Mark Wilson

Student achievement in mathematics in the United States continues to lag behind other developed countries. This relative underperformance in mathematics might be due to teachers' and students' view of mathematics as a collection of rules to be followed and their limited conceptions of mathematically important concepts. To understand this potential relationship between student mathematics knowledge and math meaning-making, this research team has developed the Mathematical Meanings for Teachin...

The purpose of this project is to develop, revise, and validate online science assessments focusing on scientific argumentation in the domains of Structure of Matter and Ecology. Although student facility with science practices has been studied, there is limited research on how these practices may be supported within a classroom environment, and, in particular, how to readily assess students' ability to engage in scientific practice in an online environment. When it comes to engaging in scie...

Statistics and data are featured prominently in the emerging national core standards in mathematics at the middle grades, but instruction in the middle grades typically isolates data from chance and fails to focus on foundations of statistical reasoning. These neglected foundations include structuring variability in data as distributions, relating data distribution to chance, and generating models of chance to guide statistical inference. Under the Data Modeling curriculum, these skills and ...

State adopted science standards are designed to describe the level of science proficiency expected of students from Kindergarten to Grade 12. However, the standards are often organized in discrete grade levels without attention to the developmental continuity across grades. Learning progressions, a new approach to thinking about how to structure science education, outline potential cognitive paths that students might experience as they develop a more sophisticated understanding of a core sci...