Anna Maria Arias

Connecting Curriculum Materials and Teachers: Elementary Science Teachers' Enactment of a Reform-Based Curricular Unit.

Abstract The purpose of this study was to describe how teachers used and adapted a set of curriculum materials that included opportunities for students to engage in scientific practices. Two-fourth-grade teachers in the same school were observed and interviewed. Findings revealed that teachers enacted almost every type of scientific practice in the curriculum, but in ways that varied from the written curriculum materials. Teacher interviews revealed ways in which the teachers understood the rationale for various scientific practices and how to enact them. These findings have implications for curriculum developers, professional development designers, and teacher educators. The study identifies the need to support teachers’ understanding of scientific practices and why and how to enact them with their students.

Teachers’ use of educative curriculum materials to engage students in science practices

ABSTRACT New reform documents underscore the importance of integrating science practices into the learning of science. This integration requires sophisticated teaching that does not often happen. Educative curriculum materials – materials explicitly designed to support teacher and student learning – have been posited as a way to support teachers to achieve these ambitious goals, yet little is known about how elementary teachers actually use educative curriculum materials to support student engagement in science practices. To address this gap, this study investigated how five upper elementary teachers supported students to engage in science practices during an enactment of two curriculum units. Three of the teachers had units enhanced with educative features, informed by current research and reforms, while two of the teachers had units without these features. The teachers varied in how they supported students in the science practices of justifying predictions, constructing evidence-based claims, recording observations, and planning investigations. For example, some of the teachers with the educative features supported students in constructing evidence-based claims and justifying predictions in ways called for by the educative features. Implications for curriculum developers and teacher educators are discussed based on the patterns found in the teachers’ use of the educative curriculum materials.

Educative Curriculum Materials: Uptake, Impact, and Implications for Research and Design:

The authors synthesize the findings of a research project to extend what is known about educative curriculum materials, or curriculum materials designed with the intent of supporting teacher learning as well as student learning. Drawing on a three-year program of research, including several close observational case studies and a large-scale quasi-experiment, the authors demonstrate how teachers use curriculum materials, what evidence there is of teachers’ uptake of ideas in educative curriculum materials, and what evidence there is of impact on teacher and/or student knowledge. These findings are situated in the literature, and the authors discuss how, taken together, the findings suggest design principles for educative curriculum materials. The authors close with implications for research.

Justifying Predictions: Connecting Use of Educative Curriculum Materials to Students’ Engagement in Science Argumentation

ABSTRACT Educative curriculum materials present a promising mechanism for promoting more ambitious science teaching in elementary classrooms, including engaging students in science practices. Integrating science practices with science content is emphasized in new education reforms. Elementary teachers, however, face challenges in engaging children in science practices such as scientific argumentation. We propose that the justification of predictions could serve as an entrée to scientific argumentation in elementary grades. To support elementary teachers in integrating science content with science practice, including justifying predictions about scientific phenomena, we added educative features to 2 existing upper elementary inquiry science units, 1 on electric circuits and 1 on ecosystems. This article reports results from a large-scale, quasi-experimental study with 2 conditions: the treatment condition, in which teachers had educative features, and the comparison condition, in which teachers had the original curriculum materials. This study sought to characterize differences in students’ written predictions with justification across condition and discipline. In the treatment condition, in which teachers were using the educative curriculum materials, the students’ predictions with justification showed significantly greater improvement in quality scores from the preunit assessment to the postunit assessment compared to the comparison condition. In addition, there was more evidence of teacher support for justifying predictions in the collected notebooks and enactments in the treatment condition compared to the comparison condition. These findings have implications for curriculum developers and teacher educators, suggesting an important role for educative curriculum materials in promoting reforms in science education.

The Design and Use of Educative Curricular Supports for Text-Based Discussions in Science.

There are a number of challenges associated with using text in science to promote general literacy skills and advance conceptual understanding. This article identifies the principles that informed the design of educative curriculum supports for teaching such texts and reports how elementary teachers chose to use the supports, which included identified learning goals, discussion moves to support sensemaking with the text, and narratives of teachers’ uses of text in science teaching. The within- and across-teacher variations are discussed in terms of their implications for student learning opportunities and the future design of educative supports for text-based discussions.

Supporting the Use of Scientific Language: Teachers’ Use of Content-Foregrounded Educative Features

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to determine how elementary teachers used scientific language during a whole-class discussion to describe 3 biological phenomena (interactions, dependent relationships, and interdependent relationships) with and without educative curricula. Findings revealed that the ways in which the 6 teachersenacted the discussion reflected and varied from the original written curriculum materials. In addition, teachers provided with curriculum materials that contained educative features foregrounding scientific content tended to use scientific language to describe the 3 phenomena more frequently and more accurately than teachers given curriculum materials without the educative features. Teacher interviews provided insight into teachers’ perceived struggles enacting the whole-class discussion and teachers’ perceived importance of the use of scientific language. These findings have implications for curriculum developers, teacher educators, and teachers. The study highlights the need to support teachers’ use of scientific language and ability to talk science with elementary students.