Inquiry
Project Summary
ASSESSING PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE OF INQUIRY SCIENCE TEACHING
– developing an assessment instrument in support of the undergraduate preparation of elementary teachers to teach science as inquiry
This proposal is submitted under the NSF/ASA
Program Announcement Track 1: New Development.
Introduction. The United States is developing a national commitment to the teaching of science as inquiry across the K-12 grades. Inquiry teaching of science refers to teaching (or pedagogy) that reflects the investigative attitudes and techniques that scientists use to discover and construct new knowledge. Undergraduate students are routinely assessed for their science content knowledge. A complementary component of our national effort to improve science education is the ability to effectively assess teachers’ pedagogical knowledge of inquiry science teaching, that is, knowledge of teaching practices that reflect the investigative nature of science. Without such an assessment we cannot readily improve science teacher education programs nor ensure the quality of our graduates. Currently, such an assessment tool is not available. We propose to develop a field-validated, objective assessment tool for testing undergraduate pre-service elementary teachers’ pedagogical knowledge of inquiry science teaching. This is dubbed POSIT, the Pedagogy of Science Inquiry Teaching test. The assessment items can be used both summatively in evaluation and formatively in undergraduate instruction.
Intellectual merit. The U.S. Department of Education (2002) has called for educational revision to be informed by research and scientifically based evidence. Accordingly our project involves a careful plan for test development followed by two rounds of piloting and revision, concluding with a blinded field-test classroom observation component for studying the validity of POSIT. The intellectual merit of the project also resides in the coherent combination of innovative and research-based features in the design, as regards authenticity, problem-based nature, epistemology, exemplification, methodology, summative and formative functions, as described in the proposal. It is a focused project with a clear goal – one that serves a national need as articulated by NSF, the National Research Council and the AAAS. Our project is an interdisciplinary, collaborative effort involving WMU departments of science, the Institute for Science Education, science teacher education, and the Evaluation Center. There are ten participating universities, and several geographically and demographically diverse public school districts, and we have a national panel of experts. The final instrument will conform to The Student Evaluation Standards and the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing
Broader impact. The “gold standard” for pedagogy assessment is what teachers actually do in the classroom. POSIT will be blind-tested against such a standard. Once POSIT has been developed and validated against the criteria by observation of classroom practice, educators at any undergraduate institution could use it to evaluate and improve science teacher education programs. Improving the preparation and quality of teacher graduates will help ameliorate inequalities in schools that serve under-represented populations, by increasing the number of teachers well qualified to teach science. POSIT will also be of value to researchers in science education seeking to improve the education and practice of science teachers. Professors teaching undergraduate and graduate SMET courses may find POSIT useful. Previous research indicates that science professors can be motivated to improve their own teaching practice as a consequence of considering how science is best taught to young people. This is of importance given recent efforts to recruit doctoral level science majors into school science teaching, such as the NSF program for Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education.