This 3-year, exploratory Development of Resources and Tools project falls under the Instruction of K-12 Students and Teachers category. The project develops, pilots, and implements online professional development in support of inquiry, focusing on facilitation of student research. The goal is to determine what types of web-based experiences and resources are most effectively support middle school teachers in overcoming the substantial hurdles inherent in enabling students to design and conduct their own scientific experiments. Working closely with the New York State Department of Education, the project creates and tests a series of web-based professional development experiences for 7th and 8th grade teachers. The experiences support implementation of research by students using BirdSleuth curriculum resources developed with NSF funding by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.
BirdSleuth is well suited as a pilot project for developing online teacher support because it is designed to engage students in authentic scientific research: making observations, collecting data, asking their own questions, drawing conclusions through research and observation, and publishing their results. This project endeavors to create effective and efficient techniques for scaffolding teachers as they use BirdSleuth to guide students through the various stages of designing, conducting, analyzing, and presenting the results of scientific experiments. Project findings provide the basis for a sustainable set of online resources to serve the needs of BirdSleuth teachers nationwide. If successful at improving the ability of teachers to implement independent inquiry in their classrooms, the project also will serve as a model for online professional development in other STEM projects and disciplines.
