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Erin Marie Furtak is assistant professor of education specializing in science education. As a former public school science teacher, Dr. Furtak's research interests involve issues pertaining to the preparation and retention of secondary science teachers, and the improvement of student learning through formative assessment and reform-based science teaching. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Science Education, Educational Assessment, and Applied Measurement in Education.
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Project Summary
The process of natural selection is the unifying framework for biology (Dobzyhansky, 1973); nevertheless, students often have difficulty understanding it (Bishop & Anderson, 1990; Ferrari & Chi, 1998). Evolution instruction in inquiry-based settings can be intimidating, especially for beginning teachers, since students often generate complicated and confounded ideas that are difficult to interpret (NRC, 2001a, 2001b). To be successful, beginning teachers need not only deep understanding of natural selection, but also knowledge about how students learn it (Gess-Newsome, 1999; Shulman, 1986). Research has identified the myriad understandings students have about evolution (Shtulman, 2006; Anderson, Fisher, & Norman, 2002), which may be organized into what have been called learning progressions. Learning progressions are typically used as foundations for curriculum development or learning targets (NRC, 2006). However, since they can contain information about students' developing ideas and suggest sequences in which different concepts should be learned, learning progressions have potential as tools to help teachers develop domain-specific knowledge for teaching. This presentation reports results of a study that explores the effects of a learning progression on the development of beginning biology teachers' knowledge for teaching and student learning. Its importance lies in understanding how learning progressions might provide support to beginning teachers at the challenging intersection of evolution instruction and scientific inquiry teaching. |
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"Natural selection is the key to understanding biology. Dr. Furtak's research focuses on helping teachers find out what their students know, and then what to do to help students better understand this complex but critically important concept."
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