Thursday, February 1
Friday, February 2
Saturday, February 3
Sunday February 4

Case Study:  The Assessment of Student Achievement in an Inquiry-Centered Science Program, Michael Klentschy

As the push for accountability races across the public schools of the United States, educators are increasingly asked to demonstrate the effectiveness of instructional programs in terms of student achievement.  There is a limited body of research evidence from which educators can draw information regarding student accomplishment trends in science education.  Most of the research evidence stems from the first generation of programs that first were used in United States classrooms in the 1960’s and 1970's.  There is little research evidence for the “second generation” of reform programs that emerged in the 1990’s.  This case study examines the effectives of these “second generation” programs in the context of their impact on students participating in the Valle Imperial Project in Science, a National Science Foundation funded Local Systemic Change Project in El Centro, California.

The Valle Imperial Project in Science (VIPS) serves approximately 22,500, K-6 students and 1100 teachers in 14 school districts in Imperial County, California.  Imperial County is in the southeast corner of California along the U.S. border with Mexico.  This is an extremely poor, geographically isolated region with a 1999 unemployment rate of 34%.

Of the 22,500, K-6 students in the Imperial Valley, 81% are Hispanic, 5% African-American, 11% Caucasian, 1% Asian and 1% Native American, a majority of historically underserved groups.  More than 50% of the students in the county are Limited English Proficient, with 10% children of migrant workers.  Nearly all of the county’s schools qualify for Title I. County-wide, more than 73% of all students are eligible for free and reduced lunches.

The infrastructure for the instructional program was based upon the National Science Resources Center LASER model with five critical elements linked and interdependent upon one another other: 1) high quality curriculum; 2) sustained professional development and support for teachers and school administrators; 3) materials support; 4) community and top level administrative support; and 5) assessment.

In the spring of 1999, all 4th and 6th grade students in the El Centro School District were assessed with the full battery of the Stanford Achievement Test, 9th Edition, Form T. The program assessment analyzed and compared only the scores of students who had been enrolled in the El Centro School District, regardless of school of attendance, for the last four years.  This part of the design was to examine student accomplishment only for students who had the potential to be exposed to the district science program during this four-year time interval. The case study also examined student achievement in other areas of the curriculum, which may have been affected as a result of this approach to teaching elementary science.  VIPS staff utilized the 6th Grade District Writing Proficiency results from the spring 1999 administration.  Student notebooks are an integral part of the science program.  Staff believed that the amount of focused writing which is associated with the science program might have an effect on student writing. 

The data from the Science subtest for both grades 4 and 6 indicate that there were distinct differences between students who participated in the district science program during the 1998-99 school year and had been in attendance in the El Centro School District continuously for the prior four years. There was an 18-percentile point difference between groups in both grade levels.  The data is consistent with that described by researchers in several studies regarding the effectiveness of first generation programs. When the data was disaggregated by years of exposure to the program, there was even a stronger trend or relationship between achievement and the number of years of participation in the program for both grade levels.

The data was then disaggregated to examine gender, language and lunch eligibility.  In both grade levels there was a strong relationship between the number of years of exposure and high student achievement rates.  In many instances gaps between groups with no exposure were closed over time. There was a strong correlation between science achievement, years of exposure and reading scores and mathematics scores.  The longer students were exposed to the science program, the higher were their mathematics and reading scores.

The pass rate on the 6th Grade Writing Proficiency Assessment for students who participated in the district science program during the 1998-99 school year doubled that of students who did not (82%-41%).  A disaggregation of the cumulative data by the number of years that students had participated in the district science program indicated a great difference between student pass rates based upon years of exposure to the science program.  The differences were most pronounced between no exposure (23% pass rate) and strong exposure of 3-4 years (90%/89% pass rate).

The data indicates a trend between the number of years of participation in a high quality program of science education and the strength of student achievement scores on a norm referenced test. This data is consistent with research reported regarding the first generation programs of the 1960’s in their reported findings of the strong benefits of hands-on science education for students from lower socioeconomic and rural backgrounds. A second trend indicated that the science notebooks used with the program to stimulate focused writing experiences might transfer to an overall improvement in writing.  A third trend indicated that there may be a carryover effect between effective teaching in science and an improvement in reading and mathematics due to the contextual instruction which provided a strong experiential base for the students.
 

