Investigating Effective STEM Teaching Through a Culturally Responsive Lens

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This project aims to serve the national need to understand the effectiveness of STEM teachers at high-need schools. Specifically, the project will analyze how culturally responsive science teaching is conducted in high-need school settings and how teacher preparation programs affect the real-world implementation of culturally responsive teaching practices. This study has the potential to increase understanding of how particular components of teacher preparation can promote teacher effectiveness in high-need schools. Thus, the results could be used to advance the goal of providing all students with qualified and effective STEM teachers.This project at the American Museum of Natural History includes partnerships with the State University of New York College at Cortland and Virginia Commonwealth University. All three partners have received Noyce funding. The project will use case studies to examine the ways in which culturally responsive pedagogy is incorporated into the respective Noyce programs and manifests itself in the teaching practices of program graduates. The project will construct two sets of case studies, the first of which will depict specific components of each partner’s Noyce program. The second set of case studies will detail the teaching practices of each Noyce programs’ graduates. The case studies will draw on the perspectives of multiple stakeholders (e.g., program graduates; their students, administrators, program faculty, and leadership; and school-based mentor teachers), and the project will conduct analyses across each set of studies. Due to the partners' diverse geographical locations, the study will attend to culturally responsive science teaching in high-need settings in both rural and urban areas. Throughout the project, two Noyce Scholar graduates from each partner institution will join the Research Team as co-researchers and contribute to all research efforts and case study development. Thus, teachers and teacher educators will work collaboratively to develop a cohesive understanding of how culturally responsive science teaching can be practiced in different classroom contexts, along with the role that program experiences may play in the development of Noyce graduates’ effectiveness. The major outcomes of this study will be rich descriptive case studies and analyses of Noyce graduates’ teaching practices in the light of culturally responsive science teaching as it relates to teacher effectiveness, along with characterizations of how these practices are reflective (or not) of graduates’ preparation experiences. Findings will be shared with the Noyce community as part of the project’s dissemination efforts to support Noyce programs as they develop plans for enhancing teacher effectiveness in high-need schools. These findings are designed to deepen the understanding of effective practice, including what it can look like and what preparation programs can do to support their teachers in learning how to implement it in flexible and context-dependent ways. Furthermore, findings from this study will be made available to researchers across the field, enabling them to draw from complex and nuanced understandings of teachers' practice and connections to teacher preparation, filling a current need in the field. Building on these findings will strengthen studies to further illuminate the connections among teacher effectiveness, persistence, and retention in high-need settings. This Track 4: Noyce Research project is supported through the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program (Noyce). The Noyce program supports talented STEM undergraduate majors and professionals to become effective K-12 STEM teachers and experienced, exemplary K-12 STEM teachers to become STEM master teachers in high-need school districts. It also supports research on the persistence, retention, and effectiveness of K-12 STEM teachers in high-need school districts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.