California State University, Dominguez Hills

California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) is a four-year public university located near downtown Los Angeles in the city of Carson. The University offers 43 undergraduate majors, 19 master's degrees and a number of certificate and credential programs. Supporting these programs are excellent faculty known for their personal commitment to students. CSUDH is a ethnically-diverse university with a student population that is 35.5 percent Hispanic; 30.9 percent African American, 22.7 percent White, 10.3 percent Asian, and 0.6 percent American Indian. At CSUDH one of the 3 strongest majors is education and CSUDH is major producer of highly qualified, credentialed teachers for LAUSD.

For more information about the university in general, visit California State University, Dominguez Hills' website.

The CSUDH College of Education (COE) and the College of Natural and Behavioral Sciences (NBS) play an important role within the SCALE partnership. Leading this effort is Dr. Eunice Krinsky--Professor of Mathematics, Director of the Center for Mathematics and Science Education and SCALE Goal 3 co-Leader.

CSUDH College of Education (COE)

The COE at California State University, Dominguez Hills is comprised of a dynamic faculty who are in continuous contact with the 18 school districts in our service area. Large numbers of funded projects regularly operate in conjunction with local school districts and their staffs in support of the educational mission for the Los Angeles Basin. As well, it is the mission of the school to prepare educational professionals who are successfully engaged in work that supports and promotes public school students in California.

CSUDH College of Natural and Behavioral Sciences (NBS)

NBS seeks to improve the scientific literacy of CSUDH students by providing them with a number of opportunities for a comprehensive undergraduate education. Of course, through the departments of biology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, earth sciences, computer science, sociology and psychology, students receive a focused education and training in the sciences, which enables them to embark on careers involving science and technology or to pursue further education leading to an advanced degree.

Both schools within CSUDH are working on SCALE’s goal to further the role of post-secondary institutions (in both 2 and 4 year schools) in K12 education (Goal 3). Specifically, these efforts are focused on the design and implementation of a new environment for new teacher preparation and professional development within a cycle of synergistic support. Through the SCALE and the related Quality Educator Development (QED) projects, these programs seek to offer teachers a deeper grasp of STEM content and effective pedagogical strategies for engaging students in learning. Also, they seek to increase the number and quality of properly trained and certified mathematics and science teachers.

Further, CSUDH is contributing to the planning and execution of partnership building through conferences like the Educational Partnership Conference, held March 11-12, 2005, in Los Angeles CA. This meeting of educational professionals, STEM and Education faculty, and administrators had as its goal to extend and strengthen existing partnerships among educational organizations to better serve the mathematics and science education of all students. SCALE/QED/FOCUS Education Partnership Conference was co-sponsored by: System-wide Change for All Learners and Educators (SCALE); Quality Educator Development (QED), A U.S. Department of Education TQE Grant; and Faculty Outreach Collaborations Uniting Scientists, Students and Schools (FOCUS), A National Science Foundation Math and Science Partnership; in cooperation with the California Math Project and the California Science Project.

SCALE Math Science Partnership and the Quality Education Development (QED) Partnership ( U.S. Department of Education TQE Grant)

On September 9, 2004, Sally L. Stroup, Assistant Secretary for Post-Secondary Education, presented a "check" for $4.9M to President James E. Lyons of CSU-Dominguez Hills for the winning Title IIb proposal titled Quality Education Development (QED). QED is a partnership among CSUDH, Los Angeles Unified School District, and El Camino College that is aligned with SCALE's theory of action and will improve teacher preparation in mathematics and sciences. QED is led by Associate Dean of the College of Education at CSUDH, Joseph Braun, as PI, and Steve Cantrell (Chief Research Scientist, LAUSD) and Eunice Krinsky (Professor of Mathematics, CSUDH) as co-PIs.

Working together, the members of the QED partnership envision “smoothing the path” from the first year of college through teacher induction in order to increase the pool of highly qualified mathematics and science teachers who are willing, and more importantly, able to serve the poor, minority and limited English proficient students within LAUSD.

The QED partners will draw on the partnership's own research and rich experience with the challenges faced by students seeking to become mathematics and science teachers. They have formulated a theory of action that places the potential teacher at the center, and addresses the types of challenges that a potential teacher faces at every stage of her preparation. These three types of challenges are present from the time the student enters college to the time she has achieved confidence, based in experience, in her capacity to effectively meet the challenges of a career teaching mathematics or science in an urban district. They are:

1. Finding sufficient social and organizational support to enable students to persist in the certification program;
2. Learning sufficient disciplinary content and pedagogical content knowledge to implement reform-oriented curriculum with expertise; and
3. Learning the ropes, through apprenticeship, from model, expert teachers who have bridged the gap between theory and practice in their own classrooms.

One key connection between SCALE and QED is a role in developing the new science instructional guides, including SCALE (goal 2) immersion units that are being developed together with LAUSD for use by teachers. SCALE has created the concept of the immersion unit as a “carefully selected and designed learning opportunity in which students are engaged in the scientific process over an extended period of time (4 weeks), focusing intensely on a particular concept or big idea in the content area.” (SCALE Five-Year Strategic Plan, July 2003). The units that SCALE has developed and identified to date have as their target recipients K-12 students.

As part of the QED-promised curricula redesign to “smooth the path”, faculty and teachers from LAUSD, CSUDH and University of Wisconsin-Madison will have opportunities to define, identify, and develop immersion units. It is the intention of the QED project to develop immersion units to be used within the undergraduate lower division mathematics and science courses.

Cohorts of CSUDH students will be introduced to a curricular unit of this nature – a learning experience in which students must “organize, synthesize, and interpret information in addressing a key mathematical or scientific idea or issue.” Subsequently the pre-service teachers will, during their early fieldwork experience, see the active engagement of K-12 students with immersion units since LAUSD will be embedding these units in their new instructional guides for mathematics and science. During their post-baccalaureate methods courses the new teachers will once again be engaged with immersion units as they investigate their power as a teaching and learning tool.