- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 2050071
- First Name Joel
- Last Name Donna
- Institution UW River Falls
- Role/Position Co-PI
- Proposal Type Lightning Talk
- Workshop Category Track 4: Noyce Research
- Workshop Disciplines Audience STEM Education (general)
- Target Audience Co-PIs, Evaluators/Education Researchers, Noyce Master Teachers, Noyce Teaching Fellows, Other Faculty/Staff, Project PIs, Undergraduate and/or Graduate Noyce Scholars
- Topics Developing self-identity, Recruiting with Retention in Mind
- Additional Presenter(s)
Brant Miller (bgmiller@uidaho.edu)
Proposal
Internationally, there have been significant investments in helping teachers learn how to teach science literacy using reform-based approaches. Yet there has been limited attention on how teachers’ goals for developing science literacy influence their teaching. In many teacher education courses or professional development settings, we may jump to the how-to teach science without first engaging our participants in better understanding their motivations for teaching science which may help better motivate instructional reforms. By better understanding the “whys” behind teachers’ reasoning for developing science-literate students, we can better understand the motivations for how teachers teach. We can also then develop marketing materials to recruit future science teachers tied to their core motivations. We have developed an instrument to help researchers, marketers, science education leaders, and teachers themselves better understand the purposes of teaching science. A pilot study with 86 participants was conducted. From this study, Aesthetic Appeal (AA) prompts related to better understanding and appreciation of their student’s world and the Personal and Moral Development (PMD) prompts were both the top choices for future elementary/middle school teachers. Engagement with phenomena (either as a motivation to understand the world or the use of science to understand phenomena) was a top choice. A separate study indicated that the beliefs did not change significantly before a
