Research on teaching practice has recently gained attention as an effective lever for improving student engagement and achievement. Recent studies have shown that even more than years of teaching experience or degree held, the instructional practice that occurs in K-12 classrooms is the best predictor of student learning. Given the limited amount of time and resources available for preparing new teachers, identifying and helping novices take up a small set of effective, content-specific practices, has great potential for improving the education of students in our nation's schools.

This program of researching draws on the emerging work of core instructional practices. Fueled by work with the Core Practice Consortium (https://www.corepracticeconsortium.com/), this series of studies focuses specifically on how science teachers learn and engage core practices like facilitating sensemaking discussions and how students participate in these experiences.

The Quality Assessment in Science Professional Development (QAS PD) project is a joint research endeavor between researchers and teacher educators at the University of Notre Dame and Stanford University investigating teachers' conceptions and practices across a year-long intervention using portfolios of assessment and data-use artifacts. This work builds on previous iterations of QAS Notebook studies in collaboration with Felipe Martinez (PI) at UCLA and Brian Stecher (Co-PI) at RAND Corporation, funded in part by the Spencer Foundation and the W.T. Grant Foundation.

In this current studies, we use the Notebook as a means for professional development. Teams of middle school science teachers from four schools in two states were trained to reflect on artifacts in these portfolios - assessment tasks, student samples, and annotations of the artifacts - in light of nine dimensions of effective practice. Drawn from the literature, the nine Dimensions used during the PD and the professional learning communities (PLCs) include:

Dimension 1: Setting Clear Learning Goals

Dimension 2: Aligning Assessments to Goals

Dimension 3: Assessing Frequently

Dimension 4: Varying Assessment

Dimension 5: Assessing with Appropriate Cognitive Complexity

Dimension 6: Reflecting Math/Science Practices

Dimension 7: Involving Students in Own Assessment

Dimension 8: Providing Specific Feedback

Dimension 9: Using Evidence of Student Thinking to Adapt Instruction

Participating teachers collected an initial 10-day Notebook prior to an intensive professional development where they were introduced to and used the Dimensions to reflect on their own practice (Figure 1). During the school year, teachers met in PLCs on a monthly basis, collecting shorter 5-day Notebooks and reflecting on specific Dimensions. A final Notebook was collected one year after the initial baseline collection.

This project is focused on developing, deploying, and evaluating a new generation of teacher portfolio instruments based on modern tablet technology. The project is a collaboration between a multidisciplinary team of experts in assessment, science education, and technology aimed at helping researchers and practitioners monitor, assess, and improve instruction in middle school science classrooms aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

Building on prior successful portfolio systems, a new electronic portfolio platform has been developed and tested using a mixed methods validation study. A sample of 40 volunteer middle school science teachers collected two 10-day Notebooks. Teachers collected evidence of their instruction using the electronic portfolios, and this evidence was scored by a group of experienced raters and experts using a set of guidelines of instructional practice aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards. Advanced quantitative methods, including multifaceted generalizability theory, factor analysis, and hierarchical linear models, was used to assess the properties of portfolio data against other teacher measures. An additional set of ratings investigated the reliability of rating Notebooks based on a smaller sample of days rated.

Qualitatively, the e-QIS Notebook was used in the context of a professional learning community (PLC). This study investigated the following research questions:

1. What do teachers learn from engaging in PLCs using the e-QIS Notebook and Dimensions?
2. In what ways, if at all, are new understandings translated into practice?
3. What is the nature of PLC discussions when using the e-QIS app and Dimensions?
4. What decisions do teachers make in collecting and selecting artifacts using the e-QIS app?
5. How do teachers envision the use of the e-QIS app for the following purposes:
   1. Self-identified professional growth;
   2. Alignment with school PD goals;
   3. Professional evaluation?

Texts play a critical role in science research and science classrooms, yet most K-12 textbooks have failed to represent the epistemic elements of the science disciplines, including the justification of claims or references to empirical data. This line of research investigates students' reading experiences when engaging alternative text types that are more epistemologically considerate, that is, texts that better convey both what we know and how we know it to be true.

Using narratives of historical experiments, these brief narrative texts have been shown in initial randomized trials to result in more interest from students, equivalent comprehension of core biology ideas, and higher performance on transfer tasks when compared to traditional textbook accounts. Current research is focusing on how students engage these alternate text types in group discussions and the impact of their use over the course of an entire year.

As a result of these studies, we look to create a set of historical narratives that are more epistemologically considerate than traditional science texts that can be used, in alignment with the Next Generation Science Standards and the Common Core Literacy Standards for Science, in middle and high school science classrooms.

The formation of STEM-focused schools has been a priority for local school systems and state and national policymakers. Yet despite calls for 1,000 new STEM-focused schools within the next decade, little consensus exists on what defines a STEM-focused school and the process by which they come to be. As greater emphasis is placed on the formation of STEM-focused schools we, as a research field, must better understand the process by which STEM-focused schools develop and how such transformations impact student outcomes and teacher practices in order to improve their outcomes across different contexts.

Our research explores the emergence of a more contemporary phenomenon - the formation of STEM-focused Catholic schools.  Our research addresses the following research questions:

1. What factors define a Catholic STEM-focused school?
2. What are the critical components of a Catholic STEM-focused school?
3. How does a STEM transformation impact the nature of schooling?