In order to compete in a global economy, students are going to need resources and curricula focusing on critical thinking and reasoning in science. Despite awareness for the need for complex reasoning, American students perform poorly relative to peers on international standardized tests measuring complex thinking in science. Research focusing on learning progressions is one effort to provide more coherent science curricular sequences and assessments that can be focused on complex thinking about focal science topics. This paper describes an empirically driven, five-step process to develop a three-year learning progression focusing on complex thinking about biodiversity. Our efforts resulted in empirical results and work products including: (1) a revised definition of learning progressions, (2) empirically-driven, three year progressions for complex thinking about biodiversity, (3) an application of statistical approaches for the analysis of learning progression products; (4) Hierarchical Linear Modeling results demonstrating significant student achievement on complex thinking about biodiversity, and (4) Growth Model results demonstrating strengths and weaknesses of the first version of our curricular units. The empirical studies present information to inform both curriculum and assessment development. For curriculum development, the role of learning progressions as templates for the development of organized sequences of curricular units focused on complex science is discussed. For assessment development, learning progression-guided assessments provide a greater range and amount of information that can more reliably discriminate between students of differing abilities than a contrasting standardized assessment measure that was also focused on biodiversity content.
Despite recent shifts in research emphasizing the value of carefully designed experiments, the number of studies of teacher professional development with rigorous designs has lagged behind its student outcome counterparts. We outline a framework for the design of group randomized trials (GRTs) with teachers' knowledge as the outcome and consider mathematics and reading knowledge outcomes designed to assess the types of content problems that teachers encounter in practice. To estimate design parameters, we draw on a national sample of teachers for mathematics and a state Reading First sample to estimate for reading. Our results suggest that there is substantial clustering of teachers' knowledge within schools and professional development GRTs will likely need increased sample sizes to account for this clustering.
This study investigated the relationship of teachers' reading knowledge with students' reading achievement using a direct teacher knowledge assessment rather than indirect proxies (e.g., certification). To address the inequitable distribution of teachers' knowledge resulting from differences in teachers' backgrounds and the disparities in how schools attract and cultivate knowledge, the study developed multilevel propensity score methods to identify comparable teachers on the basis of both teacher and school backgrounds. Results suggest that schools are complexly associated with differences in teachers' knowledge and that comparisons which ignore the relevance of schools may be misleading. By comparing teachers with similar personal and school backgrounds, results show measured knowledge is significantly associated with students' achievement in reading comprehension but not word analysis. The findings support policies which leverage school capacities to develop the specialized knowledge needed for teaching reading.
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