This NSDL Targeted Research project is part of a four-way collaborative effort involving 1043638, U. Colorado (lead institution); 1043858, Utah State University; 1043660, UCAR; and 1043717, the University of Utah. The investigators seek to understand the impact, replicability, and scalability of the NSDL Curriculum Customization Service (CCS) across four different school district deployment sites. CCS is a web-based software tool that enables teachers to: (1) customize their science instruction using digital library resources, formative assessments, and district-developed materials to aid student learning and (2) share these customizations as part of an online learning community. Three major themes guiding this research are: (i) impact on students (e.g. study of learning outcomes and self-reported engagement with science content); (ii) impact on teachers (e.g. examination of teachers' attitudes, beliefs, practices, and knowledge surrounding curriculum customization, integration of digital library resources in the classroom, and teacher learning) and (iii) how differences in deployment site characteristics (districts and schools) influence student learning outcomes and teachers' knowledge. The intellectual merit of the project lies in its grounding in a successful pilot study in which the Denver Public Schools adopted the CCS system for all its earth science teachers district-wide. With respect to broader impacts the project offers a model for the dissemination of educational technology through a key "unit" of the K-12 educational enterprise, namely adoption by the local school district.
Overview The Curriculum Customization Service (see figure 1) is an online cyberlearning tool that enables teachers to 1) customize their science curriculum using digital library resources, formative assessments, and district-developed materials to aid student learning and 2) share these customizations as part of an online learning community. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the educational impact of the CCS as an online digital planning tool for STEM education. Evaluation of impact was focused on student learning and teacher practice. [Figure one here] Research The CCS was made available to Earth science teachers in six major school districts in the U.S. intermountain west. Over 150 teachers received either face-to-face or online training in using the CCS to differentiate their instruction for diverse students and to integrate high-quality, interactive digital resources into their teaching. Data were gathered via mixed methods to provide a complete picture of CCS usage and the context (i.e. school and district factors) that influenced adoption of the technology. These methods included weblogs of tool usage (providing detailed clickstream data of every user action in the CCS), phone interviews, online surveys, student assessments, classroom observations, and collection of demographic data published for each school district. Student assessment data was collected from over 2500 students across the course of this research. Findings Results demonstrated that the Curriculum Customization Service embodies a very effective model for significantly increasing teachers’ awareness and use of digital library resources in classroom teaching. Over 90% of teachers reported that the CCS had changed their teaching practices and the ways in which they used interactive resources for science instruction. Additionally, teachers reported having an increased awareness of other Earth science teachers’ practices. Results suggest that teachers’ interactions with specific components of the CCS are beneficial for student learning. Analysis of students’ multiple choice and open-ended assessments demonstrated that focused use of interactive resources support positive learning outcomes. Teachers who used the CCS often and took advantage of the variety of the features in the CCS reported increased student learning and teacher use of the CCS significantly benefited low SES students. Conclusions Overall, results from this research demonstrated that the CCS is an effective tool for meeting the goal for which it was designed: helping teachers plan and teach more efficiently and effectively, thus benefiting students. This project has informed the field’s understanding of how and when cyberlearning tools can be integrated into authentic STEM learning environments. It also has identified critical factors that influence the scalability, adoption, and assessment of cyberlearning tools in classroom environments. These factors include district support, professional development opportunities, availability of teacher-created materials, and smaller student-teacher ratios in science classrooms. This project has resulted in a promising cyberlearning model to support teacher planning and curriculum implementation; several publishers and developers of inquiry-oriented, research-based curricula have expressed interest in exploring the applicability of the model to other curricula.
