InSTEP: Invigorating Statistics Teacher Education Through Professional Online Learning

Purpose

To prepare students who are data literate and ready to pursue careers requiring data science and statistics skills, teachers need to effectively integrate data experiences into an already packed mathematics curriculum, when they themselves may be underprepared to do so. InSTEP partners with RTI International to design and deploy an innovative personalized online learning platform to allow teachers to develop their expertise in teaching statistics and data science.

Goals

In 2019-2023, InSTEP will harness the power of online professional learning to invigorate teachers in improving teaching statistics in grades 6-12. The project team will engage in design and development research to achieve the following goals:

Curate and create online resources and tools that can support preparation of secondary mathematics teachers and enhance learning and teaching statistics in grades 6-12.
Design models and approaches for using these resources as personalized learning in a professional online community.
Examine effectiveness of teachers’ engagement with models and resources in their personalized professional education pathways.

Our Learning Platform

See: http://instepwithdata.org

InSTEP is developing an online professional learning platform and materials for Invigorating Statistics and Data Science Teaching Through Professional Learning. The InSTEP platform and learning experience is designed to allow teachers to:

Personalize learning to meet their professional needs through customized recommendations and collaborative spaces.
Build skills in data investigations and innovative teaching approaches based on practices of data professionals and research on students’ learning with data.
Expand their professional collection of resources and technology vetted by experts in statistics and data science education.

InSTEP builds from technological and curricular resources and research on design and implementation of online professional development for teachers from prior work by the PI, Co-PIs, and experts at RTI International’s Center for Technology.

Since the InSTEP platform is in the design stage and will likely not be publicly available until 2023, please visit Amplifying Statistics and Data Science in Classrooms for current professional learning in statistics and data science education.

This project is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DRL 1908760 awarded to North Carolina State University. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the principal investigators and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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