2007 Young Scholars
A Learning Progression for Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Secondary Science Teaching
Ravit Duncan, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers University
The No Child Left Behind mandate of a highly-qualified teacher in every classroom presents a significant challenge in the field of science teacher education. There is considerable proof that the United State's students are not achieving at competitive levels in science, and there is growing concern about the public's understanding of science and scientific inquiry. The task facing those educating tomorrow's teachers is: How do we prepare science teachers who not only understand the content and practices of their scientific discipline, but also know how to teach it effectively?
Teachers' knowledge for teaching a specific discipline - their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) - is arguably the most important type of knowledge for subject-matter teaching. In the area of science education, PCK links scientific knowledge with the right-for-the-moment teaching strategies that advance learning. A knowledgeable teacher not only knows the subject matter, but also knows how to give the right feedback, what demonstration or analogies to use, and how to engage students in scientific investigations while providing appropriate support. Research has demonstrated that such knowledge can be developed through teacher education and that preparation methods specifically developed for science teaching result in educating teachers who are better able to impact their students' learning.
While this knowledge is a critical ingredient for effective teaching, we know very little about how it develops over time during teacher preparation or how the various elements of such a preparation program contribute to the development of PCK. To develop better preparation programs we need to understand how PCK develops and what contributes to its development. We need to characterize the learning progression for PCK. Learning progressions map out a trajectory of learning over extended periods of time and provide guidelines for supporting students as they advance in their understanding. Thus far, learning progressions have only been used to describe children's learning trajectories for particular science concepts across grade bands. These learning progressions are a powerful idea that can be used in the field of teacher education, and such progressions can help build theory about teacher learning, as well as generate guidelines for the design of more effective preparation programs.
This project seeks to develop and study a learning progression, across a two-year teacher preparation program, that describes the deepening of the PCK of pre-service secondary science teachers. This is an ambitious endeavor. I will focus the research project on the PCK that deals with using evidence for building scientific models of phenomena and developing argumentation skills. These practices are considered central to the development of scientific literacy across disciplines, and are emphasized in current standards documents. Towards this end, I will develop a learning progression for scientific modeling and argumentation that is grounded in research on teacher learning and encompasses the five methods courses (and associated clinical experiences) in the two year Ed.M teacher preparation program at Rutgers University.
Rutgers University's Graduate School of Education educates some of the finest science education teachers in the State of New Jersey, and we have a cohort of faculty focused in the area of science education. I serve as the academic coordinator of the biological sciences education program and teach four of the five methods courses. I will test the progression by implementing it with the 2008 cohort of pre-service teachers (estimated 15-18 students) and analyzing the development of PCK over the course of the program and in relation to the activities and experiences in which our students engage (such as the development of unit plans, lesson plans, formative assessments, etc). This work will result in fine-grained descriptions of the learning trajectories of individual teachers and reveal patterns in the development of PCK over time. This research will provide important insights about the influence of various activities and experiences in teacher preparation on the development of teacher knowledge and practice.
Scaffolding Inquiry-Based Evolution Instruction for Beginning Biology Teachers: The Effects of a Learning Progression on Pedagogy
Erin Furtak, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
School of Education
University of Colorado, Boulder
Evolution is the unifying ‘big idea' of Biology; however, evolution is often barely mentioned or not taught at all in high school. The teaching of evolution is further complicated by science education reforms that have emphasized inquiry-based learning, in which teachers engage students in activities that resemble what scientists do. In inquiry-based lessons, beginning teachers are often challenged because they lack the necessary pedagogical content knowledge to interpret students' developing ideas and move them toward learning goals. Recent research has identified the myriad understandings students have about evolution; these ideas can be organized into ‘learning progressions' that map student ideas from naïve to scientifically accepted. Learning progressions can help beginning teachers more thoroughly understand students' understandings and misconceptions, thereby structuring their pedagogical content knowledge and making easier the implementation of scientific inquiry teaching.
The proposed research is a three-phase study that will explore the effects of an evolution learning progression on the development of beginning teachers' pedagogical content knowledge and student learning. The first phase of the study will involve the development of a learning progression, as well as pre- posttests of pedagogical content knowledge and student learning of evolution. The second phase will be a pilot study of the learning progression and pre- posttests with beginning Biology teachers. The third phase of the study will be a pretest-posttest control group experimental study to determine the effects of the learning progression on teachers' pedagogical content knowledge and student learning. The study will allow for the creation of important tools to scaffold Biology teacher preparation and induction in evolution, and will inform science education research about how learning progressions can scaffold the development of pedagogical content knowledge for beginning science teachers.
