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

该项目是一项探索性研究，旨在调查专业发展计划对中学科学教师制定符合当前科学技术教育标准的教学策略、学习技术和材料的能力的影响。专业发展方案是根据教师教育文献中的最佳做法制定的，并由南卡罗来纳州为暑期学校和教师后续活动单独提供资金。这项为期三年的项目涉及三组教师，每组36名，他们都接受了专业发展。专业发展包括增加参与教师的科学知识，以及让他们有机会使用他们将与学生一起使用的课程材料。这些课程材料都是基于创新的科学材料，这些材料是在以前的研究和开发活动的基础上开发的。该研究项目基于教师对专业发展的参与来衡量教师和学生的各种结果。测量的领域包括：教师对科学内容的理解、教师对建构主义学习环境的看法的性质、对教师教学策略的观察以及学生的科学内容学习。研究设计采用前测/后测设计，两次重复，使用不同的教师群。

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.