see and learn mathematics. When we bring those forms of diversity together, it’s powerful. If we want to value different ways of thinking and problem-solving in the world, we need to embrace mathematical diversity.

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Author Bonnie Garmus shares her recipe for more gender equity in the sciences, at �� GSE event

Brooke Donald Gorlick — Mon, 06 May 2024 01:31:08 +0000

Author Bonnie Garmus shares her recipe for more gender equity in the sciences, at �� GSE event

Brooke Donald … Sun, 05/05/2024 - 18:31

Author Bonnie Garmus was the featured speaker at the 2024 �� Graduate School of Education Cubberley Lecture. (Photo: Ryan Zhang)

Events | Parenting | Science and Math Education

Novelist says passion, education, teamwork, and even anger are necessary to create more inclusive spaces.

May 4, 2024

By Olivia Peterkin

Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry, says she wrote the first chapter of her novel on the heels of a presentation meeting gone awry because a man in the room claimed credit for her work and no one said anything in her defense.

As she stewed, Garmus — who was a copywriter in tech at the time — thought about the many other women who felt invisible or ignored. For her, writing the book was a way to use her talents to give voice to women experiencing inequity in male-dominated occupations and spur change by connecting people to a shared message.

“When I was writing this book, I was writing my own role model,” Garmus said to a crowd of about 500 on May 2, at the 86th annual Cubberley Lecture, a series hosted by �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) that tackles important topics in education. “We really have to change this idea that women are less.”

“I think over and over again, it starts with education,” Garmus said. ”My book, I'm very pleased to say, has been adopted into a lot of schools – high schools and colleges – and it's been adopted in London into a whole bunch of boys' schools.” She says she regularly hears from children and others about its impact.

The fireside chat was moderated by GSE Associate Professor Christine Min Wotipka, AM ’99, PhD ’01, and touched on writing, parenting, and issues pertaining to gender, science and education, among other topics.

“Tonight's program is about exploring ways in which we can change the world to make it more inclusive and respectful for our teaching and learning environments,” GSE Dean Dan Schwartz said at the beginning of the event. Noting that authors are frequent guests at GSE events, he added, “We know books are means of scaling experiences and stories that help create change.”

This year’s lecture was co-sponsored by the �� Storytelling Project, the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at ��’s School of Humanities and Sciences.

It starts with a spark

The main character in Garmus’s novel, Elizabeth Zott, is a 1960s chemist turned cooking show host who, much like the author, channeled the anger she feels into a positive platform for solutions.

“If I could give one piece of advice to an aspiring writer or agent for change, it would be to use your bad mood,” Garmus said. “If you’re being discriminated against, anger is something that’s necessary to fight a good fight.… I wanted Elizabeth Zott to be credited for being mad and doing something about it.”

Covalent bonds

Garmus went on to share that passion and conflict aren’t only good for introducing characters in a story, it’s what galvanizes people around a shared goal.

Integral to any sort of societal change, whether small or systemic, is cooperation from people on all sides and of all different backgrounds, Garmus suggested. Cooperation is something she believes women can bring into any room, and something that’s needed in order for societal norms around STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine) to move forward.

“It's important that we listen to everybody's voice, because we have a myriad of problems to solve and we need the best minds on all these problems,” Garmus said.

In the book Zott, like Garmus, rows for exercise. The sport, she says, highlights what can be done by a group of very different people moving toward a collective goal.

“Rowers know you may not like a single person in your boat, you might hate everybody's guts in your boat, but the minute you get in and you're in a race, you work together,” she said. “If you're a rower, you want to win, and winning requires cooperation.”

Testing a new hypothesis

Guests in the audience, which included �� students, local residents, parents, and educators, were invited to ask their own questions during a public Q&A. An eighth grader from Marin asked about the inspiration for a character’s name. A postdoc from �� wanted to know Garmus’ ideas for increasing the pipeline of women and girls going into STEM.

In response to a question about how educators and parents can support students in becoming anything they want to be, she said simply getting out of the way will do a lot to remove limits on what they can accomplish.

“I know that there is a huge amount of pressure to make sure your kid gets a job,” said Garmus, who has two daughters. “And I know the job market right now is not fun for kids, but I'm kind of living proof that if you just keep at your passion, it will bear fruit.”

Garmus also shared the story of a young woman in Harlem, who wrote to her after reading Lessons in Chemistry.

“Her mother was a crack addict, she didn't have a father, and she never graduated from high school,” Garmus said. “She wrote to me saying that she always wanted to be a lawyer, and asked what Elizabeth Zott would tell her to do.

