The development and validation of the Instructional Practices Log in Science: a measure of K-5 science instruction

ABSTRACT

The Instructional Practices Log in Science (IPL-S) is a daily teacher log developed for K-5 teachers to self-report their science instruction. The items on the IPL-S are grouped into scales measuring five dimensions of science instruction: Low-level Sense-making, High-level Sense-making, Communication, Integrated Practices, and Basic Practices. As part of the current validation study, 206 elementary teachers completed 4137 daily log entries. The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence of validity for the IPL-S’s scales, including (a) support for the theoretical framework; (b) cognitive interviews with logging teachers; (c) item descriptive statistics; (d) comparisons of 28 pairs of teacher and rater logs; and (e) an examination of the internal structure of the IPL-S. We present evidence to describe the extent to which the items and the scales are completed accurately by teachers and differentiate various types of science instructional strategies employed by teachers. Finally, we point to several practical implications of our work and potential uses for the IPL-S. Overall, results provide neutral to positive support for the validity of the groupings of items or scales.

KEYWORDS:

• Instructional practice
• validity
• instructional log
• elementary science

Acknowledgements

We greatly appreciate the support of Teresa Frasca and feedback from staff at Horizon Research, Inc. during the development of this paper. We also would like to acknowledge the contributions of Dr Ellen McIntryre and Dr Daniell DiFrancesca during the development of the log. We would like to thank those who provided feedback on this work at the 2013 AEA Conference in Washington, D.C.; 2014 AERA Conference in Philadelphia, PA; and 2015 NARST and NCME Conferences in Chicago, IL. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to the teachers who participated in this study. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The IPL-S User's Guide is available starting on page 31 at http://go.ncsu.edu/ipls_users_guide.

Additional information

Funding

This work is funded by the National Science Foundation [award #1118894].