Curriculum Development as a Mechanism for Changing Science Faculty Knowledge and Beliefs About Teaching and Learning
The exploratory work was undertaken by participants in a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Math and Science Partnership. The study includes twenty-nine disciplinary science faculty from five higher education institutions. The project is managed by a regional comprehensive university (RCU) which is the state's largest producer of new teachers. At this RCU, scientists from departments of biology, geology, chemistry, and physics are also faculty members in the Science Education Group and they are actively engaged in research and teaching in their disciplines and science education. One-half of their time is dedicated to their work in science education where they are responsible for teaching courses at the undergraduate and graduate level, including the elementary and secondary science teaching methods courses, supervision of science teaching field experiences for all preservice teachers, and supervision of student teaching for all future secondary science teachers. The partnership brought the RCU science education faculty together with the science faculty from neighboring community colleges based on geographic proximity to the RCU and transfer student enrollment patterns.
Data for the study were collected through the ongoing research and evaluation of the partnership. For this study, we utilized a one-group posttest-only design that included analyses of surveys and interviews (Shadish et al., 2002) to assess the outcomes of professional development, curriculum development, and curriculum implementation experiences on participating higher-education science faculty. Observations of each of the newly developed courses were conducted at all partner institutions. Since this research was conducted within the context of a Math Science Partnership, a variety of data sets were available for analysis. The data sets were collected for a variety of evaluation purposes, only some of which directly addressed the research questions in this study. However, even though some of the data were collected for other explicit purposes, evidence of influence on participating higher-education science faculty was available in sections of several surveys, interviews, and observations detailed below.
Analyses of the data were primarily conducted by the partnership internal evaluation team and an external evaluation team. Instances where analyses were conducted by parties other than the aforementioned are noted in the subsequent sections. Qualitative data, in the form of open-ended responses to survey or interview questions, were examined using thematic analyses. Thematic analysis is a process of encoding qualitative information, which can be used with any form of qualitative data (Boyatzis, 1998). Themes were generated through a data-driven "grounded" approach, where the themes emerged from the data through careful analysis (Strauss and Corbin, 1990).