Supporting Change through Teacher Preparation
April Luehmann, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Margaret Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development
University of Rochester
The purpose of the study is to demonstrate the effectiveness (and limitations) of a program designed for the preparation of high school science teachers named Get Real! Science. This program is intentionally designed to better prepare science teachers who are committed to and able to use the teaching practices recommended by researchers and professional organizations to achieve greater science literacy for all students. Some of the features of the Get Real! program include supportive, uncommon opportunities for the participants to 1) learn science and scientific inquiry by conducting an investigation as learners; 2) develop commitments, confidence and competence with reform-based science teaching through out-of-school teaching experiences such as running a summer camp; and 3) reflect on their experiences and be publicly recognized as competent teachers. The innovative practices of the Get Real! program offer science educators direction as to how to better prepare science teachers to nurture their students' deep understandings of science . To adopt a new approach to science teacher preparation, however, science educators need to be convinced that it is really worth it, and the best way to do so is to show them concrete results - namely, evidence of the impact of innovative teacher preparation elements.
The focus of the proposed research project is on characterizing what kind of science teacher the graduates of the Get Real! program are today, and what most contributed to this outcome. I will include all willing Get Real! Science graduates (up to 27) in the study so as to avoid questions about bias in the selection of participants. I plan to create a 10-15 page "profile" for each available Get Real! graduate that identifies:
(a) the extent to which this graduate is committed and able to use teaching practices recommended by researchers and professional organizations (as identified in the National Science Education Standards), and
(b) how their science content knowledge, experiences in the Get Real! program, and the context of their first teaching experiences, affected them.
Information to create these profiles will be obtained through the combination of: selected artifacts (student work) from the Get Real! program, a survey of the graduate's (beginning science teacher's) priorities and practices, an analysis of a video-taped lesson, an interview with the graduate and an interview with a colleague. The video taped lesson and survey will be analyzed first along six primary scales including propositional and procedural knowledge. These data will be used to characterize initial evidence of a graduate's strengths and weaknesses with respect to reform-based teaching, and will be used to focus and individualize the probes used in a following interview. Analyses will be conducted within and across graduate profiles.
Besides providing rigorous empirical evidence for the impact of the Get Real! program, these profiles also will constitute a valuable foundation for my future research beyond a Knowles Fellowship. Based on these profiles, I plan to later select a subset of Get Real! graduates (those presenting the most interesting "stories") as subjects for more in-depth case-studies. This follow-up research will not only shed further light on the value and limitations of specific features of the Get Real! program, but more generally help us understand what kinds of challenges are encountered by novice science teachers and what teacher preparation programs and support systems we can put in place to support their growth into effective science teachers. Improving the preparation of future science teachers can be one of the most powerful ways to advance the mission of the Knowles Foundation to improve our country's science education. I am confident this study will contribute significantly toward that goal.
2006 Young Scholar
Centering the Teaching of Mathematics on Urban Youth
Laurie Rubel, PhD
Assistant Professor of Education
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York
In the proposed project, research about the mathematics education of urban students is approached with a focus on newly certified secondary mathematics teachers. To enable all students to have equitable access to success in mathematics, scholars have proposed that instruction should include aspects of the students' lives as contexts for mathematization or relevant urban themes that can be analyzed with a mathematical lens. The use of meaningful real-world contexts as sites for mathematical representation, exploration, discovery, and communication can be viewed as both motivation for and a mechanism of mathematical understanding. A consequential and significant question is, how can mathematics teachers be prepared for such teaching? Indeed, this is the guiding question of the proposed project.
