Collaborative Research: Focus on Energy: Preparing Elementary Teachers to Meet the NGSS Challenge

下一代科学标准(NGSS)确定了从小学开始学习能量的雄心勃勃的进步。为了帮助国家教师应对这一挑战，该项目将开发和调查Focus on Energy的机会和限制，这是一种面向小学教师(3-5年级)的专业发展(PD)系统。PD将包括：帮助教师解释、评估和培养学生对能源的看法的资源；帮助他们识别、跟踪和表现能量形式和流动的课堂活动；以及帮助他们让学生参与这些活动的支持。教师将获得他们所需的科学和教学内容知识，以便在所有科学课程中教授能源；学生将在智力上参与到开发、测试和修改他们可以用来描述学校和他们日常生活中的现象的能源模型的实践中；形成性评估将引导学生对能源的想法不断进步。这个项目将开发和测试一个可扩展的PD模式，将通过协调形成性评估、面对面和基于网络的PD活动来增强在职早期小学教师帮助学生学习能源概念的能力。研究人员将开发和反复改进工具来评估教师和学生的能量推理策略。该项目的目标包括(1)提高教师对表征和能量推理的熟练程度，并使其能够从能量的角度理解日常现象；(2)提高教师解释学生关于能量的表征和想法以做出教学决策的能力；以及(3)提高学生对表征和能量推理的使用，以开发和改进描述与日常现象相关的能量形式和流动的模型。这款基于网络的产品将包括：一套形成性评估，帮助教师根据小平面模型解读学生对能源的想法；一系列课堂测试活动，介绍能源跟踪透镜(使用多种表征探索能源概念的方法)；以及课堂范例和科学家在使用能源跟踪透镜时大声思考的视频。该项目将完善现有的PD，并建立一个支持在线执行的系统，方法是编写一份主持人指南，使网上社区可以由一名主持人运行。

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) identify an ambitious progression for learning energy, beginning in elementary school. To help the nation's teachers address this challenge, this project will develop and investigate the opportunities and limitations of Focus on Energy, a professional development (PD) system for elementary teachers (grades 3-5). The PD will contain: resources that will help teachers to interpret, evaluate and cultivate students' ideas about energy; classroom activities to help them to identify, track and represent energy forms and flows; and supports to help them in engaging students in these activities. Teachers will receive the science and pedagogical content knowledge they need to teach about energy in a crosscutting way across all their science curricula; students will be intellectually engaged in the practice of developing, testing, and revising a model of energy they can use to describe phenomena both in school and in their everyday lives; and formative assessment will guide the moment-by-moment advancement of students' ideas about energy.This project will develop and test a scalable model of PD that will enhance the ability of in-service early elementary teachers to help students learn energy concepts by coordinating formative assessment, face-to-face and web-based PD activities. Researchers will develop and iteratively refine tools to assess both teacher and student energy reasoning strategies. The goals of the project include (1) teachers' increased facility with, and disciplined application of, representations and energy reasoning to make sense of everyday phenomena in terms of energy; (2) teachers' increased ability to interpret student representations and ideas about energy to make instructional decisions; and (3) students' improved use of representations and energy reasoning to develop and refine models that describe energy forms and flows associated with everyday phenomena. The web-based product will contain: a set of formative assessments to help teachers to interpret student ideas about energy based on the Facets model; a series of classroom tested activities to introduce the Energy Tracking Lens (method to explore energy concept using multiple representations); and videos of classroom exemplars as well as scientists thinking out loud while using the Energy Tracking Lens. The project will refine the existing PD and build a system that supports online implementation by constructing a facilitator's guide so that the online community can run with one facilitator.