Creating contextually authentic science in a “low‐performing” urban elementary school

This article reports on a 2½‐year collaborate project to reform the teaching and learning of science in the context of Mae Jemison Elementary, the lowest performing elementary school in the state of Louisiana. I outline a taxonomy of authentic science inquiry experiences and then use the resulting framework to focus on how project participants interpreted and enacted ideas about collaboration and authenticity. The resulting contextually authentic science inquiry model links the strengths of a canonically authentic model of science inquiry (grounded in the Western scientific canon) with the strengths of a youth‐centered model of authenticity (grounded in student‐generated inquiry), thus bringing together relevant content standards and topics with critical social relevance. I address the question of how such enactments may or may not promote doing science together and consider the implications of this model for urban science education. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 43: 695–721, 2006     

A “top-down” analysis of high school teacher motivation

Classroom instruction may be affected by school contexts that are increasingly performance-driven because of legislative demands. Interpreting this as a need to investigate the relationships between school context and classroom practice, this study took a “top-down” approach by examining contextual elements of school goal structure and teacher community on teachers’ sense of self- and collective efficacy, and classroom goal structures. After collecting data from teachers in four Midwestern high schools, results indicated that teachers in highly performance-oriented schools reported significantly less adaptive motivational beliefs, lower community, and more performance-oriented instruction than teachers in a low performance-oriented school. Furthermore, a path analysis revealed that classroom goal structures were significantly and indirectly related to teacher community. We discuss how academic context may affect teachers’ motivational beliefs as well as classroom practices, and make recommendations for future research and practice.