Impact of a Scientist–Teacher Collaborative Model on Students, Teachers, and Scientists

Abstract

Collaborations between the K-12 teachers and higher education or professional scientists have become a widespread approach to science education reform. Educational funding and efforts have been invested to establish these cross-institutional collaborations in many countries. Since 2006, Taiwan initiated the High Scope Program, a high school science curriculum reform to promote scientific innovation and inquiry through an integration of advanced science and technology in high school science curricula through partnership between high school teachers and higher education scientists and science educators. This study, as part of this governmental effort, a scientist–teacher collaborative model (STCM) was constructed by 8 scientists and 4 teachers to drive an 18-week high school science curriculum reform on environmental education in a public high school. Partnerships between scientists and teachers offer opportunities to strengthen the elements of effective science teaching identified by Shulman and ultimately affect students’ learning. Mixed methods research was used for this study. Qualitative methods of interviews were used to understand the impact on the teachers’ and scientists’ science teaching. A quasi-experimental design was used to understand the impact on students’ scientific competency and scientific interest. The findings in this study suggest that the use of the STCM had a medium effect on students’ scientific competency and a large effect on students’ scientific individual and situational interests. In the interviews, the teachers indicated how the STCM allowed them to improve their content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and the scientists indicated an increased knowledge of learners, knowledge of curriculum, and PCK.

Keywords:

• Science teaching
• Teacher–scientist collaboration or partnership
• Scientific competency

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Tai-Chu Huang, David Chao, and the participating teachers, scientists, students, and assistants, who have made this study possible. Thanks are also extended to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Taiwan's Ministry of Science and Technology [grant number 102-3113-S-110-002-GJ].