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Using small groups for response to and thinking about literature. During this portion of the seven-step process, teacher researchers will methodically sort, sift, rank, and examine their data to answer two generic questions: What is the story told by these data? Learning that deepens knowledge and understanding. If desired, revise and re-teach the research lesson to a new group of students. While your learners are giving each other feedback, walk around the class to monitor the feedback that each pair is giving. Be the first to ask a question about Improving Learning in a Professional Context. There are several ways you can share your data when you publish with Elsevier, which help you get credit for your work and make your data accessible and discoverable for your peers.
In school year , 13 percent of all public school students received special education services, and of these, about 36 percent had specific learning disabilities. The current percentage represents a decline from 14 percent in Prior to that time, the percentage had increased from about 11 percent in While there are differences among specific demographic groups in their science achievement and patterns of science learning, robust evidence indicates that all students are capable of learning science when supportive conditions for learning are in place National Research Council, There are many challenges, however, to providing all students with equitable opportunities to learn science.
Some of these challenges stem from inequities in resources and expertise across schools, districts, and communities. At the same time, instruction can also be more or less responsive to the needs of diverse students. Teachers also need to be aware that students may have different ways of engaging in classroom discussion or expressing their knowledge. The adaptation of instruction in rigorous and meaningful ways is dependent on contexts that are not treated in detail in the brief scenarios offered here; further discussion of contextual issues is contained in Chapter 5.
As this report addresses the learning needs of teachers, the ambitious, challenging, and dynamic vision of science learning presented above—which integrates ideas with concepts and practices and allows students to see the connectedness of scientific knowledge and its relevance to their own lives—serves as a guide. It follows, then, that science instruction needs to engage all students with a broad array of natural phenomena, support rigorous intellectual work, and facilitate full immersion in scientific and engineering practices over long periods of time.
However, such practices include a broad range of intel-.
The new vision for science learning does not specify the universal use of a particular pedagogy. Rather, multiple instructional approaches are likely to be required. While student learning outcomes i. The learning goals for students do suggest that particular shifts in instructional practices will be needed see Table ; given the situated nature of teaching, however, it also is likely that teachers will always need to adapt their instructional approaches to the specific needs of their students.
Metz , , for example, worked with teachers who had high expectations for the ability of elementary students to design and execute independent forms of scientific investigation. These teachers immersed children in a single domain, such as ornithology or animal behavior, for a year or longer. The children developed domain-specific knowledge that, in turn, supported further learning as they engaged in scientific practices. Later, teachers gave the children increasing responsibility for the design and evaluation of scientific investigations.
In one study, all student teams in a 2nd-grade classroom and in a mixed 4th- and 5th-grade classroom were able to formulate both research questions and methods for investigating their questions. Some teams even proposed methods for controlling extraneous variables Metz, The second pattern involves anchoring teaching and learning activities around specific concepts and topics by:.
They engaged the children in scientific practices such as quantifying or visualizing biological phenomena and applying concepts of measurement and ideas about data and uncertainty. Through this interweaving of science concepts and practices, the children gained an understanding of biological growth and change and how to represent these concepts mathematically. Early-elementary students learned to use their own representations of plant growth to ask questions about how much more rapidly one specimen grew than another, turning their attention from comparing final heights to noting successive differences in change itself from the day-to-day measurements.
In later grades, students used progressively more symbolic and mathematically powerful representations. The investigators document substantial learning effects, with students in grades 1 through 5 outperforming much older students on nationally benchmarked assessment items Lehrer and Schauble, In an early example of this pattern, Brown and Campione pioneered an approach to coupling investigations with other activities so as to cultivate deep content knowledge of targeted science ideas.
In their research project with K-8 students in the s and s, the investigators viewed learning and teaching as a social process facilitated by the use of talk, gesture, drawing, computers, and text. They encouraged students to ask questions while also guiding the ensuing discussion to ensure that important science ideas related to the learning goals were presented and were later investigated. Students first read and analyzed texts about scientific studies relevant to the domain under study and then divided into small groups to investigate questions or ideas emerging from these texts, such as food chains or food webs.
Over the course of their investigations, they were encouraged to develop specialized expertise and to share that expertise with others, as well as to reflect on their own learning and how to support it.
Students in these classroom communities routinely outscored learners in control groups in both literacy and science. It is important to note that much of the research on which Windschitl and Calabrese Barton forthcoming draw involved sustained opportunities for teachers and students to engage with scientific ideas and practices over periods of months and years, rather than days and weeks.
While the Framework and the NGSS were designed to compel and support this kind of coherence beginning in the earliest grades , it is not typical of current science teaching and learning in the United States see Chapter 3 for detailed discussion of current science instruction. Furthermore, the instructional approaches that have been researched were heavily resourced. Quality instruction is not due simply to a well-prepared.
Cohen and colleagues and Bryk and colleagues , among others, posit that these resources are embedded in a supportive culture for teaching that enables their strategic use. If the Framework and NGSS are clear on student learning outcomes and less so on specifics of the instruction needed to realize those outcomes, they are virtually silent on other aspects of the larger ecology in which individual teachers might engage in these science practices with their students. For example, they say little about the nature of the school cultures in which these teachers would need to work, or how expertise in science would be distributed across and among the teachers in a school or district.
While these standards have emerged from the larger standards movement, which presumes that systems of levers or supports—assessment, curriculum, teacher training—are necessary for instructional reform, the documents themselves do not describe the range of material, human, and social resources that schools and districts would need to enact this vision, or how school, district, and state policies might be used to create the receptive conditions and environments in which all of this innovation would need to unfold.
Yet policies on what is taught, how students are assessed, how teachers are evaluated, how schools are judged, how schools are staffed, how the school day and year are organized, how schools are run, and how leaders are supported can have crucial implications for what and how science is taught in schools. These contexts matter to ambitious teaching, a point to which the discussion returns later in this report.
Any decisions made about science teaching ought to be anchored in a well-explicated, empirically informed vision of science learning for all students. The current vision, articulated in such documents as the Framework and the NGSS, both build on and extend past efforts, which have yielded important understanding and learning for all students. This vision—one that acknowledges science as fundamental to human understanding and driven by complex, relevant problems—involves learning about scientific practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas in an integrated manner.
In the sciences, as in all fields, the doing of science goes hand in hand with mastering and using knowledge. While some might think such an ambitious view of learning is beyond the reach of all students, careful research has demonstrated that challenging instruction is possible if teachers have a clear vision of their goals, well-designed lessons and materials, and—most important—the professional knowledge and skill required to teach to these high standards. But ambitious instruction is not yet standard fare in American classrooms, and the following chapter describes the current conditions that thwart efforts to guarantee that every child learns science in intellectually substantive and exciting ways.
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Improving learning in a professional context: a research perspective The findings reveal that new conservatoire teachers are concerned relations with parents and colleagues, organizing class work, to insufficient materials and supplies. Improving learning in a professional context provides vital new evidence on in a professional context: a research perspective on the new teacher in school.
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