Beginning Science Teachers in Action: Investigating Mis/Connections Between Preservice Content and Classroom Instruction

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The is a Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) proposal to conduct research on how beginning teachers of secondary school science practice the teaching of science. The investigator, an assistant professor in the school of education at UCSB who teaches science education classes, proposes that her own teaching practices be an object of investigation. The project would study the experiences of students in the science education program at the University of California, Santa Barbara who had taken her course in science education to see how they translate the course materials into teaching practices. One intent of this project is to provide rich textual descriptions of science instruction. It will use a "design experiment" methodology and thereby provide a valuable example, and evaluation, of that method as an way to intervene in science teacher education. This proposal was submitted as a SGER because the exploratory nature of conducting research on teaching by studying the teaching of one's self, as a means of scientific discovery, generates some negative reaction by reviewers. However, the research method proposed here is also accepted and adopted by other researchers as a ground-breaking way of investigating difficult subjects such as the relationship between teaching and learning. It follows a method used by Maggie Lampert at the University of Michigan to study herself prepare mathematics classroom and her research has been widely cited as a model of research into good teaching practices. Such methods have not been employed at the college level of teaching however, and this project offers the possibility of new insight into how to improve teaching of young new teachers.