Research and Evaluation

CCT is implementing and evaluating an early childhood mathematics curriculum, Big Math for Little Kids, in child care centers throughout New York City. The curriculum is designed to engage children ages four and five in learning key early learning mathematics concepts. CCT provides teachers training in the use of Big Math for Little Kids and is conducting a two-year experiment comparing the curriculum’s impact on early mathematics skills acquisition to that of the traditional curriculum, Creative Curriculum.

In partnership with Horizon Research, Inc., EDC collects, synthesizes, and shares knowledge from the field of mathematics and science education and from the National Science Foundation-funded Math and Science Partnerships (MSP). The topics of interest include deepening teacher content knowledge, developing and deploying teacher leaders, and supporting new teachers.

In the four-year ICARE Schools study, EDC is identifying and documenting middle-grades schools that use innovative approaches to engage all families in the education of students with disabilities, particularly the creation and implementation of students’ Individual Education Plans (IEPs). After a systematic nomination, application, and review process, researchers selected three middle-grades schools that demonstrate successful parent involvement and positive outcomes for students with disabilities.

CLLC is evaluating all components of the CONNECT-ED program, which include: (1) creating and supporting collegial cross-grade design teams to develop and present Big Idea Modules (BIMs); (2) providing design teams with the needed science expertise, resources, and support to develop the BIMs; (3) developing a cohesive, conceptually coherent, content-rich, and pedagogically powerful set of BIMs for use in a variety of professional development settings; (4) helping teachers acquire valuable content and pedagogical knowledge in the sciences (chemistry for the C-E pilot) through professional develo

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.