Research in ITEST

In this webinar, PIs and evaluators described how they are meeting the challenge of incorporating rigorous research designs and evaluations that provide useful measures of project success, all while developing dynamic activities within the ITEST framework.

Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE) hosted a webinar on the Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development, a joint report by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Over 70 teachers, 1800 high school students and 900 middle school students in urban and suburban RI and CT districts during the course of the program will interact with cutting edge research technologies related to exploring the global ocean.

This collaborative project is conducting a research study to delineate the effective components of mentoring for underrepresented and non-underrepresented students in STEM, utilizing a robotics educational program.

This summer, twenty four students had an opportunity to meet Dr. Alex “Sandy” Pentland from MIT’s Media Lab, Dr. Gene Stanley from Boston University’s Center for Polymer Studies, and other researchers to learn about current applications in network science.

This study by Worcester Polytechnic Institute will ascertain how well "disengagement" of students in mathematics can be determined from math learning software and how well it predicts later outcomes of STEM learning and career advancement.

The Robot Algebra Project creates three scalable, middle school level units for use in informal settings. The units are designed around fundamental robot movement concepts but emphasize proportional reasoning - a big idea in mathematics. There are over 12,000 FIRST Lego League teams across the U.S. that purport to use robots as a motivator to engage students in STEM. However, most of the time the students use guess and check procedures thwarting the opportunity to learn STEM content.

In this paper, we investigate the correspondence between student affect in a web-based tutoring platform throughout the school year and learning outcomes at the end of the year, on a high-stakes mathematics exam.

Research shows that middle school is an important juncture for a student where he or she starts to be conscious about academic achievement and thinks about college attendance. It is already known that access to financial resources, family background, career aspirations and academic ability are indicative of a student’s choice to attend college; though these variables are interesting, they do not necessarily give sufficient actionable information to instructors or guidance counselors to intervene for individual students.