The University of North Carolina at Greensboro will arrange summer research internships for 10 middle-grades education majors and 10 experienced middle-school science or mathematics teachers in faculty research laboratories. Preservice and in service interns will work in pairs so that the preservice students can benefit from the classroom experience of their service partners as they assimilate the significance of their research experience for the practice of teaching. A series of meetings will be held during the summer to facilitate this assimilation. During the same summer, a working group of discipline faculty, education faculty and middle-school teachers will develop a two- semester interdisciplinary courses entitled "The Nature of Science and Mathematics." The preservice participants will take this course during the following academic year, when they will also complete their student teaching in the Guilford County Schools. Every effort will be made to place student teachers in the classrooms of their research internship partners. Assessment of the graduates' first semester of independent teaching will be carried out in the following fall semester to examine the effect of the research experience and the interdisciplinary course on their teaching of science and mathematics in the middle- school classroom.
