Christopher J. Harris

Examining Teachers' Instructional Moves Aimed at Developing Students' Ideas and Questions in Learner-Centered Science Classrooms

Prior research has shown that orchestrating scientific discourse in classrooms is difficult and takes a great deal of effort on the part of teachers. In this study, we examined teachers’ instructional moves to elicit and develop students’ ideas and questions as they orchestrated discourse with their fifth grade students during a learner-centered environmental biology unit. The unit materials included features meant to support teachers in eliciting and working with students’ ideas and questions as a source for student-led investigations. We present three contrasting cases of teachers to highlight evidence that shows teachers’ differing strategies for eliciting students’ ideas and questions, and for developing their ideas, questions and questioning skills. Results from our cross case analysis provide insight into the ways in which teachers’ enactments enabled them to work with students’ ideas and questions to help advance learning. Consistent with other studies, we found that teachers could readily elicit ideas and questions but experienced challenges in helping students develop them. Findings suggest a need for more specified supports, such as specific discourse strategies, to help teachers attend to student thinking. We explore implications for curricular tools and discuss a need for more examples of effective discourse moves for use by teachers in orchestrating scientific discourse.

Analysing teachers' curriculum implementation from integrity and actor-oriented perspectives

Curriculum materials and knowledge about curricular purposes and structures are valuable tools that teachers often draw upon to organize instruction and facilitate student learning. Careful analysis of teachers’ curriculum implementation and the decision-making that undergirds their curriculum use is critical for fully understanding enactment. This paper compares how integrity analyses of implementation of curriculum materials and actor-oriented analysis of teachers’ curriculum use can help researchers, teacher educators, and curriculum designers interpret teachers’ decisions about what aspects of new materials to use and how to use such materials. Drawing on evidence from teacher interviews and observations, we compare two teachers’ enactments of a new elementary-level environmental biology unit. Our analyses of integrity point to differences in teachers’ adaptations with respect to their consistency with the purposes and structures of curriculum materials as construed by designers. By contrast, our actor-oriented analysis explain how the teachers’ different approaches to interpreting the goals and structures of the curriculum unit partly account for patterns in their enactment in ways that can inform refinements to materials and the design of professional development supports for teachers. In so doing, we show how implementation integrity and actor-oriented analyses offer complementary perspectives to inform curriculum research and development.

The Role of Innovation in Scaling Up Educational Innovations

Getting innovations to scale is an increasingly important mandate for educational research, yet also a vexing challenge for researchers who have attempted to take this on. A common perspective on scaling considers it fundamentally as an issue of how to take interventions that have been shown to work in a small number of settings and transfer them to a larger number of settings. In this chapter, we develop an argument that the principal aim of scaling up is not merely to expand the use of a particular educational innovation, but to improve education. When scaling up is viewed as a matter of improving education, the focus shifts from transfer of research to practice, where the researcher is primarily concerned with specifying the right conditions for the best fit, toward transformation of practice supported by research, where researchers become intermediaries who work with practitioners to improve the education system so that the essential principles of an innovation can be sustained. This shift in how we view scale-up has significant implications for research on the process of scaling up; for the relationship between research, policy, and practice; and for the sustainable and long-term improvement of education.

Building an Assessment Argument to Design and Use Next Generation Science Assessments in Efficacy Studies of Curriculum Interventions.

Evaluators must employ research designs that generate compelling evidence related to the worth or value of programs, of which assessment data often play a critical role. This article focuses on assessment design in the context of evaluation. It describes the process of using the Framework for K-12 Science Education and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to design assessments to evaluate the efficacy of a curricular intervention. The new science standards present a significant challenge to assessment designers and evaluators because these standards emphasize the integration of disciplinary core ideas, practices, and crosscutting concepts. This article presents the structure of a validity argument for such uses with an evidence-centered design perspective and unpacks the design decisions in developing and implementing these assessments in an efficacy study of a project-based science curriculum. Implications for designing NGSS-aligned assessments for program evaluation purposes are discussed.

Investigating STEM Support and Persistence Among Urban Teenage African American and Latina Girls Across Settings

This study contributes to the emerging research literature on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) support and persistence activities among urban teenage African American and Latina girls. We present three case studies of girls who participated in an afterschool STEM curriculum. Our within- and cross-case analyses focused on how various supports explained girls’ STEM persistence and career plans. Findings highlight the important role that parents played in supporting girls’ persistence and career interests across settings. These findings emphasize the need for research that spans settings to better understand the interplay of support networks that influence girls’ STEM interest and persistence.

Implementing the Next Generation Science Standards.

The Next Generation Science Standards embody a new vision for science education grounded in the idea that science is both a body of knowledge and a set of linked practices for developing knowledge. The authors describe strategies that they suggest school and district leaders consider when designing strategies to support NGSS implementation.