T58 Beginning a New Era in Earth Science Education: The Role of Geoscience in Implementing the Next Generation Science Standards

Sunday, 1 November 2015
1:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Room 321

ADAPTING AN EFFECTIVE MATH SCIENCE PARTNERSHIP TO SUPPORT THE NGSS

Paper number: T58-16
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 5:15 PM – 5:30 PM

Authors

Abstract

The adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (Achieve, 2014) in most states provides the earth and space sciences (ESS) with a rare chance to increase its presence in K-12 classes, and as such challenges the geoscience community to develop strategies for accomplishing that (Kumar, 2013; Wysession, 2014; LaDue & Manning, 2015). The Rhode Island Technology Enhanced Science (RITES) Partnership – a peer collaboration between school districts and public higher ed institutions – has provided inquiry-rich, online investigations and PD to the majority of the state's middle and high school science teachers since 2008, and is currently realigning our ESS-centric PD, investigations and assessment tools to be compliant with the NGSS. RITES uses a partnership-centered approach to design and deliver PD to participating teachers across the state. At the heart of this model are multiple ways for teachers, scientists from higher ed and businesses and project staff to collaborate on PD learning opportunities. The scientists and lead teachers who collaborated on our "resource teams” to design the investigations, assessments and PD experiences valued the learning process (Knowlton et al, 2015). Teachers and scientists reported a high level of satisfaction (81-100%); teachers reported significant learning in about 90% of our courses. Moreover, students of RITES teachers demonstrate statistically significant gains in inquiry skills on state standardized tests.

In this session we will discuss strategies for adapting our model to support teachers who are transitioning to the NGSS. Our efforts were facilitated by having most of the members of the RI Leadership Board, a group of K-20 educators responsible for the early adoption of the NGSS statewide affiliated with RITES, assuring a strong voice in support of RITES ESS-rich PD. A second current focus is to incorporate computational thinking (Wing, 2006) into our Geosciences activities. We will describe our current efforts to determine how best to include lead teachers, higher education faculty and participating classroom teachers in discussions about the meaning of the NGSS standards and how best to foster students' computational thinking through the design of our next generation of investigations.