Three
research and development projects funded by the National Science
Foundation’s (NSF) Math and Science Partnership (MSP) program are
developing instruments to assess growth in the mathematics or science
knowledge necessary for teaching, especially in the context of
teacher professional development. Without such assessments,
professional development providers typically resort to measures in
which they have much less confidence, often a project-created
assessment or teacher self-report. By using the new instruments,
validated on a national scale with strong attention to psychometric
properties, it is expected that professional developers and their
evaluators will better learn how to improve teachers' mathematical
and science knowledge for teaching.
For
example, Assessing Teacher
Learning About Science Teaching (ATLAST) is
developing instruments that measure change in the knowledge needed by
middle school teachers to teach three topics of science: force and
motion, plate tectonics, and flow of matter and energy. ATLAST
provides assessment materials, scoring, and reporting as part of its
technical assistance. Thirteen projects currently use one or
more of the ATLAST teacher assessments to gauge impacts of their
professional development activities. Ten of the projects are
Math and Science Partnerships, funded either by NSF or by the U.S.
Department of Education through its block grants to the states. At
this time, most projects are using the assessments in a
pre-test/post-test, treatment-group-only design and analysis that
consists of a comparison of pre- and post-test mean and calculation
of effect size. One project, however, was able to do a
comparison study with a group of peer, volunteer teachers. In
this quasi-experimental design, both groups take the pre- and
post-test. The analysis will compare post-test scores of the two
groups, controlling for their pre-test scores.
Misconception
Oriented Standards-based Assessment Resource for Teachers
(MOSART) has developed science content instruments based on
the National Research Council's National
Science Education Standards and on the research
literature on students' science misconceptions. The assessments
focus on K-12 physical science and earth science and were originally
designed for evaluation of NSF-funded MSP professional development
programs' impact on participating teachers and their students. To
more broadly disseminate its work, MOSART developed a free, open Web
site (http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/smgphp/mosart/index.html)
that provides versions of its tests to any interested party,
including an online tutorial that explains how the tests were
developed and their intended uses. MOSART has recently begun to
share its expertise with some of the MSPs funded by the U.S.
Department of Education through the states. For example, MOSART
directly supports the entire Georgia effort, following a wide ranging
search by the Georgia Department of Education’s MSP Program for
instruments to measure the efficacy of professional development, with
respect to science content. Since October 2006, all new
proposals to the Georgia MSP Program that involve physical science
and earth science are required to show how they will use MOSART
instruments in the assessment of their professional development.
The
Design, Validation and
Dissemination of Measures of Content Knowledge for Teaching
Mathematics project began its work by designing
assessment items for the teaching of mathematics in upper elementary
schools. Over the past year, the project has continued to
develop and disseminate measures -- there are now approximately 300
items across the content areas of number, operations, pre-algebra and
algebra, and geometry. As the work has expanded more
significantly into middle school mathematics, it has become clear
that teachers need to pay attention not only to the mathematical
accuracy of definitions, but also to which definitions are
age-appropriate for middle-grade students. Many textbooks,
resources and professional development courses offer definitions that
are either too technically complex, on the one hand, or leave out key
elements in an attempt to make definitions accessible to students.
Teachers may select from existing definitions or develop their own,
but all face the task of balancing mathematical accuracy with
comprehensibility to students. Increasing the item pool has also
resulted in new and/or better assessments with which users can
evaluate professional development or answer research questions. To
date, the project has disseminated these measures to approximately
eighty projects, including 10 NSF MSPs and numerous U.S. Department
of Education MSPs.
