High Schools

ALMA’s mission is to help adults gain basic reading, writing, and math skills. ALMA creates innovative, educationally sound, and entertaining television-based teaching materials and cultivates community networks to support ALMA learners. TV411, ALMA’s magazine-format television series (with ancillary print materials and an instructional Web site) is aired on more than 100 stations nationwide.

CSE is directing the evaluation of the Marine Biological Laboratory’s Wolbachia Project. This five-year effort engages high school teachers and students in authentic research on bacterial symbionts, thereby providing an opportunity to learn important concepts and techniques in modern microbiology. Project components include (1) an annual teacher workshop, (2) discovery-based lab implementation during the school year in classrooms of teachers who participated in the workshop, and (3) student and teacher summer “envisionships” in a Wolbachia scientist’s laboratory.

The project’s multidisciplinary research and development team has been investigating whether the integration of a specific kind of computational model i.e., simulations into a high school science curriculum, can support students from diverse academic, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds in developing computational literacy—a capacity to understand relationships between domain knowledge and the mathematical, algorithmic, and modeling processes that are the building blocks of computational science.

The purpose of the Literacy Accessibility for Biology (LAB) Project is to develop and test an intervention that seeks to improve the performance of grade 9 and grade 10 students with learning disabilities who struggle in biology classrooms because of their reading and writing difficulties. The intervention combines literacy strategies with the use of an innovative reading and writing software tool, SOLO. EDC is carrying out the work in a Boston High School with a range of diverse learners.

CSE is working with the Massachusetts State Science and Engineering Fair to help design and develop a sustainable, scalable model of teacher professional development in inquiry-based learning. The goal of the one-week course is to enable middle and high school teachers to imbue their science curricula with inquiry-based activities that will help students develop science literacy, prepare them for college majors in science and technology, show high achievement on MCAS science tests, and acquire workplace skills such as critical thinking, communication, teamwork, and perseverance.

Project Reentry expands and supplements services offered through the Department of Justice Affairs to recently released youth offenders. Services include academic, employability, life, and occupational skills training. EDC provides technical assistance to the project that focuses on program design issues. EDC assesses curriculum provided by partnering institutions, researches and reports on best practices of similar projects, and provides recommendations for program modification based upon surveys of participants and community stakeholders.

This project addresses gaps in the current state assessment system and explores the following questions: Where are the gaps in the assessment system? Who are the students affected by these gaps? What are the appropriate assessment systems for students in the gaps? After answering these questions, the project will develop and pilot an assessment prototype to address the problem and meet student needs.

This research project investigates the effectiveness of online professional development programs for teachers. Specifically, it addresses three questions: (1) How effective are online programs in improving teachers’ content knowledge and classroom practices as compared with other models of professional development? (2) How do interactions among participants and facilitators differ across online models, and how do these interactions contribute to learning? and (3) What factors make for successful online professional development programs?