NSF funds teacher development research at UD

Steven J. Fifield, education specialist at the Delaware Education Research and Development Center, Danielle J. Ford, associate professor of education, and Deborah E. Allen, UD associate professor of biological sciences and principal investigator for the project

2:16 p.m., Oct. 7, 2005--The University of Delaware has been awarded a five-year, $2.2 million grant by the National Science Foundation to study the development of elementary and middle school teachers during the transition from college into the classroom.

The funding will be used to examine changes in the teachers’ understanding of science and education over the course of the five-year period, according to Deborah E. Allen, UD associate professor of biological sciences and principal investigator for the project.

Co-investigators on the project are Danielle J. Ford, associate professor of education; John A. Madsen, associate professor of geology; Richard S. Donham, associate policy scientist at the Mathematics and Science Education Resource Center; Steven J. Fifield, education specialist at the Delaware Education Research and Development Center; and Harry L. Shipman, Annie Jump Cannon Chair of Physics and Astronomy.

Research will focus on UD’s reform-based curriculum for undergraduate elementary education majors, a group of inquiry-based science and education courses intended to help teacher education majors reshape their understanding of learning.

A key goal of the curriculum is to help teachers change from a view that centers on learning as simply the transmission of knowledge through lectures and drills to one that focuses on the creation of knowledge through inquiry-based projects.

The purpose of this grant is to use a cross-disciplinary team of UD faculty, teachers from kindergarten through grade 12, graduate students and undergraduate students to study the effects of this innovative curriculum on the students who go through it.

“Over the past decade, UD has become really quite good at problem-based learning,” Shipman said. “We want to study future teachers’ development as they pass through the stage of being students to the stage of being beginning teachers.”

Harry L. Shipman, Annie Jump Cannon Chair of Physics and Astronomy, Zoubeida Ramez Dagher, associate professor of education, Xiaoyu Qian, a doctoral precandidate in the School of Education, and Richard S. Donham, associate policy scientist at the Mathematics and Science Education Resource Center at UD

Existing efforts such as the Science Semester, an integrated, team-taught curricular unit consisting of several science and science methods courses, have incorporated UD’s internationally renowned expertise in problem-based learning and related pedagogies into the science training of elementary education majors.

Some recent modifications in the curriculum were made because of requirements in the federal No Child Left Behind educational act that requires all teachers to be rated highly qualified upon graduation. Education students, even those planning to teach in elementary and middle schools, can satisfy this requirement by declaring a subject matter concentration.

In this project, researchers will work with those education students who elect a science concentration.

“What is unique is that NSF is providing funds not to create new programming but to do educational research on an existing program,” Allen said.

Researchers, working in conjunction with the UD School of Education and with school districts in the state, will document what happens throughout the period.

Allen said the substantial and highly competitive grant was awarded, in part, because UD has a strong problem-based learning program in place for students and its School of Education “has a fine reputation,” as evidenced by the recent accreditation review by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), which found the teacher education programs among the finest in the country.

Article by Neil Thomas
Photos by Duane Perry

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