Projects Affiliated with CREATE

LEVERS: Leveraging Engagement and Vision to Encourage Retention in STEM

Leveraging Engagement and Vision to Encourage Retention in STEM (LEVERS) is a five-year, $1.5 million project funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The award was given to Michigan State University (MSU) to improve introductory courses that serve as gateways to continued studies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In doing so, faculty hope to change the institutional culture around the teaching of STEM, raise student engagement, and increase the number of students graduating with STEM degrees.

The LEVERS project’s framework is based on an engagement-centered model for student success. The rationale for this is that engaged students are successful students. Studies have shown that students who become socially and academically engaged in meaningful educational and enrichment experiences are more likely to persist and succeed.

Automated Analysis of Constructed Response

The Automated Analysis of Constructed Responses (AACR, pronounced "acer") research group consists of researchers from seven universities (visit Collaborators page) with backgrounds in various STEM disciplines (biology, chemistry, engineering, and statistics), assessment and educational research. We hope this research can help us gain greater insight into student thinking about “big ideas”, such as evolution, energy, and genetics. We are looking to expand the scope of this work and seeking interested collaborators across STEM disciplines.

Constructed response questions – in which students must explain phenomena in their own words – create more meaningful opportunities for instructors to identify their students’ learning obstacles than multiple choice questions. However, the realities of typical large-enrollment undergraduate classes restrict the options faculty have for analyzing student writing.

Inscriptions Math Project

A DRK-12 math project

Collaborative Research: Enhancing Middle Grades Students’ Capacity to Develop and Communicate Their Mathematical Understanding of Big Ideas Using
Digital Inscriptional Resources

The Inscriptions Math Project incorporates design-based implementation research. This process is based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners and focuses on iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation. Something that is iterative involves multiple cycles of development, testing, and revision. For this project, the research process includes four design phases that will study how students use the digital learning space and related inscriptional resources.

Crafting Engagement in Science Environments

PIRE: Crafting Engagement in Science Environments is a five-year, $3.6 million research grant funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The researchers and teachers involved are working to boost interest and engagement in science for all students. They are also providing students with the skills and opportunities to pursue science in the future.

Projects and Practices in Physics

Projects and Practices in Physics (P-cubed) is a community-based learning environment for introductory physics. The project focuses on engaging students in scientific practice through the use of computational modeling and analytical techniques. Researchers aim to transform introductory physics classes from their lecture- and instructor-oriented structure to a model that better benefits students.

Supporting Secondary Students in Building External Models

This 3-year project is (1) developing and testing a modeling tool and accompanying instructional materials, (2) exploring how to support students in building and using models to explain and predict phenomena across a range of disciplines and (3) documenting the sophistication of understanding of disciplinary core ideas that students develop when building and using models in grades 6–12. The project is, thus, engaging learners in using crosscutting concepts with various scientific practices (particularly modeling, but also analyzing and interpreting data and engaging in argument with evidence), blended with disciplinary core ideas. Because the research and development work will be carried out in schools in which students typically do not succeed in science, the products will also help produce a population of citizens capable of continuing further STEM learning.

Tools for Teaching and Learning Engineering Practices: Pathways Towards Productive Identity Developing in Engineering (I-Engineering)

Achievement and interest gaps remain in engineering for students from underrepresented backgrounds. The STEM education field needs research and development that addresses both the learning problem—supporting students in learning engineering design—and the identity problem—supporting students in recognizing that they belong in engineering. By engaging students in both the technical and social dimensions of engineering design, students both learn important engineering practices and develop a personal identity of being an engineer that can lead to a long-term commitment to STEM study and future careers.

ELeVATE: Investigating How Students Build an Integrated Understanding of Energy Over Time

This National Science Foundation-funded CREATE project, with partners from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and the Leibnitz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education in Germany, is developing both innovative curriculum and a set of assessments to determine which instructional approach is most effective in helping middle school students build a robust understanding of energy. The goal is for students to understand energy as both a disciplinary core idea within individual areas of science and a crosscutting concept that spans the sciences. Assessments will capture student learning, student learning progressions and student self-efficacy—the degree to which students feel confident in their ability to apply their understanding of energy concepts to explain phenomena they encounter at school and in the world.

Teaching Science Outdoors Project

CREATE staff are collaborating with partners from MSU Kellogg Biological Station on the Teaching Science Outdoors Project to build a professional development program for elementary school teachers. The goal of this effort is to increase the ability of teachers to use the outdoors—whether in their schoolyard, neighborhood or community—as a component of doing strong science teaching aligned with NGSS.

Multiple Literacies in Project-Based Learning

This pioneering curriculum effort will use project-based learning to help students in grades 3–4 develop not only scientific understanding, but also the language and mathematical literacies that will enable them to thrive as students in later grades and explain phenomena they experience in their lives.

Health in Our Hands Project: A New Genomic Framework for Schools and Communities

NIH-Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) has funded CREATE for STEM Institute at University of Michigan in collaboration with the School of Public Health at University of Michigan and other partners for this five-year project. The project, called Health in Our Hands, is developing and testing new learning materials that blend formal classroom instruction and informal community-based learning to give both students and community members opportunities to apply ideas about gene-environment interactions, natural selection, and evolution to their lives.

Assessing Learning Progressions

Assessing Learning Progressions (ALPs) is a National Science Foundation funded project aimed at helping researchers of learning progressions bridge the gap between the development of hypothetical learning progressions and the use of assessment to study and validate them. Learning progressions have the potential to transform how we construe learning, instruction, and assessment in science.

Investigating and Questioning our World Through Science and Technology (IQWST)

The Investigating and Questioning our World through Science and Technology (IQWST; pronounced I-quest) project develops the next generation of middle school curricula designed to enable teachers with diverse knowledge and experiences to teach science effectively to students with a variety of backgrounds and strengths to meet important learning goals aligned with the Next Generation of Science Standards.

TEAM Project (MTH1825 Project)

The Teacher Education And Mathematics Project (TEAM Project) is working on transforming the remedial mathematics experience at Michigan State University. We are specifically working on MTH1825, within the face to face component MTH100E. Our intervention uses Pre-Service Mathematics teachers (Students taking TE407) to implement a curriculum using group-worthy tasks in an inquiry-based environment.

Interactions: Student Understanding of Intermolecular Forces

The Interactions project aims to develop and test web-based instructional materials designed to support high school physical science students in developing an understanding of the forces and energy involved in atomic and molecular interactions. The year-long curriculum can be used in a physical science, chemistry or physics class.

Designing Next Generation Assessments to Support the Teaching and Learning of Life Science

The NGSA Life Science project is a 3-year, $1.46 million project funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Based on the work underway in another project in the larger Next Generation Science Assessment endeavor, the team is designing, developing, testing, and validating a set of 3-dimensional assessment tasks and scoring rubrics aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards Performance Expectations for middle school science classrooms.