Ongoing Project Research
The goal of this project's design-based research and development activities is to develop—in collaboration with curriculum designers, researchers, and practitioners—a transformative algebra program that is effective with struggling students and can be successfully taken to scale, particularly in large urban school districts. This will happen through a process of iterative design, development, and implementation. During the 2011-2012 school year, teachers will be implementing Version 3 of Intensified Algebra I. Version 2 was tested in the classrooms of 30 teachers from six high schools in Chicago (IL), Evanston (IL), and Austin (TX). The materials were revised based on teacher and student feedback, lesson observations and analysis of student work. Research conducted during the 2011-2012 school year will inform further development of the program.
Researchers will collect feedback from participating teachers to ensure their perspectives and experiences are used to shape the program’s development. This feedback will be collected using face-to-face meetings, online surveys and discussions, telephone discussions, classroom observations, sample student work, and online data. We will work to make the data collection efficient for participating teachers and their classes. The largest out-of-classroom responsibility for teachers will be the completion of online, end-of-unit surveys, which we anticipate will require about 30 minutes per month. Researchers will secure Institutional Review Board approval of all research protocols and procedures.