The department of science education at Cal State Long Beach was recently awarded a four-year $950,694 grant to study science teaching methods at the kindergarten through second grade levels.
The grant, which comes from the California Postsecondary Education Committee (CPEC), is part of the federal Improving Teacher Quality program funded by the No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2001.
Susan Gomez-Zwiep and William Straits, assistant professors for the department of science education, are working together on research that will examine qualitative and quantitative aspects of the grant program’s effect on student achievement in science, as well as teacher growth.
The department of science education will partner with the Montebello and Garvey school districts in Los Angeles County and the K-12 Alliance, a statewide professional development organization, to form the K-12 Teaching Learning Collaborative.
Over the next three years, the grant will fund 42 teachers from this group to form small lesson study teams during summer sessions and continuing through the school years. This will allow teachers to tie what they learned in the summer to their classroom practices during the academic year.
According to Gomez-Zwiep, lesson study teams will meet six times throughout the school year to collaboratively plan a lesson, teach it, discuss the results, revise instructional methods if necessary, and then teach the lesson again with revisions. Selected educators at each school site will also be appointed as program facilitators to provide direction and support for teachers.
Study teams will focus primarily on improving the methods of teaching science to students who do not speak English as their first language. During the summer institutes, Gomez-Zwiep and Straits will collaborate with the school districts to train teachers in English language development (ELD) and specially designed academic instruction in English (SDAIE).
“The two main focuses of the grant are science instruction and getting kids to be more fluent with [English],” Gomez-Zwiep said. “Kids are learning science and improving their language skills while they do it.”
In the state of California, science is not tested below the fifth-grade level. As a result, the state has chosen to only fund science instruction in fourth- through eighth-grade classrooms. The study, they hope, will show ways to improve science instruction in kindergarten through second grade classrooms and help children to learn critical thinking and language skills at a younger age.
As part of the grant, Gomez-Zwiep and Straits will create their own science exams for students in the lower grade levels. The quantitative portion of the program will then look at these test scores in addition to ELD and language arts exam scores to measure students’ achievement in science. Students whose teachers participate in the program will be compared to those in regular classrooms on their test scores throughout the duration of the study.
The qualitative part of the study will involve a more in-depth look at teachers’ growth during the program by asking them for feedback regarding their classes and methods of science instruction.
“The science portion is that you improve [teachers’] content knowledge,” Gomez-Zwiep said. “It’s not uncommon for elementary teachers to feel uncomfortable about teaching science.”
Because the program focuses directly on the teachers rather than the students, the grant will provide teachers with specific content at an adult level regarding the concepts they are responsible to teach.
The classroom portion of the program will run for the first three years of the grant study. The fourth year will only be for research purposes, at which point Gomez-Zwiep and Straits will have time to gather and finalize their data before publishing and presenting it to the education community.
“It’s been a tough road for K- through third-grade teachers because there’s been no funding for them for science for years,” Gomez-Zwiep said. “That’s unfortunate because it’s really difficult to get kids thinking critically when they’re that little because they don’t have a lot of language yet, but you can get them to do it with science because they’re curious.”
