9355659 Strassenburg This national 3-year project will: conduct a national needs assessment of middle school teachers to determine their inservice needs on topics which comply with the emerging national science standards; provide teacher enhancement congruent with those topics and measure this model's effectiveness in generating local district support and assessing whether local demand is sufficient so rosters will fill reliably to maintain local participation which contains the costs. Each year fifty teachers at each of three sites will participate in a four-week summer workshop led by an instructional team of a Presidential Awardee middle school teacher, a graduate student in the discipline or a closely allied discipline and a university scientist in the topic area. The teachers from grades 6-9 will participate in workshop where the pedagogy modeled will reflect what research shows is effective science instruction. Content and hands-on activities are drawn from a variety of exemplary sources which were developed with NSF support. (The University Physics Project, SS&C and from the TRIAD Projects). If the project generates the local support anticipated and if local demand is sufficiently so local filling of the rosters contains the cost, then it's expected that this program will become a permanent feature of NSTA activities.
