Funding
Over the past 20 years, Quality Talk has received support from various funding institutions.
Quality Talk research is currently supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 1912415 to the Pennsylvania State University. The project demonstrates how Quality Talk can be adapted to mathematics-rich STEM pedagogy. The major goals are:
- for teacher educators to enhance their mathematics-rich STEM professional vision by bolstering their discussion-intensive pedagogical content knowledge and teacher educator efficacy;
- for undergraduate preservice teachers to advance their mathematical proficiency by increasing conceptual understandings and mathematical reasoning through content-rich discussions and developing mathematics-rich STEM pedagogy; and,
- for the STEM education community to meet 21st century pedagogical expectations by demonstrating the effectiveness of QT for Teacher Education.
Our research was initially supported by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305A130031 to the Pennsylvania State University. The project developed the Quality Talk model which focuses on students’ high-level comprehension of narrative text. The project extended, evaluated, and refined the model, intervention, and measures needed for an efficacy trial of Quality Talk. The main goals of the project were:
- To create a fully developed intervention based on Quality Talk using mini-lessons and informational strategies to teach discourse skills to fourth and fifth graders
- to gather evidence regarding the feasibility of Quality Talk, and
- to gather evidence suggesting the positive impact of Quality Talk on students’ critical-analytic thinking, epistemic cognition, and high-level comprehension.
Our research was then supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 1316347 to the Pennsylvania State University. The project adapted Quality Talk to high school science education. The purpose of this project was to strengthen educators’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of important science concepts in high school chemistry and physics classes through Quality Talk (QT), a teacher-facilitated discourse intervention program designed to foster students’ high-level comprehension of core disciplinary ideas and scientific practices. There were three major goals:
- To enhance teachers’ professional vision and leadership skills,
- to develop and enhance student scientific literacy, and
- to realize 21st Century Learning Goal in science education community.
Our research has also been supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation #20200013. The goal of this project is to collaborate with other researchers to investigate academically productive talk across content areas. More information about this project can be found at academically-productive-talk.org