Professional Development Threading Content, Pedagogy and Curriculum: A Study of Classroom Impact

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The project is an exploratory research study that investigates the impact of a professional development program on middle school science teachers' ability to enact pedagogical strategies, learning technologies and materials that align with the current science and technology education standards. The professional development program has been developed based upon best practices from the teacher education literature and has separate funding from the State of South Carolina for summer institutes and follow-up activities with teachers. The three-year project involves three cohorts of 36 teachers each, all of which receive the professional development. The professional development involves increasing the science content knowledge of the participating teachers as well as giving them opportunities to use curricular materials that they will use with their students. The curricular materials are all based on innovative science materials that have been developed based upon previous research and development activities. The research project measures a variety of teacher and student outcomes based upon the teachers' participation in the professional development. Areas measured include: teacher's science content understanding, the nature of the teacher's perceptions of constructivist learning environments, observations of the teacher's pedagogical strategies and students' science content learning. The research design uses a pre-test/post-test design with two replications using different cohorts of teachers.