Teacher Knowledge, Beliefs, and Technology: Constructing Models of Change in Systemic Reform

Project ended on 8/31/05

This program of research to explores the relationship between teacher learning from professional development and resultant student learning in systemic reform contexts.   Related issues explore between the knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes held by middle school science teachers with respect to inquiry-based science with embedded learning technologies and their classroom practices with those technologies.   At its heart, this research is about the study of teacher change.   The teachers who will participate in this work are part of a large-scale systemic change initiative in the Detroit Public Schools, conducted jointly by the NSF-sponsored Detroit Urban Systemic Initiative (DUSI) and the Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS).   In that context, the teachers are all learning how to teach with new curriculum materials and technology, and they receive a broad range of professional development to support them in this learning.  

To become successful with inquiry-based and technology-enhanced curricula, teachers will need to learn new science content (content knowledge); they will need to learn new methods for organizing their classroom (pedagogical knowledge); and they will need to learn new techniques for teaching particular kinds of content, such as the use of modeling tools to help students construct an understanding of how burning coal from factories combines with air to create acid rain that impacts the environment (pedagogical content knowledge).   Teachers' attitudes toward technology need to change, and their beliefs in their own self-efficacy with technology and new science material needs to improve.   DUSI and LeTUS attempt to help teachers change along these dimensions through activities that include cognitive (providing evidence for the feasibility and benefits of using new approaches), social (learning and sharing with colleagues), and contextual (providing evidence for the support of the system) mechanisms for change.   There is little understanding at the present time as to how these aspects of change work either separately or together to foster the use of technology in science teaching.

 

Funder:

National Science Foundation
CAREER Program

Principal Investigators:

Barry Fishman

Partner Organizations:

Detroit Public Schools

Status:

Ongoing.