Evidence for Growth in Secondary Science Residents’ Knowledge for Teaching in an Urban Teacher Residency

• In Event: Lessons Learned From Urban Teacher Residencies

Abstract

The Newark-Montclair Urban Teacher Residency (N-MUTR) is a partnership between Newark (NJ) Public Schools and Montclair State University, and operates both secondary and elementary strands. The secondary program is focused solely on the disciplines of math and science, and in the first three cohorts, a total of 17 teachers have been through the program and currently teach in Newark.

The question of resident growth in pedagogical content knowledge, or PCK (Abell, 2007; Shulman, 1986) was of particular interest to faculty and other residency stakeholders. One of the “lessons learned” in the first two years of the N-MUTR was the need to better integrate math and science methods instructions into the curriculum. Strategies for how this was accomplished while maintaining the school-based instruction foundational to the residency will be shared in the presentation. We sought evidence for the effectiveness of these new approaches using a variety of assessments throughout the year. The focus of this presentation is on the development and validation of one instrument in particular, the PCK probe.

The PCK Probe aided in both providing admissions data and ascertaining the knowledge growth of our residents at the completion of the program. The instrument was born out of a pragmatic necessity, namely the need to gauge applicants’ grasp of their disciplinary content for admissions prior to the reporting of PRAXIS II scores.

One instrument also used to study teacher learning in our UTR was the Learning to Teach Science interview protocol, which was developed as a science-specific adaptation of the interview protocol used in the Teacher Education and Learning to Teach (TELT) study (Kennedy, Ball, & McDiarmid, 1993).The PCK probe described in this presentation was derived from this protocol and adapted into a written instrument consisting of three questions. A parallel mathematics instrument was also developed. The questions in this knowledge probe were open-ended, and the responses were written freehand on a piece of paper with a 30 minute time limit, then scored with a rubric. This knowledge probe was first administered as part of the admissions process, and then again on the last formal day of the residency.

The results from both instruments indicate growth in PCK knowledge in our residents in two areas in particular. Residents were much better able to shift the cognitive load of teaching to students and attend to the ideas of students in their teaching. There was less evidence that residents’ content knowledge had increased, a finding consistent with prior science teacher education research (Hewson et al, 1999). Perhaps most usefully, the results from the easy-to-administer knowledge probe were similar to those produced by the more time-intensive Learning to Teach Science Interview.

Though somewhat encouraging, these data—along with the ongoing observational data throughout the year—also point to a need to further strengthen the methods preparation of our residents, and contribute to the ongoing discussion about which elements of teacher preparation need prioritization (Feiman-Nemser, 2001) in the initial preparation of our N-MUTR residents.

Authors

• Douglas B. Larkin, Montclair State University

• Gail M. Perry-Ryder, Montclair State University