Sunday, February 17, 2013
Auditorium/Exhibit Hall C (Hynes Convention Center)
The goal of the Rhode Island Technology Enhanced Science project (RITES), a statewide NSF-funded Math Science Partnership, is to develop and provide high quality teacher professional development and teacher preparation inclusive of inquiry, technology use and research based strategies. RITES has established a unique professional development (PD) model that is aligned with teacher Grade Span Expectations (GSE). The model is implemented through a partnership in which resource team pairs (one teacher from G6-12, one from higher education) co-design and co-teach a 2.5-day short course on a specific content area. To date, the partnership has engaged 28 higher education faculty and researchers from four Rhode Island institutions of higher learning and 25 teachers from 14 Rhode Island school districts as resource team instructors. The heart of a short course is a free online investigation, developed by the co-instructors, which the trained teachers will use in their science classrooms. Teachers then reflect on their practice through self-designed action research studies which they share out with their peers. Over 50 classroom-ready investigations have been created over the past 4 years of the project, equally distributed among the earth, physical and life sciences. The investigations themselves are highly interactive and model science practices that encourage students to support scientific claims with evidence. We will present results from the RITES short courses that includes pre-post testing of the science teachers taking the courses as well as results of Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) data collected by observers in the short courses. Taken together, the results show an effective and innovative PD model for science teachers that demonstrates significant content learning gains in teachers (9 of 11 short courses in 2011 and 9 of 2013 short courses in 2012 had average normalized learning gains >= 0.3) and very high levels of satisfaction reported by both participating teachers and by resource team members leading the courses. The New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) is used as a measure of student achievement in Rhode Island, and an analysis of NECAP science inquiry scores of students taught by RITES-trained teachers show that those students exceeded gains made by students who were taught by non-RITES-trained teachers. The success of the RITES PD has implications for other science education programs interested in improving science practices through partnerships between higher education and G6-12 stakeholders.