Integrating Next Generation Science Standards Core Ideas and Practices: Supporting and Studying Teachers' Implementation

• In Event: Designing for Teacher Learning and Enduring Reform Within Science Education

Abstract

Perspectives of the teacher-curriculum relationship and implications for the development of educative curriculum materials (Ball & Cohen, 1996; Davis & Krajcik, 2005; Remillard, 2005) suggest that curriculum materials can be powerful tools in supporting teachers implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013), provided they (a) align with and support teachers’ understanding of learning goals, (b) employ instructional strategies that support student learning and help teachers understand the pedagogical purpose(s) of each activity, and (c) include assessments to help teachers monitor their students’ progress, provide students with feedback, and inform instructional decisions.
This paper describes a curriculum-focused research study and, specifically, our efforts to support and understand teachers’ implementation of explanation writing with this NGSS-aligned curriculum.
Over 5 years, we developed an 8th grade curriculum unit that (a) aligns to physical and life science core ideas and crosscutting concepts about atom rearrangement and conservation, and (among others) the science practice of explanation to make sense of phenomena involving chemical reactions in non-living and living systems; (b) supports teaching and learning through sequenced activities and scaffolded tasks that guide students’ reasoning about phenomena and underlying molecular mechanisms; (c) includes embedded assessments requiring students to construct explanations of phenomena that allow teachers to elicit students’ initial ideas and skills and monitor their progress; and (d) supports teacher learning through print and online teacher resources and professional development.
An examination of student notebooks revealed that teachers did not provide feedback on students’ explanations. Teacher materials were revised with rubrics, scoring guidelines, and suggestions for providing feedback (Achieve, 2014). Professional development (PD) was offered to experienced curriculum implementers to introduce these revisions and allow teachers to practice applying them to samples of student work. Teachers were given financial incentives to (a) evaluate explanations of a representative sample of their students while teaching the unit, (b) summarize findings across the responses they sampled, and (c) provide feedback to students.
For each explanation task, teachers submitted scanned copies of their sampled students’ explanations, data on how they rated each explanation, a brief summary of findings for the sample, and a description of how they provided feedback. A comparison of teacher ratings to ratings of experts was used to determine how well teachers used the rubrics and summarized their findings and, based on this, their capacity to provide useful feedback to students. In a separate study, we examine how the quality of feedback influenced the quality of student explanations.
On average, teacher ratings differed from expert ratings on less than one-third of students’ explanations. Consistency between teacher and expert ratings positively correlated with teachers’ years of experience implementing the curriculum and number of exposures to our curriculum-based PD. Few teachers provided written feedback on students’ explanations.
The significance of these findings suggest that realizing the vision of \NGSS may exceed typical instruction in US classrooms, and that high quality curricular supports, curriculum-based professional development, and other incentives may be needed to support teachers’ effective implementation of this vision.

Authors

• Jo Ellen Roseman, American Association for the Advancement of Science

• Rebecca A. Kruse, National Science Foundation