Museum-Based Teacher Professional Development: Peabody Fellows in Earth Science

ABSTRACT

The Peabody Fellows in Earth Science program was a professional development opportunity for middle and high school teachers to enhance their knowledge of, and teaching skills in, the Earth sciences. It combined a summer institute and academic year workshops with the production of new curricular resources on the interpretation of landforms in Connecticut. Teachers implemented these materials with the aid of an accompanying classroom kit. The program included in-depth evaluation of the project outcomes for teachers and students; focused on tectonic processes; and on erosion, weathering, and glaciers. Forty-seven teachers participated in the institute, 30 taught the full curriculum, and 21 completed all the evaluation activities. Teachers reported that they had significantly increased their geoscience content knowledge as well as their ability to teach geoscience-related skills, particularly in guiding students to make observations and inferences about the local landscape. In the majority of cases for teachers that completed all evaluation activities, there was a significant increase in student performance in at least one learning goal as a result of the teachers' participation in the program. These data show this type of informal–formal educational initiative can be highly successful in improving teacher competence and student learning in the geosciences. They also provide evidence that positive proximal outcomes for the teachers are reflected in the ultimate outcomes for students.

Key words::

• teacher professional development
• museum
• informal science education

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Peabody Fellows in Earth Science program was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, Directorate of Geosciences, GEO 0807864, under the direction of Jay J. Ague, Jane Pickering, and David M. Heiser. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

FIGURE 1: Increase in student test scores between the pre- and posttests, for all students who took both tests (questions 5–12, n = 558; questions 14–16, n = 423). Questions 5, 7, 8, 12, 15, and 16 addressed tectonic processes. Questions 6, 9–11, and 14 addressed glaciers, weathering, and erosion. The Student Assessment Instrument and the Standard Deviation Data information for each item can be found in the supplementary material (available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5408/11-241s3 and http://dx.doi.org/10.5408/11-241s5.)

FIGURE 2: Test results for students in classes where teachers submitted the results of all three tests. The standard deviations for each item can be found in the supplemental material (See Standard Deviation Data; available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5408/11-241s5.) (n = 407, 416, 413).

FIGURE 3: Test results for tectonic processes, from classes that completed all three tests, separated by teacher (n between 13 and 29). Maximum possible score was 9. Results that do not conform to our expectations are marked with an * and #, and are further explained in the text.

FIGURE 4: >Test results for erosion, weathering, and glaciation from classes that completed all three tests, separated by teacher (n between 13 and 29). Maximum possible score was 6. Results that do not conform to our expectations are marked with an * and #, and are further explained in the text.

TABLE I: Summary of program's curriculum guide.

TABLE II: Comparison of teacher responses on the pre-workshop survey and the post-lesson survey on comfort levels with Earth science content and teaching (n = 21).¹

TABLE III: Effect sizes for the difference between the pre- and posttests, for all students who took both tests.

TABLE IV: Effect sizes for the three test comparisons for each teacher.

Notes

¹ The term “Informal Science Institution” is used throughout the paper to refer to science centers, museums, and other science-rich cultural institutions.

² Affordances are the opportunities for acting, thinking, or feeling that are provided by a given environment. See Bevan et al., 2010, p. 23, for a discussion.

³ Paired sample Student t-tests look at the average difference between participants' scores on one measure and the same participants' scores on another measure. They are a more exact means of examining the difference between the measures than would be the case if all of the pretests were to be compared to the posttests without matching. As with all t-tests, they provide a means of determining the p value (likelihood of the difference being due to chance) of the difference between the two measures.

⁴ Effect sizes are a measure of the difference between two means divided by the standard deviation of the group. For paired samples, the measure is somewhat more complicated, but in essence, it is still a means of determining a difference scaled to the standard deviation of the scores.