“I said, I want you to go down to community college and I want you to enroll,” Garmus said. “Long story short, this young woman went to the community college and she so impressed the faculty that within a year they got her a full ride at a four-year college, studying pre-law.

“This book has given me this huge gift of hearing from people all over the world, every single day, but her story is special because it shows that in the end, the only one who's not letting you achieve your dreams is you.”

Attendees take pictures of their books before the 2024 Cubberley Lecture with author Bonnie Garmus. (Photo: Ryan Zhang)

GSE Dean Dan Schwartz welcomes guests to the 2024 �� Graduate School of Education Cubberley Lecture. (Photo: Ryan Zhang)

Bonnie Garmus (left) sits with Professor Jo Boaler (center) and Associate Professor Christine Min Wotipka (right) at the 2024 Cubberley Lecture at ��. (Photo: Ryan Zhang)

About 500 community members inside and outside of �� attended the conversation between Associate Professor Christine Min Wotipka and author Bonnie Garmus. (Photo: Ryan Zhang)

Associate Professor Christine Min Wotipka and author Bonnie Garmus take questions from the audience at the 2024 Cubberley Lecture at ��. (Photo: Ryan Zhang)

Women clap following the discussion between Associate Professor Christine Min Wotipka and author Bonnie Garmus. The annual �� Graduate School of Education Cubberley Lecture is a public forum for important topics in education. (Photo: Ryan Zhang)

Author Bonnie Garmus signs her book at the 2024 �� Graduate School of Education Cubberley Lecture. (Photo: Ryan Zhang)

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Christine Min Wotipka , Jo Boaler , Dan Schwartz

At a new �� lab, education researchers partner with STEM instructors to make courses more inclusive

Carrie Spector — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 17:19:16 +0000

At a new �� lab, education researchers partner with STEM instructors to make courses more inclusive

Carrie Spector Tue, 01/10/2023 - 09:19

The IDEAL Research Lab helps redesign introductory science and engineering classes to promote access and a sense of belonging. Here, chemistry students work on problems in a 2018 course session. (Photo: Linda A. Cicero)

Diversity and Identity | Faculty and Programs | Science and Math Education

The IDEAL Research Lab, led by GSE professor Shima Salehi, helps redesign classes to address barriers for historically marginalized students.

January 10, 2023

By Carrie Spector

Jocelyn Nardo, a first-generation scholar and the daughter of Cuban immigrants, remembers a discouraging moment from her undergraduate days at a Florida university: After taking a class in forensics, Nardo discovered an affinity for science and decided to change her major from English to chemistry. Her advisor gave her two duplicate forms.

“She said, ‘You’ll end up changing back,’ ” recalled Nardo, who not only defied her advisor’s prediction but went on to earn both a master’s degree and a PhD in chemistry.

Now a postdoc at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), Nardo is focused on easing the barriers that might deter other students from pursuing a STEM education. As a researcher with the new IDEAL Research Lab at ��, she and other postdocs, students, and faculty work to identify challenges facing historically marginalized university students in STEM, and partner with instructors to apply educational principles to redesign courses in ways that promote access and a sense of belonging.

The lab is directed by GSE assistant professor Shima Salehi, MA ’11, PhD ’18, who studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate at Sharif University in Iran before earning her master’s and PhD in learning sciences at the GSE. The work of the lab is partly an extension of some of her own research developing evidence-based interventions to support underrepresented college students in STEM.

“We’re taking principles of learning and cognition and bringing them into day-to-day classroom practice, in a more equitable way,” Salehi said. “It’s about creating a stronger bridge between the theory of learning and the practice of teaching. We’re designing activities and tools to provide a more scaffolded learning environment for students.”

The IDEAL Research Lab is a component of the larger IDEAL initiative at ��, which emerged from the university’s long-range vision to ensure inclusivity, diversity, equity, and access in learning environments.

“One of our objectives with the IDEAL initiative is to apply research and expertise to the challenges facing students – to study the barriers to equity and then use that evidence to improve our practices,” said Dan Schwartz, the I. James Quillen Dean of the GSE and the Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Educational Technology, who is founding deputy director of the campuswide IDEAL initiative.

GSE Assistant Professor Shima Salehi (Photo: Holly Hernandez)

Targeted strategies address students’ needs

Since its launch in 2020, the lab has taken on several projects concerning equity barriers in introductory science and engineering courses at ��.

