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Abstract
This paper is a report of a quasi-experimental study on the impact of a systemic 5-year, K-6 professional development (PD) project on the ‘high stakes’ achievement test scores of different student groups in rural mid-west school districts in the USA. The PD programme utilized regional summer workshops, district-based leadership teams and distance delivery technologies to help teachers learn science concepts and inquiry teaching strategies associated with a selection of popular science inquiry kits and how to adapt inquiry science lessons in the kits to teach and reinforce skills in the language arts—i.e. to teach more than science when doing inquiry science. Analyses of the school district-level pre-post high-stakes achievement scores of 33 school districts participating in the adaptation of inquiry PD and a comparative group of 23 school districts revealed that both the Grade 3 and Grade 6 student-cohorts in the school districts utilizing adapted science inquiry lessons significantly outscored their student-cohort counterparts in the comparative school districts. The positive school district-level high-stakes test results, which serve as the basis for state and local decision making, suggest that an inquiry adaptation strategy and a combination of regional live workshop and distance delivery technologies with ongoing local leadership and support can serve as a viable PD option for K-6 science.
Notes
The project described in this article was funded by the National Science Foundation (Award #9911857). The findings and opinions contained in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official positions of the National Science Foundation.
Human subjects approval for the professional development and associated research and evaluation activities was sought and received at the proposal stage from the sponsoring university and the participating school districts.
ASIL teachers were given 1–3 content readers related to kit topics purchased with project funds. Reading and writing in science consultants conducted special sessions at the summer workshops and during the school year.
Of the 65 teachers in the initial advocate group, 55 (85%) continued as advocates for the duration of the project.
Hours of participation in ITV sessions were treated the same as hours of participation in the regional summer workshops in determining the total number of hours of professional development experienced by individual teachers.
Detailed procedures on the observation and interview protocols used are available at http://www.horizon-research.com/LSC/manual/, 2003.
Internal consistency for the observation protocols are available at http://www.horizon-research.com/LSC/news/cop_validity_2000.php.
It is important to note that these data were collected as a requirement of the NSF and are presented only as verification of the ASIL approach and cascading leadership design as a PD strategy and the extent to which the adapted lessons were being embraced and implemented in the 33 participating school districts and not as data to be used in the analysis of the student achievement reported here.
The ITBS-S is produced by the Iowa Testing Programs, Iowa City, IA, and published by Riverside Publishing, Rolling Meadows, IL. The MAP-S is published by CTB/McGraw-Hill, LLC, Monterey, CA.
The original human subjects agreements only specified access to the baseline and final year data and required written letters of approval from administrators at all 53 school districts.