Interdisciplinary (99) This project is continuing to develop a 4-semester inquiry-based integrated natural science curriculum for all pre-service elementary education majors at the University of Texas. It is supporting the remaining development of that curriculum, focusing on astronomy and earth climate. This 4-semester model has built on existing models of integrated natural science content courses and, as such, represents a refinement of past models. The curriculum is purposefully interdisciplinary and provides a special emphasis on making connections between the disciplines by using common vocabulary, evidence supported reasoning, and scientific laws while studying the phenomena of the natural world. A stand-out feature of this refinement is the extensive use of formative assessment. The curriculum includes frequent testing of the pre-service students' mastery of content. It also includes frequent testing of their self-efficacy in conducting scientific experiments or hands-on activities with K-12 students. This testing is guided by current research on using formative assessment during inquiry activities and aims to teach pre-service teachers how to use formative assessment in their classrooms.
This project is also supporting faculty training to prepare instructors for offering the necessary multiple sections of these inquiry-based courses. The new curriculum uses the guided inquiry method as the primary form of instruction. This is a teaching approach not frequently employed in service courses at large universities. Nevertheless, hands-on, inquiry-based instruction is the model that should ultimately be employed by in-service teachers. This curriculum will initially serve 400 pre-service elementary teachers at the University of Texas each year.
The HoS program at UT Austin is intended to improve pre-service elementary teacher education by providing a coherent, misconceptions-oriented, standards-based, integrated science curriculum, focused on the concepts those teachers will be responsible for teaching in their future careers, and presents that curriculum using best practices of teaching methodology, therefore modeling the teaching styles those teachers will go on to use. The curriculum focuses on conceptual understanding in the areas of physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and astronomy. The two key goals behind the design of the program are that students learn relevant science and learn it well, and that they also gain increased confidence in their own abilities to understand and explain what they know about scientific concepts. To test our performance with respect to these goals, we evaluated our program using pre-test/post-test, quasi-experimental data, investigating both attitudinal and conceptual shifts. First, we analyzed the attitudinal shifts of students in the HoS program compared to students in traditional introductory courses covering the same scientific disciplines. To probe student attitudes toward science, we administered surveys in a pre-test/post-test, two-group, quasi-experimental design. The first group was composed of students in the HoS program (the treatment group), and the second group was composed of students in two conventional lecture classes (the control group). The courses included in the control group represent some alternative courses that HoS students could have taken to attain their science credits in the absence of the HoS program. Both groups completed an online, 25-item, Likert-scale survey about their attitudes toward science in general, and learning science in particular. For simplicity we classify the questions into four categories of similar ideas. The first category, affect, represents students' enjoyment of science, the second category, anxiety, investigates the students' anxiety when confronted with situations related to science, the third category, confidence, looks at the students' confidence in their own abilities to solve problems, and the fourth category, utility, represents the students' conceptions of the utility or relevance of science to everyday life. Our treatment sample includes 217 students from the HoS program and 270 students from the control group. The data was collected between Fall 2010 and Spring 2012. Figures 1-4 show the predicted scale scores for the four categories of the attitudinal survey. Predicted values result from a model that includes SAT math score, mother’s education level, female (dummy coded) and dummy coded race/ethnicity designations. All variables are held at the mean. Figure 5 shows the average student changes in attitudes toward learning science for HoS students and control students. Students in the HoS program show improved attitudes in all areas, including higher confidence, lower anxiety, greater enjoyment of science, and consider science to be more useful in their daily lives. Students in traditional introductory courses experience either no change or more negative attitudes. We conclude that programs like HoS can meaningfully change pre-service teachers' attitudes toward science, empowering them to become better teachers of science. To study changes in students' conceptual understanding of science, we administer pre/post-assessments to both the treatment and control groups. The content assessments come from the MOSART group, which are field-tested, accredited assessment tools made up of multiple-choice items, designed to include questions of varying difficulty levels, with attractive, research-based distractors. The MOSART group makes tests available for physical science, Earth science, astronomy, and in life science. Data was collected over three semesters from Spring 2011 to Spring 2012. Altogether, the treatment sample is comprised of a total of 879 students in the four HoS classes and the control group includes 503 students in appropriate traditional introductory science courses in physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy. Figure 6 shows the shifts in conceptual knowledge for the five topics tested. HoS students show improvement in all five content areas. Additionally, compared to control courses that represent the alternative classes these pre-service teachers could have taken for their science credits, HoS students outperform control group students on the overall content in all four contnet areas compared, by up to three times as much. This indicates that for any number of possible reasons, including more time-on-task, increased student participation and discussion, elicitation of pre-conceptions, or emphasis of evidence-based reasoning, the HoS curriculum and methodology increase the learning gains in the student population served. These results illustrate the success of the HoS program and confirm that these pre-service elementary teachers are better-prepared to teach K-5 science than they would have been in traditional introductory science courses. This success further indicates the importance of learner-centered environments, by showing that courses designed for particular student populations are capable of achieving meaningful increases in student learning in relevant topic areas, as opposed to large, indiscriminate courses, where it is hard to effectively serve many populations of students with different goals.
