Practicum Academy to Improve Science Education (PRACTISE)

• In Event: 25.059 - Examining the Impacts of Practicum-Based Professional Development

Abstract

Objective
Practicum Academy to Improve Science Education (PRACTISE) is a study of the efficacy of an innovative model for science professional development (PD) for upper elementary classroom teachers. The PD model consists of an Institute, a Practicum, and Follow-up sessions. The week-long summer Institute focuses on helping teachers to facilitate scientific argumentation from evidence. Following the Institute, some teachers spend two weeks in a teaching Practicum, where they team teach science and literacy in a summer school program, engage in video reflection with peers, and receive coaching. The third component is a series of follow-up sessions during the academic year, designed to provide support for teachers as they incorporate the new instructional practices into classroom instruction.

Perspective
This PD program is a response to the need to show that science is “a history of vision and argument” (Crombie, 1994) – a feature which is emphasized by the Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2010) and the Next Generation Science Standards (Achieve, 2012). Yet, traditionally argument has been an underemphasized feature of most science education (Osborne, 2010).

Method
To test the efficacy of the PRACTISE model, our research team compared the instructional practices of two groups of teachers – one that experienced the full model (Program 1), and another that experienced the Institute and follow-up sessions but not the Practicum (Program 2). The research question we seek to answer is ‘To what extent, if any, do practicum-based PD models influence science instructional practices? To do this, we developed an instrument to measure the quality of classroom discourse drawing on work in the domains of mathematics (Boston, 2012) and language arts (Reznitskaya, 2012). The Science Discourse Instrument (SDI) has three teacher scales (Ask, Press, and Link), and three student scales (Explain/Claim, Co-construct, and Critique).

Each teacher was videoed three times during each of the three years they participated in the project (before starting the PD, after one year and after two years). The research team identified two 15 min segments with more than 5 min of whole class discussion in each videotaped lesson. A team of trained raters, using the SDI, rated these segments. Our main analysis was a split-plot ANOVA model using two aggregated measures (Teacher practices and Student practices).

Findings & Significance
Analyses to date indicate that all teachers and students, regardless of which program they were in, made statistically significant improvements in their science discourse practices after attending the PD. These results provide support for the efficacy of the PD program developed for this project. Additionally, we found that the Practicum had a statistically significant impact in improving students’ argumentation practices. This effect was not found, however, for teacher practices. The pattern of our data suggests that the Practicum provided no additional benefit; however, after 2 years, we found that the Practicum had positive effect on students’ practices. One possible explanation for this is that teachers’ Practicum experience may have helped them set strong classroom discussion norms. When such norms are established, students can more easily adopt the practices.

Authors

• Hilda Borko, Stanford University

• Evan J Fishman, Stanford University

• Florencia Gomez Zaccarelli, Stanford University

• Jonathan F. Osborne, Stanford University

• Craig Strang, University of California - Berkeley

• Emily Weiss, University of California - Berkeley