Chico State, Western Washington University and Whatcom Community College are collaboratively developing and testing 15-weeks of life science learning materials for prospective (K-8) elementary teachers. This curriculum is based on a previously designed ten week course entitled "Investigating the Flow of Matter and Energy in Living Systems" that has already been adopted by several schools. Using a constructivist, inquiry-based approach, each unit begins with an assessment of students' prior knowledge and ends with a reflection comparing their initial ideas and their new scientific understanding. Students are encouraged to structure their own learning with the hopes they will adopt both student-centered pedagogy and the constructivist approach to curriculum development in their teaching.
There is a dearth of well-crafted life science curricula for undergraduate students to meet the needs of future K-8 teachers. Teachers model their own teaching after the classroom experiences they had as learners more than on the theory or the classroom experiences they encounter in teacher education programs. Unfortunately, the contrast between what is expected of future teachers in their classrooms and what they experience in content and instruction in typical university science courses can be quite striking. We believe that the materials developed through this grant have addressed these concerns and will provide one of the first commercially available undergraduate curriculum designed expressly to meet the needs of future K-8 teachers. Several years ago, two of the PIs on this current grant helped lead the development of a life science curriculum for elementary teachers. The resulting curriculum, called "Investigating the Flow of Matter and Energy in Living Systems (IFMELS)," was a one-quarter (10 weeks) introductory biology curriculum. It used a constructivist approach, which was student-centered and incorporated active learning strategies. Each chapter began by eliciting student ideas about the chapter’s main ideas. Students then performed a series of carefully designed activities to build conceptual understanding of the chapter content. Finally, students reflected on their initial ideas and noted areas in which their thinking had changed. This curriculum was modeled after a commercially available physics curriculum called "Physics and Everyday Thinking." The current grant supported a collaboration between two of the original authors, both of whom work at institutions on the quarter system, and two faculty from an institution on the semester system. Our current work expanded IFMELS into a semester-long (15 weeks) curriculum. The revised curriculum, now called "Life Science and Everyday Thinking (LSET)," is divided into seven major chapters that cover the following topics: Living Things & Ecosystems, Consumers (Animals), Producers (Plants), Decomposers (Fungi and Bacteria) & Ecosystems Revisited, Cell Growth, Cell Reproduction & Genetics, and Evolution. The curriculum lab book (one of the main outcomes of this grant) serves as the students’ textbook. Throughout the lab book, students record their initial ideas, record observations and data from experiments, write answers to summarizing questions, and note ideas of their classmates that may be different than their own. Through this grant, we also developed a set of Instructor’s Materials to make the adaptation of LSET as smooth as possible. These materials, available on the LSET website (www.smate.wwu.edu/smate/LSET/index.html), include: example student responses and instructor tips, activity big ideas, activity summaries, common student ideas, schedules of activities, and materials and equipment lists. To assess the effectiveness of LSET, we administered content and attitude assessments at the beginning and end of each LSET course, as well in a comparison course. We anticipated that LSET students would show stronger gains on the biology content assessment than students in the related course (also taught by one of the PIs). Both groups showed strong gains on the content assessment, with no statistically significant differences between the groups. We attribute this to the fact that the comparison course, like LSET, incorporated many best practices in science education (e.g. constructivist, student-centered, etc.). However, when testing students’ views about the nature of science, we found that the LSET students scored better than those in the related course. There was a statistically significant shift towards more sophisticated views about the nature of science that was not seen in the comparison course, presumably because the LSET curriculum carefully attended to collaborative discourse and argumentation when the comparison course did not. In addition to the multiple choice questions used for the content knowledge assessment, we completed an analysis of an open-ended assessment question that requires students to integrate and apply their ideas about many linked biological processes -- decomposition, photosynthesis, food webs, and carbon cycling. After completing the LSET curriculum, students could integrate and apply concepts from across life science topic areas significantly better than college students who completed more traditional biology and environmental science curricula. The LSET curriculum is being published by It’s About Time, a company that specializes in innovative science and math curricula. It will be commercially available in Fall 2014. Our curriculum allows us to teach Biology to future elementary teachers in a way that is both content rich and pedagogically sound. Thus, they not only acquire deep content understanding but also learn science in a way that they can then apply to their own classrooms. The experiences that our students have in our classrooms should better prepare them to teach science at the K-8 level, which should translate into elementary teachers who are more comfortable teaching science and who will teach science using known best practices. We hope this will result in a next generation of elementary students who acquire deeper content knowledge and who are more engaged in learning science.
