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Our NSF IUSE project, EQUIPS (Enhancing the Quality of Undergraduate Investigations in Physical Science), is investigating the impact of an integrated Chemistry/Physics inquiry laboratory program for K-8 pre-service teachers. In particular, we are investigating pre-service teachers' explanations of physical science phenomena, the types of scientific investigations they design, and the integration of laboratory course work into their future teaching. 

We would love to hear your questions/constructive comments about our project so please share. What were your experiences of doing science in school?  How could we address such experiences in our laboratory structure? What other experiences do you think could inform our work?

Please see our video from last year to hear about researcher and instructor perspectives on EQUIPS.

Thank you for sharing your video! I look forward to the discussion--one quick question: How were students recruited to the program? Are they already students in the sciences?

Sara, thank you for your comment. Below are responses to your questions.

Students represent future elementary teachers enrolled in a Liberal Arts degree program that requires four science courses. Students enroll in a Physical Science lecture course and then students are placed into an appropriate laboratory class. The scope of our project focuses on providing future teachers contextualized and integrated opportunities to learn about aspects of scientific phenomena. So if students enroll into a lecture course taught by an instructor with a physics background they are then placed into a laboratory section taught by an instructor with a chemistry background (vice versa). The intent of this design is to support students' development of both Chemistry and Physics ideas without placing emphasis on one specific discipline.

Typically, the students enter the course with very limited experience and background with science. We take this into consideration with the laboratory design by providing students three weeks of a preparation period in which students have the opportunity to acquire foundational skills needed in order to design experiments that allow sense-making of phenomena later throughout the course.  

Thank you!

I think it's great that you are giving K-8 pre-service teacher education students these hands on experiences--you say they have 4 science courses as part of their required curriculum--is only one like this one, or do they get a sequence of experiential science courses?  Are you aligning the curriculum to the NGSS?  and helping them see the connections to framework:  practice, core disciplinary ideas, cross-cutting concepts?

Are you linking the science experiments to mathematics?  Typically, K-8 teachers who have little STEM experiences, also need some engaging mathematics courses, also.  Is this project integrated with language arts in any way--do the students do reports, or keep journals? it seems like such a rich experience for them--it would be great to get some additional spin-off benefit.

thanks for sharing!

Nancy, thank you for your comment and great questions. 

1. This Physical Science course is the only one of its kind. It stands unique from the other classes future teachers are required to take as this course provides students opportunities to engage in authentic science experiences in a laboratory setting and is specifically designed for future elementary teachers. Currently, the other science courses are either not specifically designed for future teachers or do not provide future teachers the opportunity to learn in a laboratory setting. I suppose it would be a good idea to redesign the other courses with a similar structure, given our findings that many students appreciate the opportunities to collaborate with other future teachers when designing and conducting experiments. 

2. Yes, the laboratory is specifically designed to support implementation of the NGSS. After each experiment is conducted future teachers are encouraged to reflect on how activities conducted within the laboratory align with the NGSS. Furthermore, they are required to give an example of how they may implement a similar activity in future classrooms and justify why and how it aligns with the NGSS. 

3. The focus of the laboratory is to develop future teachers' scientific understanding of concepts seen in real world phenomena. However, students are provided ample opportunities within each laboratory to think about how mathematics connects with the observations they experience in each laboratory class. Many of the concepts explored within the laboratory require calculations. For example, we have a laboratory designed to explore the differences in between pressure on a surface and pressure within a container. Within this experiment students have opportunities to explore Boyle's Law and gain an understanding of the inverse relationship between volume and pressure with the collected data from their designed experiments. 

4. They do record data in laboratory notebooks and then submit pre-laboratory and post-laboratory submissions which take into account students' ability to coherently state what it is they want to explore in the laboratory. 

Thank You!

HI Dermot and collaborators,

What a terrific project. I love the comments--and the excitement is palatable. How did you design the experiments? Are there supports to help students connect ideas?

Keep up the good work,

Marcia

The student centered aspect of the presentation is always highly valued.

Thank you for sharing this video. I agree that finding ways for students to feel invested is of critical importance. Thank you for the inclusion of student testimonials. It truly adds the richness of this project. I believe hat learning how concepts can apply in various ways and the ability to learn form peers makes this an especially fruitful experience for students. Very well done.

Regarding the future elementary teachers enrolled in a Liberal Arts degree program who participate in this program, are you able to track where students are employed after completion of their degree. Are they working in districts that serve underserved populations?

Thanks for creating this excellent video. It is great to see pre-service elementary teachers getting experience designing laboratory activities and figuring out how they work. I noticed in one of the student testimonials that the student is talking about how she sees her role as a teacher to be explaining the science to students so that they can understand it. I'm wondering how do you attend to helping the pre-service teachers in your courses make the transition from developing identities as teachers who know science and can explain it to others into teachers who (like you are doing with these pre-service teachers) provide their students with valuable and productive opportunities to do their own sense-making?

The sense of self-efficacy that these future teachers gain as a result of their creative approaches and testing is so important for them to be confident teachers and for them also to know how to give their future students hands-on science activities.  Question: are the materials and questions ones that their future elemantary students are likely to have available?  We all like the idea of "hands-on" experience in science; it's not always followed up in the school systems with adequate funding for materials or "room in the curriculum" for the slower pace of "content" that learning science process entails. 

I'm excited to see pre-service elementary teachers engage in understanding science concepts. From the years I worked as a science specialist, I found that many K-5 teachers wanted to incorporate more science in their classroom but often hesitated because they were uncertain of how to explain the science. This is a great way to support the development of a teacher's science identity.

This is great opportunity for hands-on, contextualized and collaborative learning for pre-service teachers.  Is this an exploratory project, or is there a theoretical framework underlying the course development?   It's great that you have their laboratory notebooks - are there outcomes that you are looking for in their notebooks to evaluate progress/efficacy?  

Thank you for your comment Michael.  We have been guided by the constructivist knowledge integration framework (Linn & Eylon, 2011), guided-inquiry features (Blanchard et al., 2011), and power relations framework (Donnelly et al., 2014), for designing pre/post open-response assessments for the course and informing the design of the laboratories. We are also conscious of alignment with the SEPs of NGSS.

We have lots of data on laboratory submissions from students (five semesters worth), but it is not something we have got around to analyzing in detail yet.  Hopefully this summer!  We will be looking for progression in hypothesis generation, as our laboratory instructors often explain it is something the students can find challenging and that requires a lot of exemplification throughout the semester.

Something tentative that has been interesting from the laboratory notebooks is that in earlier semesters, many students were drawing on resources such as Pinterest and Youtube for inspiration of what to investigate. They can still do that, but we've now required students to include at least three practitioner journals to better inform the types of investigations they would like to conduct and the types of concepts that would be relevant to consider.

Very interesting work - that hopefully translates into more inquiry and confidence in science in the classroom. You mentioned in an earlier response that you have discussions that focus on argumentation. Do you do any assessment of their argumentation and other science practices? This is an important component of modeling how instructors can value more than just the content explanations.

Very interesting video!  This seems very similar to the video from the High School Research Initiative, in that students are learning about scientific concepts through inquiry.

Is this course currently only offered at Fresno State, or are any other California schools replicating it for their teacher programs?

Thanks for a palpable example of promoting meaningful student agency - nice work!