Libby Gerard

Professional Development for Technology-Enhanced Inquiry Science

The knowledge integration framework is used to analyze studies on professional development in technology-enhanced science involving more than 2,350 teachers and 138,0000 students. The question of how professional development enhances teachers’ support for students’ inquiry science learning is the focus of the work. A literature search using the keywords technology, professional development, and science identified 360 studies from the past 25 years, 43 of which included multiple data sources and reported results for teachers and/or students. Findings suggest that professional development programs that engaged teachers in a comprehensive, constructivist-oriented learning process and were sustained beyond 1 year significantly improved students’ inquiry learning experiences in K–12 science classrooms. In professional development programs of 1 year or less, researchers encountered common technical and instructional obstacles related to classroom implementation that hindered success. Programs varied most considerably in terms of their support for teachers’ use of evidence to distinguish effective technology-enhanced practices.

Computer-Guided Inquiry to Improve Science Learning

Automated guidance on essays and drawings can improve learning in precollege and college courses. Engaging students in inquiry practices is known to motivate them to persist in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and to create lifelong learners (1, 2). In inquiry, students initiate investigations, gather data, critique evidence, and make sophisticated drawings or write coherent essays to explain complex phenomena. Yet, most instruction relies on lectures that transmit information and multiple-choice tests that determine which details students recall. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) mostly offer more of the same. But new cyber-learning tools may change all this, by taking advantage of new algorithms to automatically score student essays and drawings and offer personalized guidance.

Getting from Here to There: The Roles of Policy Makers and Principals in Increasing Science Teacher Quality

In this study we investigate how federal and state policy makers, and school principals are working to improve science teacher quality. Interviews, focused discussions, and policy documents serve as the primary data source. Findings suggest that both policy makers and principals prioritize increasing incentives for teachers entering the science teaching profession, providing professional development for new teachers, and using students’ data to evaluate and improve instruction. Differences between the two leadership groups emerged in terms of the grain size and practicality of their concerns. Our findings indicate that the complexity of educational challenges to improve science teacher quality call for the co-construction of policy by multiple constituent groups including school principals, federal and state policy makers, and science education researchers.

Collaboration and knowledge integration

We draw on three examples from the Technology Enhanced Learning in Science (TELS) project to show how collaborative activities designed following knowledge integration patterns contribute to science learning. By knowledge integration we refer to learners sorting out their many, often contradictory, ideas to develop coherent understanding. Research on instruction suggests four interrelated processes that jointly lead to integrated understanding: eliciting current ideas, adding new ideas, evaluating ideas, and sorting out ideas. These processes characterize design patterns that promote knowledge integration. We describe how knowledge integration patterns informed the design of collaborative activities for Chemical Reactions and report on the value of heterogeneity in small groups. We describe how teachers learned from each other while refining an on-line teachers guide for Asthma. We describe how teachers engaged in collaborative customization of the plate tectonics unit and show that the revised unit resulted in improved student learning.

Using Automated Scores of Student Essays to Support Teacher Guidance in Classroom Inquiry.

Computer scoring of student written essays about an inquiry topic can be used to diagnose student progress both to alert teachers to struggling students and to generate automated guidance. We identify promising ways for teachers to add value to automated guidance to improve student learning. Three teachers from two schools and their 386 students participated. We draw on evidence from student progress, observations of how teachers interact with students, and reactions of teachers. The findings suggest that alerts for teachers prompted rich teacher–student conversations about energy in photosynthesis. In one school, the combination of the automated guidance plus teacher guidance was more effective for student science learning than two rounds of personalized, automated guidance. In the other school, both approaches resulted in equal learning gains. These findings suggest optimal combinations of automated guidance and teacher guidance to support students to revise explanations during inquiry and build integrated understanding of science.

