Teacher Practices and Middle‐school Science Achievements

Abstract

We report on the construction and application on an instrument entitled the “Science Achievement Influences Survey” to assess combined effects of student attitudes about science, peer interaction, and home support, and the frequency of student‐centred and teacher‐centred instructional practices on student achievement. Controlling for pre‐test content knowledge, results indicated that student‐centred teaching practices have a positive association with student achievement (p < .01; i.e., group experiments) and a negative association with teacher‐centred teaching practices (p < .01; i.e., copying notes). Additionally, student attitudes about science were positively associated with student‐centred teaching practices (p < .01) and negatively associated with teacher‐centred teaching practices (p < .01). Most significantly, this study documents the predicted gains in science achievement associated with frequency of specific instructional practices used by middle‐school science teachers. Especially noteworthy and significant is the finding that near‐daily implementation of group experiments and reduction of extensive note‐copying during class yield the greatest positive impact on student achievement. Outside of school, peer interaction and home support were not significantly associated (p > .05) with student achievement. The student sample included 611 middle‐school science students with a wide range of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported in part by a grant from the Missouri Department of Education Improvement Teacher Quality Program.

Notes

1. Teacher participants were a subgroup of seventh‐grade and eighth‐grade teachers from an Improving Teaching Quality Cycle 3 professional development grant.

2. Analysis tested for the interactive effect of attitudes about science and student‐centred teaching practices, which did not contribute to explained variance and was removed from subsequent analysis.

3. The attitude factor was derived from the sum of SAIS Items 1–7 (Table 1). The maximum possible was 35.