- Year 2019
- NSF Noyce Award # 934715
- First Name Isi
- Last Name Ero-Tolliver
- Discipline Biology, Chemistry, Math
- Co-PI(s)
Clair Berube, Francis Erebholo, Cindy Thomas-Charles, Jermel Watkins
- Presenters
Isi Ero-Tolliver, Hampton University, Isi.Erotolliver@hamptonu.edu; Clair Berube, Hampton University, Clair.Berube@hamptonu.edu
Need
The need for research design literacy by pre-service STEM teachers is to assist them in conducting interdisciplinary research once they are in classrooms. It fulfills the need for pre-service teachers to start thinking of collaborative efforts in best practices across disciplines that will engage their students and make more opportunities for STEM students to become scientifically literate. There is a gap in research about ways of introducing peer-reviewed articles and research methods to pre-service STEM teachers in order to benefit diverse, STEM students in urban high need areas. If teachers can conduct classroom level research, and in turn teach their students the basics of educational research, their students will become more scientifically literate.
Goals
The overarching goal of this project is to design research design modules that incorporate multiple disciplines in problem-solving, while filling a gap that pre-service teachers may have about research designing opportunities in their own classrooms, through dissection of peer-reviewed articles, research design instruction and , the creation of classroom level quasi experiments or correlational designs for their STEM students in order to determine best practices.
Approach
Our approach is to work with our pre-service teacher STEM education students during the Fall 2019 semester to teach quasi-experimental and correlational research design strategies. This will include introduci peer-reviewed articles to their students, how to strategically distill important findings from scientific papers, how to design and understand tables and graphs, how to apply t tests and correlational tests, and to support scientific arguments with data. Our team of biologists, mathematicians and science educators will work with pre-service STEM teachers.
Outcomes
The outcome will be that the pre-service STEM teachers will create a viable quasi-experimental or correlational design to be implemented in a STEM classroom during their clinical experience. They will also be responsible for creating a lesson plan that will teach the concepts they learned in research design to their students.
Broader Impacts
The broader impact of this project is to assist our pre-service teachers in creating lessons and fostering environments within their classroom that introduce scientific and research literacy in positive and collaborative ways. We anticipate that students and teachers will benefit from these lessons and the anxiety and lack of scientific literacy of science in the classroom may be minimized.
