Educative Curriculum Materials: Research Designs for Studying Teachers Use of and Learning with Curr

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Educative Curriculum Materials Research Designs
for Studying Teachers Use of and Learning with
Curriculum Materials
Session Leaders Betsy Davis Joe Krajcik with
help from many others CCMS KSI July, 2006
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Overarching Question

• What research designs are likely to be helpful
  in answering questions about educative curriculum
  materials?

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Session Plan

• Short talk about educative curriculum materials
• Brainstorming big-picture research questions
• Model moving into researchable questions
• Small group discussions of research designs for
  those researchable questions
• Break
• Analyzing one or two groups designs
• Synthesis

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Curriculum Materials Teacher Learning

• Teachers learn from their use of curriculum
  materials
• Curriculum materials are inherently situated in
  teachers daily practice
• Educative curriculum materials are intended to
  promote teacher learning in addition tostudent
  learning

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Existing Research on ECM

• We know that
• Teachers' use of and learning from CM depend on
• characteristics of the curriculum materials
• the type of teaching activity in which the
  teacher is engaging
• whether the teacher persists in reading the
  materials over time
• what the teacher chooses to read or ignore
• the teacher's own knowledge and beliefs
• how those beliefs are aligned with the goals of
  the curriculum
• the teacher's disposition toward reflective
  practice
• PCK may be easier to support than other types of
  knowledge
• Curriculum materials may be especially helpful
  for supporting beginning teachers learning
• (Remillard, Schneider, Grossman, others)

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Existing Guidelines

• Some high-level design guidelines for educative
  curriculum materials
• support development of PCK, especially
  anticipating learners' ideas
• support development of subject matter knowledge
• make rationales for decisions visible
• (See Ball Cohen, 1996)
• Essentially Speak to teachers, not through them
  (Remillard, 2000)

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Three Areas for Support
PCK for science topics (regular PCK)
Subject matter knowledge
PCK for science inquiry
Davis, E. A., Krajcik, J. (2005). Designing
educative curriculum materials to promote teacher
learning. Educational Researcher, 34(3), 3-14.
Run through DK to give sense of what might be
int. RQs
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And, Three Types of Support
Adaptation guidance
Implementation guidance
Base support (what any good CM would have)
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Davis Krajcik (2005)
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Teacher Learning and ECM

• Educative curriculum materials can help teachers
  
• add new specific ideas
• add new general principles (e.g., through
  rationales)
• become enculturated into science teaching
  practices
• make links between general principles and
  specific instructional moves
• eventually, promote teachers pedagogical design
  capacity (see Brown Edelson, 2003) and the
  transfer of ideas

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Davis Krajcik (2005)
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Design Tensions

• Determining appropriate amount of guidance and
  prescriptions
• How explicit in providing rationales? How often?
• How prescriptive? How many choices? What are the
  choices?
• Designing for different teachers
• new versus experienced teachers?
• elementary versus secondary teachers?
• science versus other subject areas?

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Davis Krajcik (2005)
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Big Picture Research Questions

• How does teachers' use of ECM illuminate a
  trajectory or set of trajectories of teacher
  development? (from KSI 2005)
• How are the affordances and constraints of CM
  different for different types of teachers, and
  how could we design CM to work with these
  teachers?
• How do teachers plan with, enact, reflect on, and
  learn from curriculum materials designed to be
  educative for teachers? (from KSI 2005 Davis
  Krajcik, 2005)
• How does teachers practice change? (Davis
  Krajcik, 2005)
• What are the effects of particular features of
  educative curriculum materials? (from KSI 2005)
• How do issues like form, format, content,
  delivery mechanism, and others have affordances
  and challenges in terms of how educative
  curriculum materials are used? (Davis Krajcik,
  2005)
• How does the context and professional community
  make a difference in how teachers use and learn
  from CM?

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Are You Working in this Area?

• If so, please fill out an index card and pass it
  to Betsy.
• Whats your basic research question, if you know?
• Whats the basic context for your study, if you
  know?
• Well use these to try to make interesting small
  groups.

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Moving to Researchable Questions

• Take an existing big-picture research question
  and
• Connect it to the literature
• Figure out the population
• Figure out the specific things youre interested
  in
• Figure out your specific research question
• Figure out the appropriate outcome measures
• Start working on your research design

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• Model moving into researchable questions

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• Connections to the literature (building your
  rationale)
• Elementary preservice teachers hold weak
  understandings of how to represent science ideas
  to young learners (Zembal-Saul, Krajcik,
  Blumenfeld, 2000 Davis Petish, 2005 Borko
  Livingston 1989)
• Need to support teachers in developing PCK
  (Magnusson, Krajcik, Borko, 1999 Borko
  Putman, 1996).
• Educative curriculum materials can provide
  supports for teacher learning (Davis Krajcik,
  2005 Ball Cohen, 1996)
• Video has the potential to promote learning
  (Mayer, 2000 Fishman, 2003)

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• Big-picture research question
• How do issues like form, format, content,
  delivery mechanism, and others affect how
  educative curriculum materials are used? (Davis
  Krajcik, 2005)
• More specific
• How do you support practicing upper elementary
  teachers in the development of pedagogical
  content knowledge?
• How to support practicing upper elementary
  teachers in using appropriate representations and
  phenomena?
• Even more specific research questions
• How does video support elementary teachers in the
  learning of representations tied to specific
  learning goals?
• How do text-based materials support elementary
  teachers in the learning of representations tied
  to specific learning goals?
• What are the affordances and challenges of using
  video or text-materials?

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• Specific things Im interested in
• Supports for teacher learning
• PCK and representations of particular science
  ideas
• Text-based versus video-based supports
• Content areas -- water cycle and motion
  (particular learning goals)

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• Outcome measures
• Classroom observations of teachers using
  representations from curriculum materials to
  support students learning particular subject
  matter
• Accuracy of content representations
• Appropriateness of representations
• with respect to the learning goals
• With respect to age of the learner
• Stimulated recall Interviews
• Log-files
• Research design
• Participants -- 5th grade teachers and their
  students
• Context -- urban schools (2 schools with similar
  student populations)

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• Research Design

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In Your Small Groups

• Elaborate on a research question to come up with
  a research design to address that question.
  Consider and jot down some or all of the
  following
• the big-picture research question
• the specific research question
• the rationale for this question (i.e., connection
  to the literature)
• how will answering this question support
  classroom teachers
• who is the population
• what is the research design
• what are the data sources
• how will you analyze the data
• what are the outcome measures
• how do the outcome measures allow you to answer
  the research question

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Small Group Time
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Analyzing One Groups Design

• Think about questions like
• Is the research question grounded in the
  literature? Is it a valuable question to explore?
• What are the strengths of the design? What are
  the limitations? What is missing from the design?
• Does this design allow you to answer the research
  question? What will you be able to say as a
  result of doing this study?

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Individual Reflection

• Based on
• the whole group discussion at the beginning,
• your small group's discussion, and
• the discussion we've just had,
• think about what you see as the major lessons
  you'll take away from this session.

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Synthesis

• What are the major lessons you take away from
  this session?
• What are the key areas that need further
  exploration?
• What are the next steps that CCMS can take to
  move this research area ahead?

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