{"id":203083,"date":"2015-03-24T11:41:39","date_gmt":"2015-03-24T15:41:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=203083"},"modified":"2023-08-22T11:45:55","modified_gmt":"2023-08-22T15:45:55","slug":"neag-professors-work-with-american-museum-of-natural-history-on-science-education-reform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2015\/03\/neag-professors-work-with-american-museum-of-natural-history-on-science-education-reform\/","title":{"rendered":"Neag Professors Work with American Museum of Natural History on Science Education Reform"},"content":{"rendered":"

Neag School of Education faculty members Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead and Suzanne M. Wilson are working with scientists, science educators, and teacher leaders at the American Museum of Natural History and other partners to raise the quality of science education in the U.S. and meet Next Generation of Science Standards.<\/p>\n

Developed by the National Academy of Science\u2019s National Research Council, the Next Generation of Science Standards outline the performance expectations, disciplinary core ideas, scientific practices, and crosscutting concepts that all kindergartners through 12th-graders should know. To help assess progress in meeting them, UConn researchers are partnering with the Gottesman Center for Science Teaching and Learning at the American Museum of Natural History and the University of California Berkeley\u2019s Lawrence Hall of Science to develop both a middle school ecology curriculum and the professional development framework needed to teach that curriculum effectively.<\/p>\n

Documenting What Students \u2013 and Teachers \u2013 Learn<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Suzanne<\/a>
Suzanne Wilson (on the right), who is also heading up Neag\u2019s new faculty mentoring efforts, discusses the project with Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead. (Photo credit: Shawn Kornegay, Neag School)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Wilson, previous to joining Neag as Endowed Professor of Teacher Education, had served for five years at Michigan State, where she took part in a project that laid the foundations for the current work, \u201cLearning Science as Inquiry with the Urban Advantage.\u201d Today, she and Montrosse-Moorhead are focused on investigating the effects professional development has on teachers\u2019 knowledge and practice. To do this, the two, along with a team of Neag graduate student research assistants, have developed a system that will document what teachers as well as students learn from a set of curricular materials, which focus on the real-life and harmful invasion of zebra mussels in the Hudson River.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t just put teaching materials into teachers\u2019 hands and expect them to figure it out.\u201d<\/h3>\n

\u2014Neag Endowed Professor of Teacher Education Suzanne Wilson<\/em><\/h3>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t just put teaching materials into teachers\u2019 hands and expect them to figure it out,\u201d says Suzanne Wilson, Neag Endowed Professor of Teacher Education. \u201cTeachers need to learn and fully understand that material they\u2019re teaching, and that means they need to engage with the materials themselves. They also need to understand options for how to best teach the material to their students.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cScience education reform,\u201d Wilson says, \u201chas traditionally been a tough nut to crack. But if we can get teachers immersed in, and excited about, scientific inquiry, they can get kids excited about it, too. It\u2019s important to remember that not all middle school teachers are science experts. Many teach more than one subject, or are elementary teachers who\u2019ve moved up to the middle school-level and are finding their way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Bianca<\/a>
Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead, who was named the 2014 Marcia Guttentag Promising New Evaluator with the American Evaluation Association, shares her ideas on the data collection process. (Photo credit: Shawn Kornegay, Neag School)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Developing tools to evaluate teacher professional development efforts is key, says Montrosse-Moorhead, Neag School assistant professor of measurement, evaluation and assessment.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the whole, despite growing agreement around best practices for professional development, rigorous studies that test these practices produce mixed results,\u201d she says. \u201cWe still do not know enough about how to provide professional development that produces long-term, sustained results for teachers and their students across the wide variety of contexts in which science is taught. It\u2019s exciting to be part of and contribute to this national conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Potential to Expand<\/strong><\/p>\n

If successful, Wilson and Montrosse-Moorhead\u2019s measurement tools could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of similar future professional development efforts and help advance national science education overall. Their work is a component of a larger four-year, $3 million National Science Foundation grant that made the total project possible.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the hopes of all involved,\u201d Wilson says, \u201cis for the curricular materials to expand beyond its current use in New York City public middle schools, and that it be taught first to teachers, and then to students, throughout the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur collective goal is to develop engaging curriculum materials, high-quality professional development that supports teachers learning how to teach those materials in their classrooms, and authentic measures that can assess both teacher and student learning,\u201d Wilson says. \u201cLike the scientific inquiry being done by students during the unit, developing a system to evaluate the unit\u2019s effectiveness can be messy. There\u2019s no one formula involved. It\u2019s been a process of discovery, and we\u2019ve all learned a lot. We\u2019re hoping this project helps advance science education in meaningful ways for teachers and their students.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Neag School of Education faculty members Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead and Suzanne M. Wilson are working with scientists, science educators, and teacher leaders at the American Museum of Natural History and other partners to raise the quality of science education in the U.S. and meet Next Generation of Science Standards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":203084,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2424,1855],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2455],"class_list":["post-203083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-neag-community-engagement","category-neag"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 06:31:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203083"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":203085,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203083\/revisions\/203085"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/203084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203083"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=203083"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=203083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}