U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences Awards LSI $4 Million STEM Education Grant

Tallahassee, Fla. -- The Learning Systems Institute has been awarded a four-year, $4 million grant by The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.

Dr. Robert Schoen, will serve as the principal investigator on the Supporting Teacher Enactment of the Probability and Statistics Standards (STEPSS)–Replication study. Schoen is the Associate Director for the Florida Center for Research in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (FCR-STEM) at the Learning Systems Institute (LSI) and associate professor of mathematics education at the FSU College of Education, Health and Human Sciences (CEHHS).

“Many of the fastest-growing job fields worldwide involve statistics and data literacy,” said Schoen. "It is well established that people and organizations with statistical and data literacy have a strategic advantage in many endeavors, including business, science, politics, sports, and national security.”

Despite the need for a statistically literature population in the Information Age, educational data show disturbing trends in statistical literacy. Longitudinal data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate persistent decreases in the competence of middle-school students in data analysis, statistics, and probability in Florida and across the U.S. over the past decade.

“We urgently need to identify more effective ways to teach statistics and data literacy at a large scale,” said Schoen.

Schoen and colleagues will conduct a cluster-randomized controlled trial of the STEPSS intervention. Through the STEPSS intervention, teachers receive four days of professional learning opportunities to increase their knowledge of statistics and support implementation of curriculum materials that have been vetted and published by the American Statistical Association in their classrooms.

Teachers in the STEPSS intervention receive the teacher's guide for a set of 12 lesson plans that are designed to teach all the benchmarks in the course descriptions for seventh-grade mathematics. They also receive class sets of consumable student booklets for the curriculum replacement unit and other materials that are necessary to implement the lessons. Teachers in the STEPSS program also participate in 4 days of professional development workshops designed to support implementation of the curriculum resources. 

The American Statistical Association—one of the project partners—will provide access to their curriculum materials free of charge and assist with dissemination of findings. To support further replication and scaleup efforts, the curriculum unit will be provided for schools to use and download, free of charge, through the American Statistical Association, along with a list of the qualifications of workshop leaders and a detailed agenda for the teacher workshops.

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) funded a previous randomized controlled trial of the STEPSS program through the Regional Educational Laboratory—Southeast. That previous study examined the impact of the STEPSS program on classroom instruction and student understanding of statistics in 40 Broward County, Florida, middle schools.

“There has been only one randomized controlled trial of the current leading ideas in statistics education so far,” said Schoen. “The results of that study were promising, and this replication study will examine whether the positive effects observed in the previous randomized controlled trial are found in other settings.”

For 55 years, LSI has delivered systems that measurably improve the learning and performance of organizations and individuals in Florida and globally. Our experts' advanced research provides state-of-the-art methods and a clear path for implementation. To learn more about LSI, please visit us on the web at LSI.FSU.edu.