News from the Concord Consortium

Teachers Need Feedback LOOPS

The National Science Foundation has awarded the Concord Consortium $3 million for a new five-year project, Logging Opportunities in Online Programs for Science (LOOPS). LOOPS will collect data on student progress—what activity each student is working on or has completed, plus student responses to questions and scores on various explicit assessments. The major innovation of LOOPS will be data on student inquiry skills obtained by monitoring how students learn from their explorations of models and probes. LOOPS will extract in real time a few key indicators of inquiry skills and present them in a format that teachers can use.

LOOPS will put teachers in a feedback loop of data, which will help inform their choice of assessments, actions, and curriculum customizations. These feedback loops will be classroom-tested with inquiry-based materials using probes and models focused on eighth grade physical science.

The LOOPS project is part of a long-term collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Toronto, and North Carolina Central University.

Physics First in Rhode Island

The Concord Consortium is excited to collaborate with Rhode Island’s statewide Physics First movement, which switches the order of required secondary science courses to a physics-chemistry-biology sequence. The National Science Foundation has funded the Rhode Island Information Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (RI-ITEST) project, which will provide 100 teachers over 120 hours of activities and full support for classroom implementation.

The revised course sequence will add new content drawn from the science of atoms and molecules, which our Molecular Workbench models in powerful ways. Using computational modeling like Molecular Workbench also prepares students for related careers in information technologies.

Over two years, participating teachers will meet in summer and school year workshops, take an online course, and be mentored. Student progress will be determined using qualitative and quantitative techniques that include measuring students’ gains in modeling and molecular reasoning skills.

Student Inquiry with Biological Data Sets

The Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance, the Concord Consortium, and Jackson Laboratories have partnered to conduct a new project: GENIQUEST (GENomics Inquiry through QUantitative Trait Loci Exploration with SAIL Technology): Bringing STEM Data to High School Classrooms. The project’s long-range goal is to improve student understanding of science, scientific research, and the use of evidence in reaching scientific conclusions.

The focus is the development of an application enabling students and teachers to investigate biological data sets using a research-based instructional model. By integrating the publicly shared data set from the Jackson Laboratories with powerful analysis tools and innovative approaches in science instruction, developers will build a biology computing environment to support student investigation and inquiry. Pilot studies will be conducted in Maine, which is geographically large and rural, and possesses high-quality classroom access to technology.