Strengthening the Research Base that Informs STEM Workforce and Curriculum Improvement Efforts

该项目由NSF的教育和学习研究（真实的）计划资助。 真实的支持积累强有力的证据，为理解、建立理论解释和提出创新和干预措施提供信息，以解决STEM兴趣、教育、学习和参与方面的持续挑战。 该项目通过确定有效的教师专业发展和课程改进工作的特点，解决了当代STEM教育面临的重大挑战。这项研究将产生迄今为止关于这一主题的因果研究证据的最全面和最严格的综合。该项目将积累证据的干预措施的影响，旨在提高教学质量对学前班-12年级学生的社会情感，行为，情感，在数学和科学的学习成果。 该项目的目的是产生一个全面的综合研究，探讨专业发展（和其他）干预措施，旨在提高教师的学习和倡议，以加强教师在课堂上使用新的课程材料的（即时，中期和长期）的影响。 具体来说，研究人员将建立一个全面的研究数据库，将通过搜索参考数据库，综述文章，资助研究项目的结果，基于网络的资源，主要STEM和通识教育会议的摘要，以及与研究人员的直接联系来构建，包括NSF和美国教育部支持研究的主要研究人员。该数据库将包括可能影响所研究项目有效性的关键主持人的信息，例如：持续时间，强度，格式，等级和学科主题。然后，研究人员将利用元分析技术，综合从方法上严格的STEM干预研究的结果，明确目的是改善数学和科学教学（例如，涉及专业发展、课程材料或两者的干预措施）。

This project is funded by NSF's Research on Education and Learning (REAL) program. REAL supports the accumulation of robust evidence to inform efforts to understand, build theory to explain, and suggest innovations and interventions to address persistent challenges in STEM interest, education, learning, and participation. This project addresses a grand challenge facing contemporary STEM education by identifying characteristics of effective teacher professional development and curricular improvement efforts. The research will produce the most comprehensive and rigorous synthesis to date of the causal research evidence on this topic. This project will accumulate evidence on the impacts of interventions intended to improve instructional quality on preK-12th grade students' social-emotional, behavioral, affective, and learning outcomes in mathematics and science. The project has been designed to produce a comprehensive synthesis of research exploring the (immediate, intermediate, and long-term) impacts of professional development (and other) interventions intended to enhance teacher learning, and initiatives to enhance teachers' use of novel curricular materials in the classroom. Specifically, the researchers will build a comprehensive database of studies will be constructed through searches of reference databases, review articles, results of funded research projects, web-based resources, abstracts of major STEM and general education conferences, and direct contact with researchers, including principal investigators of NSF and U.S. Department of Education supported studies. The database will include information on the key moderators that likely impact the efficacy of the programs studied such as: duration, intensity, format, grade, and disciplinary topic. The investigators will then utilize meta-analytic techniques to synthesize findings from methodologically rigorous studies of STEM interventions with the explicit intent of improving mathematics and science teaching (e.g., interventions involving professional development, curricular materials, or both).