Middle Grades

The Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast and Islands (REL-NEI) is one of ten regional laboratories and has a mission to help pre-K–16 educators use the best available evidence to make decisions leading to improved student achievement and reduced performance gaps. REL-NEI places a special emphasis on helping states, districts, and schools build capacity to use their data effectively; forming and conducting high-quality research and evaluation through new “research alliances”; and helping regional education stakeholders incorporate data-based inquiry practices into their decision-making.

Mission US is an interactive adventure game designed to improve the understanding of American history by students in grades 5 through 8. Over the next several years, the project will develop four Web-based American history video games and accompanying pedagogical support materials. To learn more about the administrative, technology infrastructure, and professional development support teachers will require to use these history video games in their classrooms, EDC is conducting an evaluation focused on how teachers integrate the game and classroom materials into their ordinary practices.

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is an online portal for education and research on learning in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). The NSDL Youth Resources project (NYR) is designed to increase utilization of the NSDL by middle school students and their teachers by adding relevant, high-quality and engaging content. The project focuses on the quality, accessibility, and interactivity of content to determine what student’s identify and conceptualize as high-quality online STEM content.

EDC is developing and testing a 2-year, intensive professional development model for building middle grades mathematics teachers’ facility with formative assessment. Using a combination of institutes, ongoing professional learning communities, and Web-based resources, this model attends both to teachers’ knowledge of critical aspects of formative assessment and their implementation of formative assessment in the classroom.

EDC is creating and studying a two year professional development model for middle school mathematics teachers with an emphasis on teaching struggling math students in the areas of fractions and rational numbers. The professional development is composed of online modules, professional learning communities, and face-to-face workshops. Each of the online modules is one week long and covers: 1) Fraction sense: concepts, addition, and subtraction, 2) Fraction multiplication and division; 3) Decimal and percent operations; and 4) Integer sense, including concepts and operations.

This project is evaluating the Talk Science! program, led by TERC, which strives to enhance and study the development of teachers’ skills in managing productive classroom talk in inquiry-based science. The Talk Science! project is documenting teachers’ learning and closely studying the changes in discussion patterns in 18 science classrooms in urban, suburban, and rural schools. The project hypothesizes that aligning professional learning with conceptually driven curricula and emphasizing the development of scientific discourse will change classroom culture and increase student learning.

EDC, the University of Michigan, and the Center for Applied Special Technology are applying the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to enable science curricula to be customized to serve a wide range of student learning needs.

The Boston Science Partnership was a five-year NSF-funded Math and Science Partnership project designed to improve science teaching and learning in Boston’s middle and high schools, enhance university-level teaching by STEM faculty, and ensure the university partners’ continued support for and faculty involvement in science education. The Boston Public Schools, the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Northeastern University are the principal partners. Harvard Medical School and the College Board participate as supporting partners.

Under a previous NSF grant, EDC is developing the Inquiry Science Instruction Observation Protocol (ISIOP), an instrument designed to help evaluators and researchers determine the nature and extent of scientific inquiry instruction and the best practices that are present in middle grades science classroom teaching.