Using Improvement Research to Enhance the Use of Research and Repair Epistemic Harms in Science Classrooms (Poster 8)

• In Event: Advancing Methods, Theories, and Conceptualizations of Infrastructuring in the Learning Sciences

Abstract

Objectives:
This DBIR Project investigates integrating the Student Experience Improvement Cycle (SEIC) into a district’s instructional coaching routines to support equitable science teaching and use of evidence to promote equitable knowledge-building experiences in science.

Theoretical Framework:
Improvement science aimed at educational justice at its root focuses on repair, insofar as it involves problem diagnosis, remedy devising, and solution testing related to matters of educational inequity (Jabbar & Childs, 2022). Successful improvement science, further, enhances research use to inform solutions and data use to evaluate changes in social and material conditions. This project aligns with efforts to reform science education to reduce epistemic harms, which occur when students from nondominant groups’ viewpoints are systematically excluded from instruction (Stroupe, 2021). We see these harms as reparable through instruction that connects to students’ funds of knowledge and supports their collaborative investigation of compelling phenomena (Penuel et al., 2022).

Recognizing the need for systems-level action to address epistemic injustice (Penuel & Watkins, 2019), we aim to promote research use within district-level coaching routines for science teachers. We seek to promote conceptual use of ideas related specifically to the importance of making science instruction relevant to students’ personal interests and to their communities’ priorities and of academically productive talk and instrumental use of teaching strategies known to promote relevance and to support more equitable contributions to knowledge-building. Further, we aim to support data use for equity by deploying practical measures of student experience and visualizations that support analysis of experience by race/ethnicity and gender (Raza et al., 2024). Such use can best be supported, we conjecture by integrating research use into an existing routine, such as coaching.

Methods and Data Sources:
We used an embedded case study design, analyzing teams of coaches and science teachers within a large school district in the Intermountain West. The coaches (a pair of researchers and a district leader) remained constant, while middle school science teacher configurations varied.
Our evidence sources included recordings of coaching sessions, interviews with a district coach/leader and teacher, surveys, and observations of select school-level meetings on research use. To assess the SEIC’s impact on repairing epistemic harms, we analyzed student exit tickets focusing on coherence, relevance, and contribution to knowledge building.

Results:
Coach-teacher teams significantly used research within the SEIC. They employed research briefs to support instructional materials, helping students connect learning to their funds of knowledge and collaboratively build knowledge to explain phenomena. These briefs also guided strategy selection for classroom testing. Regarding repairing epistemic harms, students reported improved experiences in targeted areas, including relevance and contributions to knowledge building. The SEIC adapted well to the coaching routine, but its institutionalization requires further adaptation for teacher-led implementation in schools next year.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:
This study highlights the potential of improvement research to enhance research use and repair epistemic harm at the school district level. It also underscores the necessity of adapting approaches to fit changing district circumstances.

Authors

• William R. Penuel, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Annie Allen, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Ali Raza, Colorado State University

• Yamileth Salinas Del Val, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Samantha Duwe, Aurora Public Schools