More specifically, this study will seek to answer three important questions: 1) How can mathematics teachers learn to teach mathematics using relevant urban themes? 2) What are the complexities of teacher learning when students come from a variety of cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds all of which may differ from the teacher's own background? 3) How does a structure of a professional community of learners contribute to teacher learning? An important feature of the data collection model is the creation of a Mathematics for Urban Youth Summer Institute, a 35-hour summer institute, to take place in August, 2006. I will plan the content of this Institute, recruit the participants, facilitate the sessions, as well as gather data about the teacher' progress during this program . In the proposed Institute, participants (all newly certified mathematics teachers, mostly at high schools) will work toward developing their own mathematics projects centered on urban themes, focusing on the mathematical ideas, relevant technologies, and potential implementation. Monthly meetings will enable continued support for and study of the teachers' work throughout the school year. These meetings will focus on issues of classroom implementation of projects and will include collaborative analysis of lesson plans, assessments and student work. In addition, a group of three to five focal teachers will participate in classroom teaching experiment activities in 2006-2007, and I will collaborate with these focal teachers by visiting their classrooms, assisting in the planning and implementation of their teaching experiments, and the monitoring or analysis of student outcomes. The entire group will reconvene in a second Mathematics for Urban Youth Summer Institute, in August of 2007, which will be directed at the collaborative analysis of the classroom teaching experiments conducted by the focal group and will inform a second round of classroom experiments in the fall of 2007.
In summary, the proposed study would enable me to closely examine an important intersection of the fields of mathematics education, teacher education, and urban education. This research has the potential to make significant contributions toward the development of theories about 1) the processes of teacher learning about teaching middle and high school mathematics in urban settings, and 2) the effects of a professional community-of-learners model on beginning secondary mathematics teachers
2005 Young Scholar
Knowing and Teaching School Science
Mark R. Olson, PhD
Neag School of Education
University of Connecticut
Because most people agree that high quality science teaching requires a strong understanding of subject matter, it is perhaps surprising that there is little consensus as to just how much content knowledge is needed and what the nature of that knowledge is. Furthermore, the current measures we do use - disciplinary major, passing a subject matter exam, or the possession of an advanced degree - are, in fact, poor proxies for teacher content knowledge. If we are to ensure high quality science teachers, we must articulate what a science teacher should know about subject matter.
In order to inform our understanding of the subject matter knowledge necessary to teach science for and with understanding, this proposal consists of three concurrent and interacting lines of inquiry. The first is a qualitative inquiry into the instructional representations of subject matter used by a small number of both exemplary and novice physical science teachers. Instructional representations of subject matter -- a teacher's use of explanations, demonstrations, labs, and activities - are important because they significantly define students' opportunities to learn science. Data collection will occur in two ways: first naturalistically in the course of observations of their teaching practices and second, through interviews, surveys, and the collection of artifacts of practice such as planning documents, instructional materials and in the case of prospective teachers -- course assignments.
Data will be used for three analytic purposes: first, to characterize the instructional representations used (or planned) by teachers with respect to their narrative and/or paradigmatic organization (more on this later), ways of describing theories and using data, and types of questions asked of students, etc. Second, the data will be used to trace the factors affecting the origins of instructional representations such as subject matter background, available resources and reasoning about students. Finally, the data will be used to develop detailed descriptions and specific practice-based examples of more and less successful instructional representations. This study will allow me to both articulate more clearly the relationship between instructional representations and the subject matter knowledge of teachers as well as inform the development of the second strand of my proposal: the development and testing of a subject matter assessment.
Building on the insights gained from my investigation of teaching practice, the second line of inquiry will be to iteratively develop open-ended assessment items to investigate the subject matter knowledge for teaching two topics in physical science: density and condensation/evaporation. These are topics relevant to both middle and high school teachers and they are sufficiently complex as to allow me rich conceptual territory to explore teachers' ways of knowing and subject matter knowledge. I aim to engage, and learn more about, the methodological and conceptual issues involved with instrument design for examining the relationships between instructional representations and subject matter knowledge for teaching science.
The third line of inquiry is conceptual and involves the articulation of the relationship between instructional representations and science subject matter knowledge for teaching. The framework I'm developing to examine the structure of scientific understanding and instructional representations is based on distinctions between narrative and paradigmatic ways of knowing. The development and further articulation of this framework will be informed by both the study of instructional representations and the testing and development of assessment instruments for subject matter knowledge for teaching science.
By studying a range of teachers, from pre-service through exemplary, this proposal engages both conceptual and pragmatic issues central to teaching -- and learning to teach -- science. Products will include journal articles, observation and interview protocols, subject matter assessment instruments and validated scoring rubrics. The breadth of products is intentional, for the research is designed to create products for research audiences (conceptual analyses, research instruments, and the like), as well as useful products for teacher educators (e.g., exemplars of instructional representations, assessments that teacher educators might use to track the learning of prospective teachers, and observation protocols to assess progress in student teaching). Ultimately, the trajectory begun here holds promise to positively impact and inform policy and practice in science teacher education and in the learning of school science.
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