Designing Automated Guidance to Promote Productive Revision of Science Explanations

Supporting students to revise their written explanations in science can help students to integrate disparate ideas and develop a coherent, generative account of complex scientific topics. Using natural language processing to analyze student written work, we compare forms of automated guidance designed to motivate productive revision and help students integrate their understanding of science. Research shows the benefit of providing timely, transparent guidance to students and identifies some challenges. Specifically, (a) students often believe online guidance is generic rather than adapted to their response; and (b) students do not always engage effortfully with online guidance to improve their written responses. We conducted two studies to address these challenges. In Study 1, we created transparent guidance that clarified how the computer personalizes guidance based on the student response. We hypothesized that transparent guidance would be especially valuable for low prior knowledge students who might expect the computer guidance to be too difficult. We found that transparent guidance had a greater impact than typical guidance on low prior knowledge student revisions, suggesting that student beliefs about how guidance is designed influence their performance. In Study 2, implemented in six schools, we compared two specific guidance strategies: revisiting evidence and planning writing changes. We found that both revisiting and planning guidance resulted in significant improvement in student knowledge integration, although neither guidance strategy showed a significant advantage over the other. In addition, we found that the form of guidance interacted with school, suggesting that teacher practices could reinforce a specific guidance strategy. These results illustrate ways to design guidance to strengthen student understanding of science. They raise important questions about when to encourage revisiting, how to design instruction focused on planning, and how to instill a lifelong practice of engaging in iterative refinement of scientific explanations.

Technology as Inquiry Teaching Partner

This special issue explores how technology can strengthen teaching and professional development in K-12 science education. Consistent with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) the contributors focus on supporting teachers to engage students in scientific practices and prepare students to become autonomous learners who can tackle new problems they encounter in their lives. Their papers illustrate how teachers and technology can be partners in inquiry, and how technology can help teachers guide students to design ways to investigate scientific dilemmas. The contributors in this issue share the view that technology can help shift the focus of science education away from learning discrete scientific facts to engaging in that develop rich and productive knowledge. In these papers technology supports all the scientific practices in the NGSS. For example, interactive models of scientific phenomena such as mitosis, global climate change, or photosynthesis enable students to engage in practices such as asking questions, planning and carrying out investigations, constructing explanations, analyzing and interpreting data, engaging in argumentation, and communicating information. Model building technologies allow students and teachers to design solutions, as well as conduct investigations, construct explanations, use computational thinking, analyze data, engage in argumentation, and communicate information. Communication technologies

Science Education: From Separation to Integration

Advances in technology, science, and learning sciences research over the past 100 years have reshaped science education. This chapter focuses on how investigators from varied fields of inquiry who initially worked separately began to interact, eventually formed partnerships, and recently integrated their perspectives to strengthen science education. Advances depended on the broadening of the participants in science education research, starting with psychologists, science discipline experts, and science educators; adding science teachers, psychometricians, computer scientists, and sociologists; and eventually including leaders in cultural studies, linguistics, and neuroscience. This process depended on renegotiating power structures, deliberate funding decisions by the National Science Foundation and others, and sustained, creative teamwork. It reflects a growing commitment to ensure that all learners are respected and that all students learn to address the complex scientific dilemmas they face in their lives. This chapter traces the evolution of research on science education in the United States with a focus on 5- to 17-year-olds. It highlights trends in the view of the learner, the design of instruction, the role of professional development, and the impact of technology. The chapter closes with recommendations designed to realize the full potential of these advances.

Professional Development Programs for Teaching with Visualizations

Previous research suggests the value of technology-enhanced materials that guide learners to use dynamic, interactive visualizations of science phenomena. The power of these visualizations to improve student understanding depends on the teacher. In this chapter we provide two exemplars of professional development programs that focus on teaching with visualizations. The programs differ in intensity but follow the same basic philosophy. We show that the more intense professional development approach results in more effective teacher implementation of visualizations and greater student learning gains. We identify specific strategies that other educators can use to improve students’ knowledge integration with interactive visualizations.