Kathleen S. Davis

Integrating Technology in Elementary Preservice Teacher Education: Orchestrating Scientific Inquiry in Meningful Ways

During the last two decades, there have been many efforts to increase science learning opportunities for all students and to reform teaching and learning practices in science classrooms (American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 1989; 1993; National Research Council (NRS), 1996). For example, the National Science Education Standards (NSES) (NRC, 1996) call for science teachers to serve as orchestrators of student inquiry. In other words, effective science teachers provide contexts for students to think critically, explore phenomena in their everyday lives, and solve meaningful problems. Teachers facilitate student discourse about their ideas, investigations, and conclusions. In addition, teachers need to make available to students appropriate technological resources with which they can gather, evaluate, record, and analyze data and develop and broaden their science understandings. However, despite these reform efforts, research indicates the tendency of teachers to minimize science instruction and the use of learning technologies, especially in the early grades (Weiss, l997). Relatively few teachers have sufficient coursework preparation to meet professional teaching standards in these areas (National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21 Century (NCMST), 2000; Weiss, 1997). Many educators, especially elementary teachers, are female and have been underserved like many of their students, hence many come to their classrooms with little experience and/or background with the content and processes of science and technology (Weiss, 1997). Preservice teachers often lack confidence and competence in teaching with technology. Yet, concomitantly, demands from national and state officials, educational leaders, school district administrators, parents, and students for improved science teaching and the utilization of technology have increased (International Society for Technology Education (ISTE), 2000; NCMST, 2000). Therefore, as we consider the reform of science instruction in K-12 classrooms,