Research-Practice Partnership Past Grantees

2015 Grantees

The 21st Century Naturalist: A Research-practice Collaboration for Informal Science Education

Kevin Crowley, Karen Knutson, Lauren Giarratani, and Stephen Tonsor
University of Pittsburgh

The University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE) and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History have been building a partnership on a project-by-project basis over the last 10 years. This project includes a set of research activities, relationship building, and capacity building that will allow the partnership to deepen and sustain that work. We are working together towards understanding how to help the museum become a more engaged and outward focused community resource, and to find new ways to activate the existing resources within the museum in the context of the broader educational ecology in the region. Projects that involve school districts and community based organizations, that target different kinds of audiences than the traditional general visiting public, and that provide professional development to support staff in better accommodating and mediating these experiences are intended to reshape the museum as a place that is better suited for the educational challenges of the future.

Shifting Instructional Practice in Middle Grades Mathematics: A SERP-SFUSD Partnership Proposal to the Spencer Foundation

Suzanne Donovan and James Ryan
Strategic Education Research Partnership Institute

The SERP-SFUSD partnership proposed a two-year project to design and iteratively improve a strategy for shifting instructional practice in middle grades mathematics classrooms. The strategy centers on interactions among coaches and teachers in professional learning communities, anchored by classroom video of students engaged with curriculum-embedded rich math tasks. The goal is to increase student learning by focusing teachers’ attention on the effectiveness of small group work, particularly the level of scaffolding of the task, the regularity with which students articulate their thinking and listen to others ideas, and effective time use.

The use of video and the site-based professional learning community strategy are supported by research evidence, but the influence of research on practice is limited by the many logistical and design challenges involved in introducing and sustaining these practices in complex school systems. The PIs will explore whether and how they can engineer robust district processes and build district capacity for a scalable, sustainable and productive teacher learning strategy. The strategy, the tools to support it, and documentation of the implementation challenges will be shared widely.

Seizing a Missed Opportunity: Transforming the Placement, Evaluation, and Hiring of Student Teachers in Spokane Public Schools

Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald, and Mary Templeton
American Institutes for Research

Local school systems have significant control over important policy levers affecting the quality of the teacher workforce: the recruitment and selection of teachers into the workforce. Previous work conducted by this partnership has focused on one aspect of this process – the selection of teacher applicants – and they now plan to study another aspect of this process, the important role of student teaching placements in defining the applicant pool for Spokane’s future teacher workforce. The work proposed provides greater structure to student teaching placements in Spokane Public Schools (SPS), establishes a framework for collecting better data about student teachers and the cooperating teachers who supervise their internships, and will allow Spokane Public Schools to use data about student teachers to inform hiring decisions. The project will prepare the team to study whether information collected about student teachers is predictive of the future performance of those hired into the workforce.

Development of Practical Measures for Improving the Quality of Mathematics Classroom Practice

Kara Jones Jackson, Marco Munoz, Paul Cobb, and Erin Henrick
University of Washington

This project builds on an eight-year design-research partnership with Jefferson County Public Schools (Louisville, KY) that focuses on improving middle-grades mathematics instruction. The PIs have jointly identified the need for practical measures to both assess and leverage improvement in the quality of whole-class and small-group discussions in mathematics classrooms. The need to improve classroom discourse is acute with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and associated increase in the rigor of state assessments. In contrast to research measures, practical measures can be integrated into current work routines, and thus can be used frequently. Furthermore, the resulting data can be analyzed rapidly so that practitioners can receive prompt feedback on their progress. The activities involve design research cycles in which they will jointly construct a set of instruments, establish routines for collecting and analyzing data, and develop data representations tailored to the needs of different groups of practitioners. The project will contribute to JCPS’ capacity for instructional improvement, produce practical measures that will be used by other research-practice partnerships, and generate knowledge on designing and implementing practical measures of key aspects of classroom instruction that have been linked to student learning.