A course on principles in chemistry, for example, which focuses on teaching concepts and problem-solving skills, meets prerequisite requirements for a variety of majors, from earth science to mechanical engineering. Many pre-med students also enroll, well before settling on their major. “This course is one of the most important gateways for students interested in STEM,” Salehi said.

But some, especially first-generation and underrepresented minority students, enter the class at a disadvantage – if they come from a high school that didn’t offer AP or honors courses, for instance, or one that had less experienced teachers.

A two-quarter sequence, Chem 31A and B, was introduced in 2004 as an alternative to the original 10-week course, giving students with less preparation a longer runway to master the material. A placement test for incoming students helps determine who would most benefit from the two-quarter option instead of the original section (Chem 31M).

Students who need more time to get up to speed in this course often face other pressures and demands on their time, compounding the difficulty, said Jennifer Schwartz Poehlmann, a senior lecturer of chemistry at ��, who coordinates and co-teaches the first-year chemistry sequence.

“They might have one or more jobs, or they might be struggling in multiple classes so they need support in those, too,” she said. “The hours just add up for these students.”

Reducing the amount of material covered in the course isn’t a viable option, Poehlmann added. “The problem would then become that [students] won’t be prepared for subsequent courses – it would set them up to fail in a later course where they would lack key skills or knowledge,” she said. “It takes time to learn science. There’s no way to sugarcoat that.”

The instructional team for Chem 31A and B has continued to pursue strategies for supporting students, including a robust mentorship program introduced in 2020 that provides personalized mentoring and tutoring, as well as support around belonging and well-being.

The IDEAL Research Lab got involved that year when Natalie Chapman, then a �� student majoring in mechanical engineering, undertook a research project through the GSE’s undergraduate honors program in education. With Salehi as an advisor, Chapman interviewed 57 students who had taken the introductory chemistry sequence in recent years, 60 percent of whom identified as first-generation/low-income.

An analysis of the findings by Chapman, Nardo, and other researchers at the IDEAL lab found that students who had less preparation in high school struggled with certain course elements such as lab worksheets, practice problems, and group work.

Drawing on her expertise in both chemistry and education principles, Nardo worked with Poehlmann to address some of the components students found challenging. For starters, she adapted a problem-solving template that Salehi had developed for physics as part of her dissertation research, tailoring it to chemistry; Poehlmann then customized it further to the course itself. The template walks students step by step through the process of unpacking a complicated chemistry problem, including clarifying the task at hand and identifying the relevant skills and concepts needed to solve it.

“Often students get to a problem and they’re like deer in the headlights – they don’t even know where to start,” said Poehlmann. “The problem-solving template helps them to get through it on their own, and then to make connections and use the knowledge they just gained to solve the next problem.” The IDEAL lab also helped develop and implement a once-weekly supplemental problem-solving session, which Poehlmann said instantly generated double the attendance she found with office hours.

Another project the IDEAL lab has taken on involves an introductory sequence in mechanical engineering, also focused on concepts and problem-solving. The team, led by Fred Krynen, a doctoral student at the School of Engineering, designed targeted activities for each of the course’s weekly learning goals, creating opportunities for students to receive timely and specific feedback they could incorporate to improve their performance going forward. The changes to the course debuted this fall, and the researchers will closely monitor their impact.

The lab is also working with the math department on a problem-solving template tailored to an introductory sequence of calculus courses. And an economics instructor recently reached out to Salehi for guidance in making an introductory course more appealing and engaging for a diverse body of students.

“It’s really fulfilling,” Salehi said. “I love having this close collaboration with instructors – hearing their desire to teach better, and helping them to do that.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Shima Salehi

A new approach to teaching science can help inoculate against misinformation, �� researchers say

Carrie Spector — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:31:37 +0000

A new approach to teaching science can help inoculate against misinformation, �� researchers say

Carrie Spector Thu, 11/10/2022 - 16:31

Standards for teaching science were developed before misinformation became such a problem, say �� researchers, who lay out strategies to equip students against scientific falsehoods. (Photo: Monster Ztudio / Shutterstock)

Curriculum and Instruction | Science and Math Education | Teaching

�� scholars Jonathan Osborne and Daniel Pimentel make a case for “a fundamental shift” in K-12 science education.

November 15, 2022

By Chris Woolston

At a time when climate models churn out increasingly precise and dire predictions, about 30 percent of Americans don’t believe climate change will occur in their lifetimes. While the James Webb space telescope peers toward the beginning of the universe, two in 10 Americans remain unconvinced that the Earth is round. And while pharmaceutical companies continue to tweak vaccines to combat COVID-19 variants, roughly 10 percent of Americans believe the shots are actually designed to insert microchips.

