Teachers fostering the co-development of science literacy and language literacy with English language learners

Thirty-five elementary teachers participated in a yearlong professional development (PD) program that was designed to foster a culture of on-going teacher learning to promote the co-development of science and language literacy for English language learners (ELL). An explanatory design methodology was used to determine the degree to which science and language literacy co-developed. The research question guiding this study was: In what ways did the yearlong PD science program support teachers at 10 elementary schools to become more knowledgeable about fostering science literacy and its role in co-developing language literacy (e.g. reading, writing, listening, and speaking) for ELL? The measurable and significant gains on the quantitative mandated state science and reading tests and the analysis of qualitative teaching episodes led to the conclusion that demonstrated the synergy between science learning and language learning – as one increased, so did the other.     

Differential effects of three professional development models on teacher knowledge and student achievement in elementary science

To identify links among professional development, teacher knowledge, practice, and student achievement, researchers have called for study designs that allow causal inferences and that examine relationships among features of interventions and multiple outcomes. In a randomized experiment implemented in six states with over 270 elementary teachers and 7,000 students, this project compared three related but systematically varied teacher interventions—Teaching Cases, Looking at Student Work, and Metacognitive Analysis—along with no‐treatment controls. The three courses contained identical science content components, but differed in the ways they incorporated analysis of learner thinking and of teaching, making it possible to measure effects of these features on teacher and student outcomes. Interventions were delivered by staff developers trained to lead the teacher courses in their regions. Each course improved teachers' and students' scores on selected‐response science tests well beyond those of controls, and effects were maintained a year later. Student achievement also improved significantly for English language learners in both the study year and follow‐up, and treatment effects did not differ based on sex or race/ethnicity. However, only Teaching Cases and Looking at Student Work courses improved the accuracy and completeness of students' written justifications of test answers in the follow‐up, and only Teaching Cases had sustained effects on teachers' written justifications. Thus, the content component in common across the three courses had powerful effects on teachers' and students' ability to choose correct test answers, but their ability to explain why answers were correct only improved when the professional development incorporated analysis of student conceptual understandings and implications for instruction; metacognitive analysis of teachers' own learning did not improve student justifications either year. Findings suggest investing in professional development that integrates content learning with analysis of student learning and teaching rather than advanced content or teacher metacognition alone. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 333–362, 2012     

Teaching and learning with ICT within the subject culture of secondary school science

This paper reports some of the findings from the science subject design initiative team in the ESRC Interactive Education Project at the University of Bristol. The subject culture of secondary school science, characterised by a content‐laden curriculum and assessment, but also with a tradition and requirement for practical work, is briefly described to give a picture of the environment in which the use of ICT was planned. Six science teachers, working in UK comprehensive schools, with between 2 and 18 years experience in the classroom planned subject design initiatives (SDI) in which practical work was simulated by software. Team discussions and individual interviews following the SDIs are summarised and early conclusions presented about the resulting shift in pedagogic approach and subject culture.     

On pigs and packers: Radically contextualizing a practice of science with Mexican immigrant students

This paper reports on instructional practices observed in a high school English Learner (EL) Science course serving newcomer Mexican immigrant youth. The school is located in a rural Midwestern meatpacking community in which labor at the hog plant is economically- and racially-segmented; it is the town’s Mexican residents, many of them undocumented, who comprise most of the unskilled labor force. The general purpose of the paper is to document how the economic and racial context of this community influences science instruction in the EL Science course and to describe how this presents particular challenges in achieving equitable science instruction for Mexican immigrant youth in these rural, globalizing places. Entering the data via critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995) and then utilizing Barton’s (2003) “practice of science” perspective, with an eye toward achieving “radical contextuality” (Grossberg, 1997), we describe the science events, identities, and structures of the pig dissection lesson and detail how what these students could do with science, as rendered by that lesson, was limited by the roles the teacher attributed to the students, her inability to draw on their funds of knowledge as resources for learning, and the voice and position she allowed them to take up. The data reinforce conventional understandings of schools as sites of cultural reproduction (Bowels & Gintis, 1976), as well as of resistance (Giroux, 1983), but afford us a glimpse of the particularity of those mechanisms within the demographically-transitioning American Heartland, iconic of the era of global capitalism.