WTG: Diffusion of Research on Supporting Mathematics Achievement for Youth with Disabilities through Twitter Translational Visual Abstracts

All students have the potential for mathematics success and deserve access to high-quality mathematics instruction. Yet students with disabilities tend to have lower mathematics achievement than peers without disabilities and are vastly underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in the United States. Furthermore, the gap between research and practice means that mathematics strategies that could benefit students with disabilities are not consistently reaching the classroom. Such barriers to mathematics learning may limit students’ career opportunities and deprive society of an inclusive STEM workforce. This project seeks to develop effective strategies for sharing mathematics-focused research with a teacher audience, which may help to reduce inequality in mathematics and STEM outcomes for youth with disabilities. The project will explore (a) current and innovative strategies for communicating research focused on supporting mathematics learning for students with disabilities and (b) the diffusion of research via social media (i.e., Twitter) to a teacher audience. The project supports a diverse STEM workforce through its research activities and by providing funded, STEM-related research experiences to undergraduate students with disabilities who continue to be underrepresented in STEM occupations. The research plan involves a robust intervention mixed methods design. Phase 1 entails analysis of practitioner journals using Altmetrics and qualitative content analyses to describe whether, how, and by whom mathematics-focused articles for supporting students with disabilities have been shared on Twitter in recent years. Phase 2 leverages a partnership with the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC). A randomized controlled trial will compare diffusion of 90 articles focused on mathematics learning for youth with disabilities (a) without CEC Twitter promotion, (b) with text-based CEC Twitter promotion, and (c) with innovative CEC Twitter promotion using translational visual abstracts (TVAs; concise, infographic-type overviews of practitioner journal articles). Project findings will inform the development of guidelines for both the design and sharing of TVAs—which will be shared via training webinars and other accessible materials—to empower researchers, journals, and professional organizations with novel approaches for improving research communication efforts and mitigating the persistent research-practice gap. The project is is co-funded by the Science of Science: Discovery, Communications, and Impact program and the EDU Core Research programs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.