Building Coherence in STEM Learning Opportunities for Pre-Service Elementary Teachers across Disciplinary Boundaries

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This project will address a fundamental challenge in STEM teacher education. While growing evidence shows that elementary teachers play a central role in shaping their students' learning, interests, motivations, and persistence in STEM fields, teachers face many challenges including underdeveloped content knowledge, feelings of being underprepared and anxious about teaching STEM, and a limited number of content and methods courses during their teacher preparation program. Research on teacher education has repeatedly documented challenges with a lack of coherence and fragmentation in teacher education programs that further exacerbates these problems. In recent years, reforms in both mathematics and science education (Common Core State Standards for Mathematics--CCSSM and the Next Generation Science Standards--NGSS) have foregrounded and explicitly called for coherence across STEM disciplines. This challenge is further compounded by the fact that STEM coursework spans different disciplines and departments (e.g., education, science, and mathematics). Prior efforts to organize teacher education around a common vision have typically focused on building coherence in an entire program, in a single discipline, or at a large scale across institutions. This Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) project in the Engaged Student Learning track seeks to build intellectual coherence in STEM learning opportunities for elementary pre-service teachers (PSTs) across a set of eight redesigned mathematics and science content courses and mathematics, science, and technology methods courses. This project will advance understanding of how undergraduate elementary PSTs learn STEM content knowledge, instructional practices for teaching STEM, and attention to equity and justice in a coherent and connected approach. This project will involve a working group of faculty from the College of Education and the College of Science at the University of Utah, who will collaboratively redesign and implement all STEM content and methods courses for elementary teachers with a goal of building coherence for elementary PSTs. This project, with funding from the IUSE program and the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship program, will produce results that will contribute to an opening up of the focus on disciplinary connections between STEM fields in a coherent and rigorous model of elementary teacher preparation for providing success for all elementary students in STEM learning. This project aims to deliberately leverage connections across STEM fields to build coherent and rigorous preparation in content and methods courses across disciplines and colleges. A focus on two key disciplinary connections (representations and arguments) that are situated as central knowledge generation opportunities in classrooms and align with current mathematics and science reforms, will function as key pillars. This project will build STEM disciplinary coherence in elementary teacher education to support the development of ambitious instruction, which is intellectually ambitious with respect to STEM learning goals for elementary children and socially ambitious with respect to serving all students across ethnic, racial, socioeconomic status, linguistic, and gender groups. Ambitious STEM instruction supports all students in developing conceptual understanding of big ideas in mathematics and science, solving complex problems, and engaging in authentic disciplinary practices such as those set out in the CCSSM (e.g., making sense of problems and persevering in solving them) and the NGSS (e.g., engaging in argument from evidence). This design-based research project will test, refine, and improve specific conjectures about the elementary PSTs' learning of content and instruction in the context of eight redesigned and implemented courses, which will impact approximately 200 elementary teachers and their subsequent K-12 students over the project's lifetime. Specifically, this project will address: (1) how a coherent vision of ambitious STEM instruction through a focus on representations and arguments affords productive STEM learning opportunities for elementary PSTs, and (2) how experiencing and learning to enact a coherent vision of ambitious STEM instruction through a focus on representations and arguments influence elementary PSTs' (a) content knowledge for teaching STEM, (b) skill with instructional practices for ambitious STEM teaching, and (c) principles and dispositions around equity and justice in STEM instruction. The results of this project will advance knowledge by contributing to: (1) the growing literature on how to foster PSTs' learning of STEM content knowledge, instructional practices for teaching STEM, and principles and dispositions around equity and justice in STEM instruction; (2) opening up a focus on disciplinary connections between STEM fields in a coherent and rigorous model of elementary PST preparation in ways that may strengthen PST learning opportunities around STEM content and teaching; and (3) a two-pronged roadmap for how to build disciplinary coherence in STEM PST programs.