By their nature, scientific falsehoods defy reason. But two �� researchers — Jonathan Osborne, a professor emeritus of science education at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), and GSE doctoral student Daniel Pimentel — are taking a scholarly approach to understand where such beliefs originate and how they can be discouraged.

In a new essay published in the journal Science, Osborne and Pimentel argue that new approaches to science education could help inoculate society against scientific misinformation in all of its forms, from the misguided to the malicious.

“It will take a fundamental shift,” Osborne said. “The standards for teaching kindergarten through high school were framed before misinformation was such a problem.”

Teaching strategies early

Jonathan Osborne

It’s important to address the issue at a young age, said Osborne, who began his career as a science teacher in the 1970s and is one of the authors of A Framework for K-12 Science Education, the basis for the Next Generation Science Standards. Adults can be especially reluctant to abandon or even question their personal misinformation, he said, especially if those beliefs are tied up with their politics or personal identity.

Osborne and Pimentel are the lead authors of Science Education in an Age of Misinformation, a 2022 report exploring the threat posed by scientific misinformation and how it can be addressed. In the report, they lay out strategies to prepare students to cope with dubious claims, including revising the curriculum, better preparing and equipping teachers, and assessing students’ capabilities in this area.

For starters, the researchers say, students should know how to check the reliability of a source. That task often starts with three key questions: Who is providing this information, how do they know it, and what are they trying to sell? At a fundamental level, Osborne said, it’s often more important to evaluate a source than the actual claim. If the source doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, it’s safe (and generally wise) to disregard everything else.

To guard against questionable sources, students have to be taught how to navigate the internet and interpret search results, Osborne said. Internet skills should be purposefully taught throughout primary and secondary school: Students should know how to tailor search terms to get the most reliable results, how to spot sponsored content, and how to quickly identify the most credible information in a sea of results. The report details strategies used by professional fact checkers to evaluate sources online, citing research and materials developed by the �� History Education Group.

Daniel Pimentel

Creating “competent outsiders”

Even if they trust a particular source, students still need to be equipped to recognize plausible claims and disregard the ridiculous, said Pimentel. It’s not possible or even desirable, he said, to make every student an expert in every realm of science. Instead, the goal should be to create “competent outsiders” who can grasp the fundamentals of a field without an advanced degree.

Pimentel points to climate change, a topic that often pits scientists against naysayers with political or economic motives. Only a small percentage of the population can ever gain the expertise to build and interpret climate models. Instead of raising a new generation of climate scientists, Pimentel and Osborne argue that schools should prepare students to understand the concept of scientific models and the fundamentals of the scientific process.

For his dissertation, Pimentel, whose doctoral research focuses on how technology can help teachers and students engage with science-related civic issues, helped create a high school biology curriculum designed to turn students into competent outsiders. One major goal is to help students recognize the importance and meaning of scientific consensus. Scientists may argue over the exact lineage of a newly found hominid fossil, for example, but they unanimously agree that all hominids are closely related to apes.

It takes many years of work and mountains of evidence to lead to such widespread agreement. By teaching students to appreciate the weight of consensus, the curriculum prepares them to face the onslaught of misinformation that has not been so thoroughly validated. “The results so far are pretty encouraging,” he said. “They are much more likely to be able to distinguish credible from incredible information.”

Students should also be prepared to appreciate the disagreements that inevitably arise in science, Osborne said. Traditional science education often glosses over the dynamic nature of science and the evolution of knowledge.

“Even up to the undergraduate level, science education traffics in settled facts,” he said. “Nothing is uncertain, and nothing is up for grabs.”

He recalled his own college education, where students were required to do step-by-step lab tests to replicate an expected result. “That was a fundamental flaw, because nobody got the right result and everyone fiddled with the figures,” he said. Instead of simply regurgitating the “correct” answer, students should learn why experiments don’t always work. “Science is difficult,” he said, adding that a better understanding of how science actually works can help people put arguments and conflicting evidence into context.

“You need to have some understanding of the major ideas in science,” he said. “But you also need to educate people to recognize that they will be confronted with scientific knowledge that is beyond any kind of understanding they learned in school. And when you are confronted with that, how do you make a good decision?”

Misinformation often borders on the ridiculous, but, Osborne and Pimentel argue, the issue has never been more serious.

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