A Multi-Method Approach for Assessing Changes in Teacher Performance in a Life Sciences Teacher Institute
The Life Sciences for a Global Community (LSGC) Teacher Institute at Washington University seeks to improve the content knowledge and teaching performance of approximately 90 teachers across the United States. Teachers attend a three-week summer institute for two consecutive summers and complete web-based distance learning courses during the school year. Three cohorts of approximately 30 teachers have been recruited for the institute; upon completion of all coursework, teachers earn a Master of Science degree in Biology from Washington University. In addition to content-based coursework, teachers are encouraged to adopt inquiry-based strategies, as modeled by institute faculty, and transfer them to their own classrooms. Teachers are also engaged in leadership development activities that are intended to position them as teacher leaders in their schools and districts.
The program design was based on research summarized in the National Research Council's publication, 'America's Lab Report: Investigations in High School Science' (NRC, 2006). The laboratory activities are sequenced into the flow of instruction and each course specifically integrates science content and process skills. For example, during the course, "Biological Evolution", following a presentation by a scientist on his research laboratory's work on cyanogenesis production in clover, teachers conduct laboratory investigations on the effect of environmental pressure on the natural selection of cyanide production in a ubiquitous species of clover. Another professor provided seed from two ecotypes of Arabidopsis sp. for teachers to grow with their students as part of a collective scientific research project into the effect of domestication on molecular markers in the plant's genome. Additionally, every field exploration in, "Ecology and the Environment", is designed as an empirical investigation to answer a theoretical question framed in a presentation.
The above examples clearly show a program emphasis on teaching inquiry as it is illustrated in the process of scientific investigation. However, there are two additional ways that inquiry is addressed in institute courses, 1) discussions that explore inquiry-based teaching strategies inherent in curriculum development (Dewey, 1938; Piaget, 1970; Vygotsky, 1978), lesson planning, and interactions between teachers and students (Lewellyn, 2002; NRC, 2002) and, 2) lab activities that either support the conceptual framework of the lecture presentations and/or support the transfer of concepts into inquiry-based instructional activities for high school students. Each activity in the participant manual is labeled with the types of inquiry intended in the lesson.
While improvement in biology classroom instruction is fundamental to the Institute, it is the extension of this knowledge to the classroom that is key. A citizenry that can make educated decisions about personal, public and global issues, such as health, scientific advances, the environment, and the world food supply, must be scientifically literate and able to draw conclusions from a set of facts as scientists do. They must be able to see the implications of emerging technologies or global disasters beyond the immediate concerns of gasoline prices and local economies. The last opportunity to teach large numbers of the general public scientific reasoning and the critical importance of life sciences at a personal, local, national, and global level is high school. The only course that can address these issues is general biology. Therefore, the need for biology teachers, curriculum, and resources that can help high school students understand and decide on these issues is of unprecedented importance.
The institute is currently in its third year of funding. To date, Cohort 1 has completed both summer sessions and is currently completing its final year of distance learning courses. Cohort 1 will complete its work in spring 2009. Cohort 2 completed the first summer session in 2008 and is engaged in the first set of distance learning courses. Cohort 3 will attend its first summer session in 2009.
An integral part of the institute is a rigorous assessment program for all teachers and their students. Teachers take content tests at the start and end of each summer institute session and then complete follow-up assessments at annual intervals. Students of teachers attending the institute also take a pre- and post-test at the start and end of each school year. In addition, students are surveyed about their attitudes toward science, which includes a scale about their teacher's adoption of inquiry-based teaching strategies. The external evaluation utilizes these data, along with classroom observations to make judgments about the impact of the institute on teacher content knowledge and changes in classroom performance.