WestEd
The lead institution for the Math Center, WestEd is a respected educational research, development, and service organization with over 600 employees in 16 offices nationwide. The Math Center is housed in WestEd’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) program.
WestEd has been a leader in moving research into practice by conducting research and development programs, projects, and evaluations; by providing training and technical assistance; and by working with policymakers and practitioners at state and local levels to carry out large-scale education improvement and innovative change efforts.
WestEd leads multiple IES-funded projects involving randomized control designs and has led the development of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Technology and Engineering Literacy Framework and Test Specifications for the assessments that were administered nationally, beginning in 2014. In addition, WestEd was the lead agency for the National Center for Assessment and Evaluation of Student Learning (CAESL) and has served as the West’s Regional Education Laboratory for over 40 years.
Carnegie Mellon University
CMU brings a rich array of resources to this work. The LearnLab, part of CMU’s Simon Initiative, investigates complex learning of science, math, and second language acquisition in real college and high-school classrooms, in its effort to advance the science of learning. The IES funded Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER) is a multidisciplinary graduate training program that spans the departments of Psychology, Statistics, Philosophy, Human Computer Interaction, and others, to create a new cohort of education researchers who have solid disciplinary training as well as experience in real world educational settings.
Temple University
Temple University has won annual awards for technology facilities and access on campus. Faculty have free access to space on Internet servers for creating Web pages as well as TECH Center facilities. Along with dedicated hardware, the College of Education maintains a range of software resources, a streaming server for audio/video dissemination, and an extensive library of analytical and productivity software.
University of Illinois at Chicago
The UIC Learning Sciences Research Institute (LSRI), co-directed by Susan Goldman and James Pellegrino, is dedicated to the support of multidisciplinary research on learning and teaching, and to the development and evaluation of learning environments and educational practices appropriate for 21st century schools. LSRI encompasses NSF and IES-funded research and development projects in the content areas of mathematics, science, literacy, history and other social studies, language arts and literature, and assessment. It is supporting instructional development projects as well as research on learning and assessment. LSRI personnel also design and deliver professional development activities for K-12 mathematics, science, literacy, and history practitioners, with extensive work with the Chicago Public Schools.
University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER), in the UW-Madison School of Education, is one of the nation’s oldest and most highly esteemed university-based education research and development centers. With annual outside funding exceeding $30 million, WCER is home to centers for research on the improvement of mathematics and science education from kindergarten through postsecondary levels. WCER has deployed an enterprise-level Web-based collaborative environment to support distributed work across complex partnerships. This environment facilitates data sharing and is backed up by a relational database for monitoring project status.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
WPI is expanding in the interdisciplinary area of cognitive science and its application to education research as it relates to computers and is in the process of creating a new Ph.D. degree in Learning Science and Technologies. Faculty in this program have raised over 10 million dollars in external support for ongoing projects in recent years.