CAREER: Teacher Knowledge, Beliefs, & Technology: Constructing Models of Change in Systemic Reform

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This proposal describes a program of research to explore the relationshipbetween the knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes held by middle school scienceteachers with respect to inquiry-based science with embedded learningtechnologies and their classroom practices with those technologies. At itsheart, this research is about the study of teacher change. The teacherswho will participate in this work are part of a large-scale systemic changeinitiative in the Detroit Public Schools, conducted jointly by theNSF-sponsored Detroit Urban Systemic Initiative (DUSI) and the Center forLearning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS). In that context, theteachers are all learning how to teach with new curriculum materials andtechnology, and they receive a broad range of professional development tosupport them in this learning.To become successful with inquiry-based and technology-enhanced curricula,teachers will need to learn new science content (content knowledge); theywill need to learn new methods for organizing their classroom (pedagogicalknowledge); and they will need to learn new techniques for teachingparticular kinds of content, such as the use of modeling tools to helpstudents construct an understanding of how burning coal from factoriescombines with air to create acid rain that impacts the environment(pedagogical content knowledge). Teachers' attitudes toward technologyneed to change, and their beliefs in their own self-efficacy withtechnology and new science material needs to improve. DUSI and LeTUSattempt to help teachers change along these dimensions through activitiesthat include cognitive (providing evidence for the feasibility and benefitsof using new approaches), social (learning and sharing with colleagues),and contextual (providing evidence for the support of the system)mechanisms for change. There is little understanding at the present timeas to how these aspects of change work either separately or together tofoster the use of technology in science teaching.The main questions that this research asks are:1) What are teachers' knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes with respect toteaching science with technology, and how do they change over time?2) What are teachers' classroom practices with respect to technology, andhow do they change over time?3) What is the relationship between teachers' knowledge, beliefs, andattitudes and their classroom teaching practices with technology, and howdoes this change over time?4) How do professional development activities influence changes inteachers' knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and practice over time, and howmight those activities be re-designed to foster desired changes?This research is designed to complement a program of instruction in theEducational Technology program at the University of Michigan. Students inthis program will approach the study of technology in K-12 settings fromthe perspective of teachers' technology use and cognition. The researchalso serves and as a setting for graduate students to conduct their owninvestigations.There are immediate practical benefits of this work for teachers inDetroit, where the results of the research will be used to re-shapeprofessional development activities to more directly address their needs inreform.