Authentic Research Experiences for High School Teachers and Students

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Authentic Research Experiences for High School
Teachers and Students
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Goals of the project

• Increase teachers understanding of authentic
  scientific research
• How it is conducted, how data are collected, how
  questions are phrased, etc.
• Improve teachers content knowledge
• Promote close professional collaboration between
  high school students and research scientists
• Help teachers better incorporate researchboth
  content and methodologyinto the classroom

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The forum

• N-STEP is/was an intensive in-service teacher
  research experience requiring collaboration with
  high school students and research scientists
• Designed for teacher education improvementbenefit
  s for students considered a bonus
• Part of bigger education reform project (NRC 1996
  and AAAS 1989, 1998)

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How it was designed

• Designed to mimic how scientific research is
  conducted
• Teams compete for a limited number of openings
• Similar to grant proposal process
• Research products were subject to review by
  peers
• Via peer review panel
• Incentives were provided to promote excellence
• Stipends, paid travel, cash prizes

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What they do during the project

• 3 weeks in the field
• Embedded within the context of a 9 month program
  with formal class to provide the foundation
• Each team is 2 teachers and 2 students and a
  lead scientist (PI)
• Roughly 5 teams in 2 or 3 different projects

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The end of the project

• Each student/teacher team
• Writes a research paper
• Prepares a poster
• Gives a 20 minute talk
• All work completed under the guidance of the
  leader (PI)

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The numbersteachers

• 8 projects completed in 3 years
• 50 teachers (some teachers were repeats year to
  year)
• Gender ratio 5050
• Mostly science teachers
• 90 white
• 94 at high school level
• 96 public school sector

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The numbersstudents

• 74 students
• All high school students
• Gender ratio 6238
• 81 white
• 7 African-American
• 5 Hispanic
• 4 Asian/Pacific Islander
• 3 Native American
• 78 from urban areas

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Types of Projects completed

• Anasazi pottery
• Evaporation data from Lake Tahoe
• Ozone column amounts
• Meteorological observations
• Ultraviolet flux measurements
• Soil permeability in Death Valley
• Vegetation composition and density

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How was the data?

• Varies from group to group
• Some collected excellent data while some data had
  to be tossedoverall, scientists were satisfied
  with the data
• Comments from teachers
• Too much time on irrelevant information about
  evaporation (for example) and not enough about
  how to use the equipment
• This got better by year 2 and 3scientists learn
  from the feedback

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Favorite quote

• Certainly collection of reliable data was not as
  efficient as using well-trained graduate
  assistants. However, use of high school teachers
  and students provided an economical way to get
  good quality data if sufficient time were spent
  on training and protocols were well defined and
  tested before implementation
• Can be said about practically any project with
  any age group

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Evaluation type

• Formative Evaluationfree-form response
• Lead directly to changes in the format of the
  course
• Summative Evaluation of Teacher Learning
• Asked to describe beliefs about science and
  contrast this understanding with their
  understanding of school-based science

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Results

• Interestingly enough, there were no changes in
  pre- and post field course tests for both
  teachers and students, even in the third year
  when the tests were conducted once again after
  the presentations.
• Author doesnt seem to be affected by this...

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Then what is the value of this type of course?

• Gets teachers to start to think outside the box
• Gives them the opportunity to see what science is
  like when you dont have the answers and when
  things dont conform to a syllabus or a
  fill-in-the-blank style question
• Reminds teachers the importance to think about
  teaching students how to ask questions and how to
  problem solve when they dont have all the tools
  called for

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Scientists like it because

• The get data
• Its cheap
• They have a chance to reform the way they
  instruct people how to do things, ultimately
  refining their goals and methods
• NSF loves itgreat for the broader impacts
  section of grant proposals

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My humble 2 cents

• Great idea
• Need to look into why there is no appreciable
  difference in learning/science understanding
  after the course
• Maybe ask student/teacher teams to write their
  own proposals about a given topic that a PI has
  specialty in and then research that topicmore
  motivation to collect good data