DISCOURSE IN INQUIRY SCIENCE CLASSROOMS (DiISC): REFERENCE MANUAL

One of the greatest challenges facing scholars and funding agencies interested in reform is determining the impact of classroom practice on student achievement. The degree to which this effect can be determined is contingent upon instruments that measure teachers’ ability to enact specific instructional strategies. Frequently, a general instrument will not do because it was not designed to measure the unique focus of a professional development program or a set of variables of interest to researchers. Consequently, specific instruments should be developed to allow researchers to measure fidelity of classroom implementation. Fidelity of implementation is always the first step in determining effectiveness. For without fidelity of implementation, it is impossible to determine whether what the teacher does has an impact on student achievement. This manual reports on the development of just such an instrument, called the Discourse in Inquiry Science Classrooms (DiISC). The instrument was developed to measure teachers’ use of strategies in their classrooms to foster a science classroom discourse community (SCDC) as a way of furthering achievement in science. The DiISC instructional strategies that support the creation of a SCDC address oral and written discourse, and academic language development embedded in inquiry and they also reflect learning principles. We believe that the creation of the DiISC is especially timely for two reasons. First, science educators are beginning to focus on communication in science as a learning tool to increase students’ conceptual understanding and achievement in science. Second, we need an instrument to measure teachers’ ability to support the academic language development in science of the increasing number of English Language Learners (ELLs) in our schools. The DiISC is an instrument for observing teachers, not students. It describes what teachers do and focuses on five sets of instructional strategies that form the scales of the DiISC. These scales are Inquiry, Oral Discourse, Writing, Academic Language Development and Learning Principles. Consequently, the stems of many of the items start with the phrase, The teacher… , as in “The teacher creates an environment that supports inquiry”

Measuring Short-Term Teacher Learning of Scientific Classroom Discourse Communities

The Communication in Science Inquiry Project (CISIP) provides schoolbased teams of secondary science and English and/or ELL teachers with year-round professional development with the goal of establishing scientific classroom discourse communities (SCDC). Teams participated in one of two three-week CISIP summer institutes. Four CISIP model elements of a SCDC can be framed within a pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) taxonomy at two levels: domain-specific PCK, including academic language development, written discourse, and oral discourse; and general pedagogy, specifically scientific inquiry. The fifth professional development element focuses on overarching learning principles that are applicable to any discipline. By situating the CISIP professional development model within teacher knowledge this clarifies the purpose of the institutes and the PCK taxonomy can be employed as a research lens. With the exception of scientific inquiry, both science and English/ELL teachers broadened their pedagogical awareness, but need more time to refine their conceptual framework of the five SCDC pedagogies. Both science and English/ELL teachers would benefit from more explicit distinctions between domain-specific and general pedagogical strategies. Not surprisingly participants exhibited a greater awareness of the ALD and discourse pedagogical strategies than on the scientific inquiry PCK, which was addressed less explicitly in the professional development activities

Perceptions of Secondary and Post-Secondary Interdisciplinary Faculty on CISIP Professional Development: A Teacher Learning Community Designing Scientific Classroom Discourse Communities

This study summarizes semi-structured focus group exit interviews with Communication in Science Inquiry Project (CISIP) participants, experienced secondary and post-secondary science, English, and ELL faculty. CISIP is an NSF-funded initiative designed to meet the need for highly qualified teachers and science education reform. The main purpose of the larger study was to understand teachers’ application, in teams, of the CISIP model during the three-week summer institute. The focus group interviews helped to triangulate researchers’ observations with the participants’ perceptions. Participants expressed favorable attitudes toward their extended CISIP experience, at least one year’s participation before the summer institute. All acknowledged the value of a professional learning community. Science educators valued sharing ideas with other teachers and disciplinary area experts to incorporate academic and English language acquisition, oral and written discourse teaching strategies into their inquiry-based science lessons. By providing an adaptable curriculum model CISIP facilitators affected individual educators’ beliefs, assisted them in learning new pedagogical strategies, and helped them design CISIP-aligned curriculum. However, full implementation of the CISIP model has been a challenge, perhaps due to so few teachers having a school-based CISIP team member, systemic school-based frame factors, or insufficient practice with the CISIP model

University Students’ Conceptualization and Interpretation of Topographic Maps

This study investigates the strategies and assumptions that college students entering an introductory physical geology laboratory use to interpret topographic maps, and follows the progress of the students during the laboratory to analyze changes in those strategies and assumptions. To elicit students’ strategies and assumptions, we created and refined a topographic visualization test that was administered before and after instruction to 26 students during the first semester of the study and to 92 students during the second semester. To more deeply understand how students think about and conceptualize topographic maps, we focused on eight individual students who were interviewed about their pretest and posttest answers as well as videotaped during three laboratory sessions. We found that even students who claim never to have worked with topographic maps often perform impressively on their pretests by making useful assumptions about symbolic topographic information. Some students, however, begin with less productive assumptions that may be unfamiliar to some instructors (e.g., thinking that the spacing of contour lines indicates elevation instead of slope). Initial success should not be misinterpreted, however, as an integrated understanding of topographic maps. Only in posttest interviews do most students express explanations integrating multiple normative assumptions. In addition to highlighting the strategies and assumptions that college students use to interpret topographic maps, we outline the implications of these findings for the design of learning objectives, curricular activities, and assessments for topographic lessons in introductory college geology courses and the training of future geoscientists