Ling L. Liang

Embedded Teacher Leadership: Support for a Site-Based Model of Professional Development.

Project Achieve is a professional development (PD) project that utilizes teacher leaders (TLs), former teachers who have been reassigned to provide school‐based mentoring, instruction, lesson plan assistance and modelling of lessons for urban middle school teachers. A primary goal of Project Achieve is to evaluate the extent to which TLs were able to increase teaching skill to such an extent that it positively impacted student learning. The results of this comparative case study reveal that Project Achieve was successful in improving teaching performance and increasing student achievement.

Analyzing the FCI based on a Force and Motion Learning Progression

In this paper, we bring together a well-established and often-studied instrument assessing students’ understanding about force and motion, the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), and a proposed description of how students develop in understanding of the force concept, the Force and Motion Learning Progression (FM-LP). We report on two phases of content analysis of the FCI and the FM-LP. In the first phase, findings indicate that 17 FCI items address aspects consistent with the FM-LP. In the second phase, our findings show that these 17 items have responses that can be coded to fit the levels of the proposed FM-LP. Implications for future research on both the FCI and the FM-LP are described.

Science Teaching Practices in Junior Secondary Schools

This chapter presents an investigation into science classroom practices in junior secondary schools. The investigation measures students’ experiences of instruction through a student survey of their instructional experiences and attempts to provide insights about using this information in the evaluation and planning of instruction. The study involves 1,324 students from 16 junior high schools of different levels of academic prestige in a well-developed city in the Jiangsu province of China. The schools are of three types, A, B, and C, with the A schools being highest in academic standing and C schools being lowest in academic standing. The students’ reports of actual instruction indicate that they often or very often experienced direct teaching, occasionally experienced cooperative teaching, and seldom or rarely experienced constructivist teaching. This pattern was consistent across all school types, although the students in higher-ranked schools reported significantly lower cooperative teaching and constructivist teaching than did counterparts in the lower-ranked schools. Attitudes showed a small but statistically significant difference among the school types, with students in the higher-ranked schools having lower attitude. The findings also show that students’ attitudes are significantly higher when they experience instructional strategies that encourage student cooperation and conceptual development. Drawing on these findings, if increased attitudes toward science are a desirable outcome of science teaching, then one possible avenue is to increase the use of cooperative and constructivist instructional strategies in class. However, as the present study did not experimentally manipulate the extent of cooperative, constructivist, or direct teaching, additional research is needed to test such a conjecture.

An Alignment Analysis of Junior High School Chemistry Curriculum Standards and City-Wide Exit Exams in China

Alignment between content standards and standardized exams is a significant issue for adjusting curriculum implementation, applying pedagogy, and improving test validation. This chapter presents a study that examined the alignment between the Chinese junior high school national chemistry curriculum standards (grades 7–9) and the city-wide standardized chemistry exit exams at the 9th grade level. It was found that there was not a statistically significant alignment for chemistry exit exams in Nanjing City, Nantong City, and Yangzhou City. The insignificant alignment was to the result of a shift toward higher-level cognitive reasoning skills from content standards to standardized tests. For all of them, the insignificant alignment was also related to a lesser emphasis on scientific inquiry and STS in the chemistry exam. The insignificant alignment may result in both desirable and undesirable effects on guiding classroom instruction. Thus, ongoing study of the alignment between chemistry content standards and the standardized exams is necessary for chemistry education reform in junior high school in China.