Digital learning tools have become ubiquitous in virtual and in person classrooms as teachers found creative ways to engage students during the COVID 19 pandemic. Even before the pandemic and widespread remote learning, however, digital learning tools were increasingly common and a typical part of many classrooms. While all digital learning tools are worthy of study, math digital learning tools (MDLTs) designed for K - 8th grade in particular raise questions of efficacy and usefulness for classrooms. This paper shows that MDLTs are an effective tool to raise students’ math achievement across K - 8th grade, and that time spent on MDLTs can lead to better understanding of a topic than traditional, teacher led instruction. However, if the MDLT is being delivered in a language the student is not familiar with, that student will not be able to benefit from MDLTs in the way other students do. This is also true of students who receive Special Education services. Additionally, higher quality MDLTs that provide feedback that attaches meaning to students’ work creates a better learning environment for students than one with simpler feedback. Based on my experiences with student teaching this year and using the popular MDLT IXL frequently, I recommend that MDLTs not just be used for independent practice time, but for whole class, problem solving sessions where students have to use mathematical thinking in new content areas. This will build deeper conceptual learning and a greater sense of achievement in students.

Education has been at the forefront of many issues in Arizona over the past several years with concerns over lack of funding sparking the Red for Ed movement. However, despite the push for educational change, there remain many barriers to education including a lack of visibility for how Arizona schools are performing at a legislative district level. While there are sources of information released at a school district level, many of these are limited and can become obscure to legislators when such school districts lie on the boundary between 2 different legislative districts. Moreover, much of this information is in the form of raw spreadsheets and is often fragmented between government websites and educational organizations. As such, a visualization dashboard that clearly identifies schools and their relative performance within each legislative district would be an extremely valuable tool to legislative bodies and the Arizona public. Although this dashboard and research are rough drafts of a larger concept, they would ideally increase transparency regarding public information about these districts and allow legislators to utilize the dashboard as a tool for greater understanding and more effective policymaking.

As we count down the years remaining before a global climate catastrophe, ever increases the importance of teaching environmental history and fostering environmental stewardship from a young age. In the age of globalization, nothing exists in a vacuum, yet our traditional education system often fails to reflect the abundant connections between content areas that are prevalent outside of schools. In fact, many of the flaws of the field of education have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and a forced transition to online schooling, with many educators reverting to outdated practices in a desperate attempt to get students through the year. The aim of this project was to design a unit curriculum with these issues in mind. This month-long environmental history unit engages students through the use of hands-on activities and promotes interdisciplinary connections. The unit can be taught in a physical, online, or hybrid American history class, and will hopefully inspire and motivate students to become environmental stewards as they look toward their futures on this planet.

I created a flash unit on American Ethnic Literature and delivered it in a high school classroom. The purpose was to introduce students to ethnic literature and to highlight the value of ethnic literature as a form of cultural agency and an authentic record of cultural history. I did research on the importance of ethnic literature, why it has been absent from the standard curriculum, and why it should be a part of the standard curriculum. Because of ethnic literature's importance and absence, I constructed the unit for secondary education and created a micro-unit on ethnic fiction and a micro-unit on ethnic poetry. I delivered the micro-unit on ethnic fiction at Metro Tech High School, gathered data, and reflected on the outcomes. Based on the outcomes, I revised the unit for future teaching and application.

Machine learning is a rapidly growing field, with no doubt in part due to its countless applications to other fields, including pedagogy and the creation of computer-aided tutoring systems. To extend the functionality of FACT, an automated teaching assistant, we want to predict, using metadata produced by student activity, whether a student is capable of fixing their own mistakes. Logs were collected from previous FACT trials with middle school math teachers and students. The data was converted to time series sequences for deep learning, and ordinary features were extracted for statistical machine learning. Ultimately, deep learning models attained an accuracy of 60%, while tree-based methods attained an accuracy of 65%, showing that some correlation, although small, exists between how a student fixes their mistakes and whether their correction is correct.