Saturday, February 3

The Impact of Two Standards-Based Mathematics Curricula on Student Achievement in Massachusetts, Julie Riordan, The Noyce Foundation Since the passage of the Education Reform Act in 1993, Massachusetts has developed curriculum frameworks and a new statewide standardized testing system.  As school districts align curriculum and teaching practices with the frameworks, standards-based programs are beginning to replace more traditional curricula.  This paper compares statewide standardized test scores of students using one elementary or one middle school program with demographically similar students using traditional curricula.  Results indicate that students in schools using either Everyday Mathematics or the Connected Math Project performed significantly better on the 1999 statewide standardized mathematics test than did students in traditional programs attending comparison schools.  With minor exceptions, differences in favor of the standards-based programs remained consistent across mathematical strands, question types, and student sub-populations. What We Have Learned about Curriculum Development Research, Zalman Usiskin. After a first phase of curriculum development and evaluation, and a second phase of publication and implementation, the NSF mathematics curriculum development projects are in a third phase: dealing with scrutiny by a public that was not involved in either of the first two phases.  This third phase is characterized by different problems than  the first two phases.  I will try to describe some of these problems and give recommendations that might help alleviate them.     Sunday February 4 MathLab:  Multimedia problem-solving software for middle school mathematics, Andrew Zucker http://www.sri.com/policy/ctl/html/mathlab.html MathLab is a set of problem-based computer activities that take one to three 45-minute class periods to complete.  Students are presented with short video-based situations in which teenage characters encounter realistic mathematics problems.  Using the computer software, the students then gather additional information about the problems, make use of computer-based tools (such as a spreadsheet) to generate solutions, and communicate their solutions in writing.  Students can save and print their written solutions and teachers can score the students’ work using rubrics that come in the Teacher’s Guide.  The mathematics in MathLab is carefully tied to the NCTM standards for grades 5-8 and focuses on number sense, algebraic thinking, data analysis, probability, and geometry.  The computer-based tools in MathLab include a spreadsheet, data table, scatterplot, histogram, box plot, function grapher, spinner, calculator, and dynamic geometric sketches.  Different problems require the use of different tools, many of which can be linked.  (For example, a geometric sketch can be linked to a data table so that making changes in the table results in changes to the sketch, or vice versa.)  The tools can also be used alone, without opening a MathLab problem.  User trials have shown that students of different ability levels are interested in MathLab.  Students enjoy learning about the power of computer-based mathematics tools and they also appreciate that the problems involve believable characters.  ChemViz: Chemistry Visualization, Lisa Bievenue, Richard D. Braatz  http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/edu/chemviz ChemViz is a set of scientific visualization tools and curriculum materials designed to make computational chemistry accessible to high school, and college, teachers and students. Waltz, one of the ChemViz tools, is a web-based interface to DiSCO, a computational chemistry tool that calculates electron densities and molecular orbitals. Students use Waltz as a web-based computational laboratory for designing experiments that can answer their questions concerning such abstract concepts as electrons, atoms, molecules, and chemical bonding.  A second tool of ChemViz is a web-based interface to the Cambridge Structural Database of crystallographic structures.  Students can search for, and view, named molecular structures such as aspirin or caffeine, or they can search for a chemical formula. With these tools, chemistry teachers who currently use "handwaving" to teach "invisible" submicroscopic concepts will instead use computational and visualization tools to represent three-dimensional processes.  Concord Consortium - BioLogica, Paul Horwitz  http://www.concord.org/biologica The "hypermodel " is a new approach to the design of science education software that integrates multimedia materials, experimental data, or text with a manipulable model of the subject domain, and uses each medium as a tool for navigating the other. Thus, students' actions in the modeling environment can trigger the presentation of experimental data or bring up a question. In turn, their answers to questions or manipulations of an experiment can affect the configuration of the model.  Hypermodels are scriptable and thus provide a flexible tool for the creation of a wide variety of "web labs" that challenge students to solve problems, and then monitor and react to their actions.  