Effective communication is key to ending the "chilly climate" that students of many backgrounds experience in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. But it is possible to improve the chances that all students will persist in STEM and perhaps continue on to graduate school.

To recruit more girls and women into the so-called "engineering pipeline" educators are presenting engineering careers in more appealing ways, for example, as fun, socially useful, and multidisciplinary.

Sadhana Puntambekar's CoMPASS (Concept Mapped Project-Based Activity Scaffolding System) is a hypertext system that uses graphical representations in the form of concept maps alongside text descriptions, to help students learn science.

WCER will help three states design and implement statewide systems for analyzing longitudinal education data, thanks to a new competitive grant awarded last week. WCER is part of a three-state consortium consisting of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan to win a total of $9.4 million (approximately $3 million to each state) over the next three years.

Given its role as a gatekeeper to future educational and employment opportunities, algebra has become a focal point of both reform and research efforts in mathematics education. Understanding and using algebra depends on understanding a number of fundamental concepts, one of which is the  concept of equality.

Several new working papers have been posted. The most recently posted papers in the WCER Working Series include Visual Display and Co-Expressivity as Students Strive for Intersubjectivity in a Spatial Reasoning Task; and The New Instructional Leadership: Creating Data-Driven Instructional Systems in Schools, among others.

Transana, developed at WCER, is software for professional researchers who analyze digital video or audio data. Transana analyzes and manages audio and video data in very sophisticated ways. It allows researchers to transcribe video and audio files, create and identify analytically interesting clips, assign keywords to clips, arrange and rearrange clips, create complex collections of interrelated clips, explore relationships between applied keywords, and share analysis with colleagues.

The Chicago Community Trust awards grants totaling more than $62 million annually to organizations ranging from neighborhood social service agencies to museums and educational institutions. Chris Thorn and colleagues are evaluating three areas of the Trust's Education Initiative: literacy, professional development, and alternative schools.

WCER's Coordination, Consultation, and Evaluation (CCE) Center works with six research centers at universities across the U.S. to study behavior and reading intervention models for K-3 students and to provide technical assistance.

Effective schooling depends on coordinating three components of the educational environment: curriculum, instruction and assessment. The degree to which these elements work together toward student learning is alignment. Alignment is the extent to which expectations and assessments agree and serve together to guide the system toward students learning what they are expected to know and do.

An enrichment program called Learning Through Teaching in an After-School Pedagogical Laboratory addresses two issues: the underachievement of African American students and the preparation of teachers who can work successfully with these students.

WCER's Working Paper Series offers a broad view of the center's research. To date, we have posted 22 papers covering a wide range of topics.

SCALE (System-Wide Change for All Learners and Educators) has developed Immersion Units. Immersion Units are designed to support science teaching and learning, where students are engaged and asking questions and actually doing science. Immersion Units provide a coherent series of lessons designed to guide students in developing deep conceptual understanding that is aligned with the standards and key concepts in science.

Brian Bottge and colleagues investigate the factors that promote or impede the successful implementation of Enhanced Anchored Instruction (EAI), a way of using technology to help students with learning disabilities and/or emotional disabilities develop their computation and problem-solving skills in authentic contexts for learning.

For the past seven years WCER staff have worked with Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) district staff to develop their capacity to analyze and use data on students and schools. Rob Meyer, Norm Webb, and Paula White provide technical direction to the work of a research manager employed by the Milwaukee Public Schools and the Milwaukee Partnership Academy.

WCER researcher John Smithson and colleagues are evaluating instruction and professional development in the National Science Foundation's Mathematics and Science Partnerships (MSPs). The MSP program seeks to help prepare the next generation of scientists, engineers, science and math educators, and a science-literate citizenry.

Professional development programs enhance learning when they provide teachers with sustained opportunities to experiment with and receive feedback on innovative practices, to collarborate with peers in and out of school, and to interact with external researches. UW-Madison education professor Jeffrey Lewis studies the effectiveness of the program Learning Through Teaching in an After-School Pedagogical Laboratory (L-TAPL).

The most consistent predictor of children’s social development through the early school years turns out to be the sensitivity of maternal behavior across the infant, toddler, and preschool years. Recent research by UW-Madison education professor Deborah Lowe Vandell and colleagues in the NICHD and Early Child Care Research Network shows that early family and child care factors predict a child’s social adaptation in school.

The Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning promotes the development of a national faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) committed to implementing and advancing effective teaching practices for diverse student audiences as part of their professional careers. CIRTL represents a collaboration of faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Michigan State University, and the Pennsylvania State University.

Teacher evaluation can be useful if meaningful data are collected. But in many schools evaluations are haphazard and are framed through the principal's cognitive lens, rather than by any particular evalution instrument. A recent study by UW Madison education professor Carolyn Kelly and graduate student Victoria Maslow found that few experienced teachers identified evaluation feedback as useful in advancing their professional learning.

