The Impact of High School Science Teachers’ Beliefs, Curricular Enactments and Experience on Student Learning During an Inquiry-based Urban Ecology Curriculum

Abstract

Inquiry-based curricula are an essential tool for reforming science education yet the role of the teacher is often overlooked in terms of the impact of the curriculum on student achievement. Our research focuses on 22 teachers’ use of a year-long high school urban ecology curriculum and how teachers’ self-efficacy, instructional practices, curricular enactments and previous experience impacted student learning. Data sources included teacher belief surveys, teacher enactment surveys, a student multiple-choice assessment focused on defining and identifying science concepts and a student open-ended assessment focused on scientific inquiry. Results from the two hierarchical linear models indicate that there was significant variation between teachers in terms of student achievement. For the multiple-choice assessment, teachers who spent a larger percentage of time on group work and a smaller percentage of time lecturing had greater student learning. For the open-ended assessment, teachers who reported a higher frequency of students engaging in argument and sharing ideas had greater student learning while teachers who adapted the curriculum more had lower student learning. These results suggest the importance of supporting the active role of students in instruction, emphasising argumentation, and considering the types of adaptations teachers make to curriculum.

Keywords:

• Teacher beliefs
• Curriculum enactment
• Scientific inquiry

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted as part of the Urban EcoLab project, supported in part by the National Science Foundation grant ESI 0607010. Any opinions expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent either those of the funding agency, Boston College or Loyola Marymount University. We would like to thank Michael Barnett, Christopher Harris, Jeremy Price, Meredith Houle Vaughn and Lisa Yamagata-Lynch as well as our colleagues at the Urban Ecology Institute for their work on this project.

Notes

Multicollinearity is when two or more predictors are highly correlated. Multicollinearity does not impact the power or reliability of the model as a whole, but it may not give valid results for any one individual predictor.

In terms of the enactment variables, percentage of time engaged in group work and percentage of time spent lecturing were significantly negatively correlated with each other, r(22) = −0.613, p < 0.01. Consequently, including both variables in the model does not provide valid results for each individual predictor.