Web labs structure students' investigations of a domain and offer metacognitive prompts and links to real world science. They also produce log files of students' actions and responses, and thus provide a valuable new tool for embedded assessment and educational research.  The talk will illustrate the hypermodel concept with a demonstration of BioLogica." The first of a projected series of hypermodels, BioLogica currently covers introductory genetics, but we plan to expand its domain to include topics in cellular and molecular biology as well. A prototype is available for free download at http://www.concord.org/biologica. Supporting Inquiry-Based Learning with Technology, Daniel Edelson As with any form of learning-by-doing, inquiry-based learning requires support for the doing and support for the learning.  Researchers in the Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools at Northwestern University have been investigating supports for both doing and learning from inquiry for several years.  In this presentation, I will share insights we have gained about how to adapt scientific inquiry tools to scaffold learners and about the additional supports that students require to enable them to be  reflective inquirers.  I will discuss two software environments: WorldWatcher (http://www.worldwatcher.northwestern.edu), a scientific visualization environment for geographic data, and the Progress Portfolio (http://www.progressportfolio.northwestern.edu), an inquiry support tool. Engaging Students:  A National Library of Web-based Interactive Manipulatives For Elementary Mathematics,  Lawrence Cannon and E. Robert Heal http://matti.usu.edu/nlvm/index.html This NSF / Utah State University project is in the process of creating a National Library of Virtual Manipulatives, computer-based applets (written in Java) in which the  interactivity requires engagement from student users in their discovery and experience of mathematics.  The projected library will be a mathematical resource for students and teachers nationwide, accessible via the Internet without cost to the user. Many applets are based on physical manipulatives commonly used in the school system (i.e. geoboards, tangrams, pattern blocks, base blocks, etc.); others are concept manipulatives especially designed to teach or reinforce basic mathematical concepts (i.e. ladybug geometry, isometric transformations, Platonic solids, 2d-grapher, game of life, etc.).  The emphasis is on interactivity, so the learner controls the variable aspects of the manipulative and is not only free, but also encouraged, to explore and discover important mathematical principles and relationships.  The organization of the web site is designed to correlate with NCTM's Principles and Standards for School Mathematics including links to the electronic edition of Principles and Standards. Interactive math applets are being used for primary content material in distance  ducation courses originating at USU and taught entirely over the Internet with on-line testing making use of a Java mathematics editor. Tinkerplots, Clifford  Konold http://www.umass.edu/srri/serg/tpmain.html Seen this?  To explore data they’ve collected, mathematics or science students generate and print every graph the spreadsheet or data analysis software allows.  Lots of ink; little thought. Tinkerplots is a general tool for doing exploratory data analysis designed particularly for  students with little prior experience analyzing data.  Tinkerplots comes with no ready-made graphs.  Rather, students progressively organize data by "ordering" "separating" and "stacking" to produce displays of their own design, displays that help them explore questions about group differences (Are males and females with comparable experience paid the same?) or relationships between variables (e.g., Does blood pressure increase with age?).  Students can enter their own data into Tinkerplots or download data directly from the web.  They can then analyze the data using features that help them visually perceive patterns and trends in the data, make presentation-quality graphs, and write a report all within Tinkerplots. In designing Tinkerplots, we are collaborating with teachers, authors, and publishers of several mathematics curricula, including Connected Mathematics, Mathematics in Context, MathScape, Math Thematics, and MMAP.  New data-analysis units in each of these curricula will use Tinkerplots.  Tinkerplots will also be a valuable addition to the inquiry-based science class, where students collect and analyze data as part of formulating and testing their own hypotheses.   Exploring Earth from Space, Daniel  Barstow  The Center for Earth and Space Science Education at TERC, in collaboration with a major publisher, will develop a year-long high school Earth Science course that features extensive use of images and visualizations of Earth, in the context of a series of investigations of core concepts in Earth Science.  The course will emphasize inquiry-based learning and Earth as a system.  In this technology demo, we will illustrate our approach as developed for NASA's EarthKAM project, in which students investigate Earth using a digital camera flown on the International Space Station.