ForwardED: News and Research Findings from WCER

SPRING 2020

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COVID-19 EDUCATION ALTERNATIVES

Career planning and learning for the whole family

As the world is sheltering safely at home from COVID-19, everyone has more time to look ahead and think about their future―including children, who can explore the age-old question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Parents now can help their kids answer that and other questions right from home, and get career help themselves, with a self-paced, online career-information system called CareerLocker.

A COVID-19 guide to online college internships

Even as COVID-19 looks poised to cancel traditional college internships over the next three to four months, a new resource guide for colleges, students and employers developed by University of Wisconsin−Madison education researcher Matthew T. Hora points the way to a host of web-based alternatives for these important on-the-job learning opportunities.

Download a free at-home learning language activity book
for kids

To help children learn at home during the COVID-19 outbreak, WIDA Early Years has created a new booklet, “Learning Language Every Day: Activities for Families,” available free online. The booklet can be downloaded in English and Spanish for printing and sharing.

How to keep young children learning during COVID-19

Due to the spread of COVID-19 causing school closures all over the country, parents are now becoming home-school teachers. For families with young children, UW-Madison educator and family engagement researcher Lorena Mancilla has some advice on how to create spaces and establish routines for learning and working effectively from home.

FEATURE STORY

How brain imaging improves fraction learning

In 2012, Ed Hubbard, assistant professor in UW‒Madison's Department of Educational Psychology, created the Educational Neuroscience Lab to understand—through functional magnetic resonance imaging—how physical changes in kids’ brains as they learn may improve education practices. “The scanner picks up blood flow in the brain, showing parts of the brain that are active when kids read words or do math problems."

RECENT PUBLICATIONS & FINDINGS

NEW BOOK ON STEM

"On My Own: The Challenge and Promise of Building Equitable STEM Transfer Pathways"

Xueli Wang follows 1,670 two-year college students navigating STEM and prospective transfer in the Midwest. She reveals complexities and inequities shaping students’ four momentum trajectories: linear upward, detoured, deferred or taking a break. Wang names systemic and institutional structures to address to cultivate an equitable pathway to STEM bachelor’s degrees.

MULTILINGUAL LEARNERS

"Design Principles for Engaging Multilingual Learners in Three-Dimensional Science"

To address the urgent STEM opportunity gap for multilingual learners—the most rapidly-growing K-12 student subgroup—“Making Science Multilingual,” a joint program of WIDA and National Science Teaching Association, devised eight principles defining the integration of contemporary, three-dimensional science and language-in-use pedagogies.

INTERNSHIPS

"How Financial, Sociocultural, and Institutional Barriers Intersect to Inhibit Participation in College Internships"

Matthew Hora, Matthew Wolfgram, and Zi Chen examined surveys and focus groups with students at a community college, a Historically Black College and University, and three universities. They found 64 percent of students who didn’t take internships wanted to, but couldn’t due to full- or part-time jobs, heavy course loads and lack of opportunity in their disciplines.

JOB MARKET

"How … Does Industry Experience Influence how Faculty Teach Cognitive, Inter-, and Intrapersonal Skills in the College Classroom?"

In this working paper by Matthew Hora and Changhee Lee, the researchers discuss how industry experience influences the way STEMM faculty teach teamwork, oral and written communication, problem-solving and self-directed learning skills in two- and four-year postsecondary institutions.

SCIENCE ASSESSMENT

“Obtaining Necessary Parity through Academic Rigor (ONPAR)”

WCER’s project called ONPAR (Obtaining Necessary Parity through Academic Rigor) develops and researches innovative science assessments that use visuals, action, sound and language to communicate to and from students in the assessment environment.

MATH

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“Using Machine Learning to Overcome the Expert Blind Spot for Perceptual Fluency Trainings”

Some students have difficulty in acquiring perceptual fluency, a necessary requirement for STEM learning. Researcher Martina Rau used a machine-learning model that mimics human learning from perceptual fluency trainings. This experiment compared a machine-developed training to one developed by a human.

DIGITAL LEARNING

“Improving the Effectiveness of Digital Educational Tools”

Researcher Annalee Good and colleagues are conducting an ongoing study of digital tools in K-12 classrooms, with collaborators from Vanderbilt University. Through data sourced from multiple education partnerships, researchers will evaluate student outcomes after students leave the K-12 education system.