The key to higher student performance is professional development; teachers, principals and aides are learning different strategies for assisting students who often are no "scoring" well because of factors related to poverty, language, or culture.

A school's socio-economic status, or poverty index, has a significant and negative effect on student reading and math achievement.

Schools across the U.S. struggle to address critical learning gaps, and to identify ways to improve quality of teaching for all students. Evaluation can play an important role in teacher professional development and in policy changes.

A school performance indicator must accurately and reliably measure school performance. School performance is defined as the contribution of a school to a particular test or other student outcome. The only indicator that satisfies this criterion, in general, is the value-added indicator.

School principals establish and influence conditions that affect student achievement. However, research has not yet resulted in a definitive model of the competencies these leaders need to have. With funding from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences, researcher Tony Milanowski is embarking on a study that will address the knowledge gap in school leadership evaluation.

David Williamson Shaffer, Kurt R. Squire, Richard Halverson, and James P. Gee argue for a particular view of video games in their paper "Video Games and the Future of Learning." In "Studio Mathematics: The Epistemology and Practice of Design Pedagogy as a Model for Mathematics Learning" David Williamson Shaffer examines three precursors to the development of mathematical understanding.

Five new awards will further increase WCER's capacity to respond to the new research mandate of the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education.

Instructional improvement intervention programs like Accelerated Schools, America's Choice, and Success for All can have powerful effects on the enacted curriculum in U.S. schools.

In a study for the Society for Research in Child Development, UW-Madison education professor Deborah Lowe Vandell and colleagues found that high quality child care is associated with higher scores on standardized tests of math and reading achievement in elementary school.

UW-Madison education professor Elizabeth Graue examines how prospective teachers just beginning a professional education program think about working with parents.

Richard Halverson is developing new methods and using new technologies to access, represent, and communicate successful instructional leadership practices for school leaders.

WCER's Center on Integrating Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) holds its 2005 national forum, Addressing the Student Learning Experience: Achieving Diversity in STEM Disciplines, in Madison May 25 and 26.

A recent study by Anthony Milanowski and Steven Kimball provides a justification for interventions aimed at improving teacher expertise, as defined by standards-based evaluation systems, and for using such evaluations for making decisions with consequences for teachers, such as tenure, professional development requirements, or pay.

A $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education will enhance UW-Madison's capacity to conduct high-quality research on practical questions in education and will help to prepare a new generation of scholars in the social sciences with expertise in the design, implementation, and statistical analysis of evidence on "what works" in education.

Cost analysis has become an important educational decision-making tool in recent years, as educators are being asked to do more with less funding and to provide tangible evidence of the effectiveness of educational programs.

Interests of mathematics and science educators at all educational levels were addressed at a SCALE/QED/FOCUS conference in Los Angeles March 11-12 titled "An NSF Framework for Improving Math and Science Learning Environments."

UW-Madison education professor David Williamson Shaffer and colleagues use design experiments to explore how computers and other new media make it possible to use techniques from the professions to learn by doing.

Compared with other areas of educational psychology, the application of learning sciences is a relatively new, yet rapidly developing field.

Professor Sadhana Puntambekar is synthesizing research on complex causal learning across disciplines, and is identifying gaps in the knowledge base that past research has built up.

Research indicates that students at risk of failure, and students with serious emotional disturbance benefit from strong attachment to schooling, and to adult mentors in school environments.

UW Madison education professors Mitchell Nathan and Eric Knuth worked with an elementary school teacher for two years, analyzing whole-group discourse for use in mathematics education.

In a recent study of resilience in students from families of low socio-economic status, UW-Madison education professor Geoffrey Borman and colleagues found that the most powerful school characteristics for promoting resilience were represented by the supportive school community model which, unlike other school models, includes elements that actively shield children from adversity.

Value-added models and indicators have emerged as the most promising strategy for measuring the performance of schools, teachers, programs, and policies.

UW-Madison education professor Martha W. Alibali and colleagues have found that gestures do more than help a speaker generate the surface forms of utterances.

UW-Madison education professor Eric Camburn and colleague Carol A. Barnes found that triangulation strategies provide a more holistic understanding of the validity of teachers' reports of instruction than past validity studies.

UW-Madison education professor Diana Hess's research investigates teaching strategies, class composition, length and depth of instruction, teachers' knowledge and skills, and content and currency of issues students are deliberating.

Two elements of child care programs consistently predict children's cognitive, language, and social development, says UW Madison education professor Deborah Lowe Vandell: Does the child care meet structural/caregiver standards and process quality standards?

UW-Madison education professor Brian Bottge investigates factors that promote the successful implementation of Enhanced Anchored Instruction.

The CIRTL Diversity Institute brings together scholars to produce materials and resources that aim to reform science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) higher education.

Adam Gamoran, Professor of Sociology and Educational Policy Studies, is the new Director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.