Supporting Equitable Math and Science Instruction

Life is a great teacher. And that's why the Developing and Implementing Case-Based Scenarios to Support Elementary Pre-Service Teachers' Enactment of Equitable Mathematics and Science Instruction is using real-world teaching dilemmas to train the next generation of future educators. The project team (see below) will work with in-service educators from diverse backgrounds to develop scenarios that incorporate "elementary students' cultural resources and lived experiences, as well as issues of power and status in classrooms."

These cases will then be used as a learning tool in teacher preparation math and science methods courses to help those training to be educators learn how to mitigate educational inequities. The team will also use these cases to create a set of publicly available guiding principles that other educators and teacher preparation programs can use to create cases for more equitable teaching in math and science. 

The research team is using qualitative analyses and computational data analytics techniques to address the following research questions: 

1. How does in-service teachers' expertise about culturally grounded pedagogy influence the development of cases focused on mathematics and science teaching? 
2. How can an expansive framing approach to implementing cases in methods courses support pre-service teachers' learning? 
3. How does this approach support pre-service teachers' learning of culturally grounded pedagogy in mathematics and science? 
4. What design principles can be used to develop cases that enhance pre-service teacher learning of mathematics and science content and culturally grounded pedagogy? 

Data include pre-service teachers' written responses and dialogue while interacting with the cases, in addition to surveys, journal entries, and evaluation of performance on a learning task. The data will then be analyzed to understand pre-service teachers' learning of culturally grounded mathematics and science pedagogy. Finally, the team will share their findings through scholarly presentations and manuscripts, a project website, podcast episodes, and professional development sessions/workshop series for P-12 practitioners--results and data have been designed to be shared as widely as possible. 

We celebrate our team for working to benefit the STEM education community, future educators, and learners of science and math. Teachers can play a significant role in mitigating deepening educational inequities in STEM, and the Developing and Implementing Case-Based Scenarios to Support Elementary Pre-SErvice Teachers' project will do just that.

 

          Project Investigators 

                                                                                                   

Tracy Dobie (PI)                      Lauren Barth-Cohen (Co-PI)             Lynne Zummo (Co-PI)            Connor Warner (Co-PI)