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

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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).