Developing a Research Agenda in Science Education

The Science Summit reinforced a question upon which many of us in science education are focused: How can we, the science education community of researchers, practitioners, and consumers, lead policy? We include a brief review of the No Child Left Behind Act and its implications for teachers, and elaborate about one ongoing and growing effort to answer the concerns about the paucity of research expressed at the Summit. We describe a unique and growing collaboration across professional science education and science organizations and societies that focuses on the development of a research agenda. The term ‘consilience’ refers to the “jumping together of knowledge” that leads to scientific advancements, progressive, creative, fluid scientific research and intellectual capacity to move a research community toward an enlightened research agenda. A coherent research agenda enables us to specify what we know, what we need to know, and how research can be employed for creating and implementing policy. The use of a dynamic organizer (such as Pasteur’s Quadrant) for a research matrix of topics provides a possible structure for organizing and cataloging research questions, designs, findings from past studies, needed areas for research, and policy implications. Through this unique collaboration, the science education community can better focus on needs and priorities and ensure that teachers, policy makers, scientists, and researchers in education at local through national levels have an important stake in research priorities and actions.     

A study of student outcomes and teacher characteristics in exemplary middle and junior high science programs

Recent efforts of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) have encouraged collaborative “research partnerships” between university researchers and classroom science teachers. This research partners study, begun in 1987, examined student outcomes and teacher characteristics in middle/junior high exemplary programs identified by the NSTA's Search for Excellence in Science Education (SESE). A second year of the study has been completed involving SESE program teachers with similar instructional profiles. Using Iowa Test of Basic Skills and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) items, key teachers in those SESE programs examined their seventh- and eighth-grade student outcomes in three domains: (a) knowledge, (b) attitudes, and (c) applications/connections. Results were compared with national populations. A similar study was conducted during the second year, involving teachers from the first year and additional teachers with instructional practice profiles similar to those in SESE programs. Teachers were surveyed using a questionnaire from the Report of the 1977 National Survey of Science, Mathematics and Social Studies Education Teachers (Weiss, 1978a) and supplemental questions (Bonnstetter, 1985). This study found that in exemplary middle/junior high programs: (a) as a group, students achieve high scores in science knowledge and maintain or develop positive attitudes toward science; and (b) students need opportunities to make connections between what they learn in science and personal responsibility.