Mathematics Equity and Access through Mindset and Sense-Making: High Quality Math Instruction in East San Jose (MEAMS)
Our evaluation of this project includes both a newly developed survey and extensive interviews of preservice teachers for their views on equity and the role of academic language in mathematics instruction. The report we provided for the project allowed leaders to pivot the focus of the project to better meet student needs.

“Embracing Spanish for the Professions at Home and Abroad” Program at California Lutheran University 

This project, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education International and Foreign Language Education Office, Title VI Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language Program, was designed to improve and enhance interdisciplinary courses, provide culturally inclusive materials related to professions, and offer cultural events to prepare students for future work and increase civic engagement. CRECE’s evaluation of undergraduate students’ international experiences provided data and analysis suggesting that the program caused them to reflect on their own cultural identity.  

Current Projects and Proposals

The use of a novel software program to teach fallacy detection and other writing skills to under-served secondary students (A Proposal Submitted to the Brady Foundation)
Secondary teachers working in low-income schools (and in California especially) face class sizes much too large to provide quality feedback on student writing. Consequently, they offer fewer writing opportunities for their students, who are already well behind their wealthier peers in compositional skills, especially in forming complex sentences correctly, observing stylistic conventions, and constructing strong arguments. Working with our new CRECE fellow, Tim Musgrove, we will using software to help teachers evaluation students’ persuasive writing, aiming foremostly to assist teachers in increasing the consistency, quantity and timeliness of feedback on student writing, resulting in higher scores on the state assessment of English/Language Arts. Specifically, we want to help teachers in low-income schools to identify fallacies in their students’ persuasive writing. We also hope to increase the number of essays assigned to students, in virtue of reduced load on teachers for generating reliable feedback. The software we will be utilizing, Logic Arts: Write, provides teachers and students with a variety of quality indicators of the student writing, including: 

• Readability (grade level of writing) 
• Lexical diversity (use of a broader vocabulary) 
• Compliance with writing prompt 
• Scoring on rubrics (standard or custom rubric) 
• Grammar, punctuation and writing style 
• Balance of complex vs simple sentences 
• Argumentation (strongest and weakest arguments in a text) 
• Logical fallacy detection 
• Performance graphs comparing each student to rest of class 
• Roll-ups of most common issues across a class 

By employing multiple large language models in conjunction with an additional knowledge base, the system is able to produce the above information in a matter of minutes, allowing for prompt, frequent feedback. 

Developing a new Teacher Performance Assessment for teacher licensure

Working with several teacher education experts in the UC system, CRECE, led by Téllez in this case, has partnered with Mark Wilson, Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at UC Berkeley, to develop a new and formative system of teacher evaluation. With interest from the Hewlett Foundation, the working team, including UC Education Deans Tom Smith (Davis) and Michelle Wood (Berkeley), Directors of Teacher Education Tory Harvey (Santa Barbara), Soleste Hilberg (Santa Cruz), and Susan Toma-Berge (Irvine), and others, we hope to develop a more developmental, equity-based performance assessment that will be of genuine value to both teacher educators and licensure candidates.