Understanding the Priorities and Practices of Rural Science Teachers: Implications for Designing Professional Learning

In order to design professional learning that supports rural science teachers to effectively implement standards-based “five-dimensional” (5D) instructional and assessment practices, a critical first step is to elicit their perspectives, prior experiences, concerns, and interests. Based on survey data from 87 rural science teachers in Colorado, along with focus group sessions with 18 of those teachers, this article investigates teachers’ perspectives on what makes rural science teaching unique, the degree to which they use 5D science instruction, their curricular and assessment resources, and their professional learning experiences and preferences. Overall, rural science teachers in Colorado reported using rich practices for engaging students’ interests and identities in the pursuit of high-quality engagement, and they expressed a need for more science-specific professional learning and materials distribution. Implications for designing professional learning opportunities for rural science teachers are offered

Developing and Evaluating an Eighth Grade Curriculum Unit that Links Foundational Chemistry to Biological Growth: Using Student Measures to Evaluate the Promise of the Intervention

Students often have trouble understanding key biology ideas, in part because they lack an understanding of foundational chemistry ideas. AAAS is collaborating with BSCS in the development of a curriculum unit that connects core chemistry and biology ideas in order to help eighth grade students build the conceptual foundation needed for high school biology. The unit is designed to engage students in (a) observing phenomena that are explicitly aligned to the targeted ideas and address common student misconceptions and difficulties and (b) using models to help interpret the phenomena in light of the targeted ideas. An initial draft of the unit was pilot tested at two schools in 2011. The results of the pilot test were used to revise the unit. In the spring of 2012, the revised unit and teacher materials were field tested with 677 eighth grade students from four states across the U.S. Pretests and posttests were used to measure the change in students ’ understanding of chemical reactions, conservation of mass, and biological growth. The data were analyzed using Rasch modeling and the racking and stacking methods. The stacking method showed that, overall, the students made statistically significant gains, suggesting that their understanding of the targeted ideas improved. The racking method showed that the difficulty of most of the items decreased as a result of the intervention, suggesting that the unit successfully covered most of the ideas. An analysis of distractor selections and written explanations of their answer choices showed that fewer students held misconceptions after participating in the unit. These results were used to inform a second round of revisions to the unit. Herrmann-Abell et al., NARST 201