Strengthening the Research Architecture for High Quality Universal Pre-K: Leveraging the opportunity of a historic expansion

Pamela Morris, Sophia Pappas, and David Berman
New York University

Senior leaders in New York City are currently undertaking one of the most rapidly and broadly deployed educational policy initiatives in the nation by expanding universal pre-Kindergarten opportunities through “Pre-K for All” (PKA). The purpose of this project is to continue a partnership between New York University researchers and New York City’s early education policy leaders in the Center for Economic Opportunity at the Mayor’s office and the Division of Early Childhood Education at the Department of Education during the wake of this expansion. This collaboration is designed to put “science to work,” to jointly strengthen the tools needed to answer policy and scholarly questions regarding the effectiveness of PKA. This effort has two major goals: a) to strengthen the services offered through PKA, thus ensuring that the program is “ready” for rigorous evaluation; and b) to support progress monitoring to undergird the ongoing evaluation of the program, providing the research infrastructure to “take the pulse” of PKA. By helping New York City leaders to answer relatively straightforward descriptive questions of high policy relevance, the PIs aim to set the stage for continued long-term collaboration between Center for Economic Opportunity, the Division of Early Childhood Education, and researchers in early childhood education and policy at New York University.

The Hive Research Lab: Investigating and Supporting Youth Interest-Driven Learning Pathways in Hive NYC

Kylie Peppler, Christopher Hoadley, and Meghan McDermott
Indiana University Bloomington

This research-practice partnership looks to promote interest-driven STEM learning pathways through the lens of a specific practice: educators brokering future learning opportunities to youth. Opportunities might include fellowships, internships, events, out-of-school programs, and online tools and communities. The central question driving the work is how educators and informal learning organizations can develop routines and interventions that lead to youth taking up new learning opportunities. The research team, along with members of the Mozilla Hive NYC Learning Network (hivenyc.org), a city-based collective of informal education institutions committed to networked innovation, is engaging in this work through collaborative design-based implementation research activities to test a theoretical model of how brokering activities lead to enhanced social capital and engagement in future learning, as well as piloting an instrument to support STEM pathways within the New York City-based Hive network. The results of this partnership will include new theoretical and practical knowledge, interventions, design principles, and measures that will increase the Hive network’s collective capacity to support youths’ interest-driven learning pathways. For more information visit: hiveresearchlab.org.

College Readiness Benchmarks in the Elementary and Middle School Years and the Strategies and Practices that Help Students Meet Them: A Project of the Los Angeles Education Research Institute’s Research-Practice Partnership

Meredith Phillips, Kyo Yamashiro, Cynthia Lim, Carol Alexander, and Derrick Chau
University of California, Los Angeles

Through a Los Angeles-based partnership, the PIs will conduct research to identify elementary and middle school benchmarks that predict college readiness in the Los Angeles Unified School District and strategies and practices that may help students meet those benchmarks. The PIs will also build stronger and more regular mechanisms for communication, relationship-building, and capacity-building. Their research will begin by identifying the 3rd, 5th, and 8th grade indicators that are most predictive of students’ college readiness by the end of 11th grade. They will then identify elementary and middle schools in which students meet college readiness benchmarks even when they start out behind in earlier grades. At key points throughout the project, the PIs will use central office staff interviews, focus groups with school personnel, and site visits at a subset of schools to gather information about the strategies and practices schools use to improve students’ preparation. They will also develop survey items asking school staff about the strategies and practices they use, to include on the district’s annual survey, in order to document strategies districtwide. This project will further institutionalize the collaboration and partnership and yield information about a set of promising practices that might be scaled to other schools in subsequent partnership work.

Oregon English Learner Alliance: An Ongoing Partnership To Understand and Improve Outcomes for Current and Former English Learners in Oregon

Karen Thompson, David Bautista, Martha Martinez, and Sarah Drinkwater
Oregon State University

Formed in 2012, the Oregon English Learner Alliance is a partnership between the Oregon Department of Education and Oregon State University focused on improving outcomes for English learners in Oregon. This grant will provide medium-term stability for the Oregon English Learner Alliance, enabling them to: 1) conduct new studies motivated by findings of the partnership to-date; 2) build the research infrastructure to further facilitate data sharing and collaboration; and 3) engage in the capacity-building necessary to ensure the partnership’s long-term success. Specifically, the PIs will build on current findings to conduct further research about outcomes for English learners with disabilities, a population of increasing concern at the national, state, and local level. In these efforts, they will maintain their overarching goals of improving outcomes for English learners in Oregon while generating and disseminating knowledge about promising policies and practices that have impact beyond Oregon as well.