Scaffolding Teacher Learning in Support of Student Inquiry

这个为期3年的探索性资源和工具开发项目属于K-12学生和教师指导类别。该项目开发、试点和实施在线专业发展，以支持探究，重点是促进学生的研究。目标是确定哪种基于网络的经验和资源最有效地支持中学教师克服使学生设计和进行自己的科学实验所固有的实质性障碍。该项目与纽约州教育部密切合作，为七年级和八年级教师创建并测试了一系列基于网络的专业发展体验。这些经验支持学生使用由美国国家科学基金会资助的康奈尔鸟类学实验室开发的BirdSleuth课程资源进行研究。BirdSleuth非常适合作为开发在线教师支持的试点项目，因为它旨在让学生参与真正的科学研究：进行观察，收集数据，提出自己的问题，通过研究和观察得出结论，并发布他们的结果。该项目致力于为脚手架教师创造有效和高效的技术，因为他们使用BirdSleuth来指导学生通过设计，实施，分析和呈现科学实验结果的各个阶段。项目结果为一套可持续的在线资源提供了基础，以满足全国鸟类侦探教师的需求。如果成功地提高教师在课堂上实施独立探究的能力，该项目也将成为其他STEM项目和学科在线专业发展的典范。

This 3-year, exploratory Development of Resources and Tools project falls under the Instruction of K-12 Students and Teachers category. The project develops, pilots, and implements online professional development in support of inquiry, focusing on facilitation of student research. The goal is to determine what types of web-based experiences and resources are most effectively support middle school teachers in overcoming the substantial hurdles inherent in enabling students to design and conduct their own scientific experiments. Working closely with the New York State Department of Education, the project creates and tests a series of web-based professional development experiences for 7th and 8th grade teachers. The experiences support implementation of research by students using BirdSleuth curriculum resources developed with NSF funding by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.BirdSleuth is well suited as a pilot project for developing online teacher support because it is designed to engage students in authentic scientific research: making observations, collecting data, asking their own questions, drawing conclusions through research and observation, and publishing their results. This project endeavors to create effective and efficient techniques for scaffolding teachers as they use BirdSleuth to guide students through the various stages of designing, conducting, analyzing, and presenting the results of scientific experiments. Project findings provide the basis for a sustainable set of online resources to serve the needs of BirdSleuth teachers nationwide. If successful at improving the ability of teachers to implement independent inquiry in their classrooms, the project also will serve as a model for online professional development in other STEM projects and disciplines.