This award will enable Dr. Ronald D. Anderson, University of Colorado, Boulder, and three other U.S. educational researchers to collaborate with Dr. Uwe Hameyer, Institute for Science Education, University of Kiel, Federal Republic of Germany, and three other researchers from the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. They will compare the implementation of elementary school science programs in the five home countries of the researchers. The project is being coordinated from the Institute for Science Education in Kiel. The goal of the research is to study the process of putting quality elementary school science programs into practice and to identify the conditions that foster or restrict their successful implementation. The study will be conducted in a variety of settings where attempts have been made or are being made to implement and institutionalize activity-based elementary school science programs. Each of these countries has developed good curricular materials for science teaching, but has had difficulty in consistently implementing or maintaining activity-based elementary school science programs. An ethnographic approach will be used in case studies in the five countries; this should provide information not usually obtainable from surveys. Dr. Anderson and Dr. Hameyer have successfully collaborated on previous research on science education. The other members of the research group offer important skills and access to the diverse school populations required for the project.
