University of Southern California

The purpose of this study is to testthe efficacy of a teacher-training and implementation model for the Pathways to Success program that was developed through a previous IES grant. Pathways is a 12-session social psychological intervention administered at the start of eighth grade to help students change key elements of their identity based motivation - their possible selves (who students expect to become in the near and distant future), their strategies to work on these possible selves, and...

A key strategy for addressing students' poor mathematics achievement is to improve professional learning opportunities for middle school teachers. Researchers propose to develop an interactive, personalized computer-based professional development intervention to increase middle school teachers' content knowledge of proportional reasoning and pedagogical content knowledge of proportional reasoning and, in turn, improve their students' understanding of proportional reasoning.

This development study addressed two challenges: high school failure and the need to transform theory- and evidence-based dropout prevention programs into usable, feasible, scalable school-based programs to reduce risk of school failure. School-to-Jobs (STJ) is an intervention rooted in identity-based motivation theory, which predicts that to do well in school, children need to experience the present as psychologically connected to their future self, and interpret difficulties in school as s...

In this project, the researchers created and evaluated supplemental intelligent tutoring software (ITS) for supporting student learning outcomes in grade 6 mathematics. The goal of this software, called AnimalWatch, was to improve mathematics skill and achievement, particularly for students from groups that have been traditionally under-represented in science and engineering fields. AnimalWatch software was to integrate mathematics problem solving and multimedia instruction with information ...

In this project, the researchers will develop a diagnostic measure of content and pedagogical content knowledge of numbers and operations for elementary school teachers. Despite the agreement across teacher educators on the importance of teacher content and pedagogical content knowledge in creating meaningful learning opportunities for students, many existing assessments of teacher knowledge have not been designed to capture the key elements of these knowledge components, particularly pedago...

In this study, the researchers will evaluate the impact, implementation, costs, and cost effectiveness of Street Law Inc.'s program, Talking About Local Current and Contested Issues in Schools (TALCCS) in grades 8 through 12. TALCCS includes instructional materials with aligned professional learning. The program aims to develop teachers' capacity to improve students' ability to productively discuss current and contested issues, as well as their attendance, academic outcomes, and civic behavi...