Maxima Project Summary

Even though women's enrollment in post-secondary institutions and graduation levels continue to increase, their participation in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) remains alarmingly low. Many educators and researchers argue that this issue can be addressed by making science and mathematics more socially relevant and inclusive to females at all school levels, but particularly at the elementary school level. However, elementary teachers often feel unprepared to meet this challenge due to a lack of preparation and opportunities to participate in effective and responsive professional development programs.

By building upon current research on gender inclusive teaching, inquiry-based learning, multicultural education, and sociocultural constructivism, our project provides teachers and student teachers with an alternate framework for teaching science and mathematics for understanding in diverse classrooms. We call this alternate framework sociotransformative constructivism. Sociotransformative constructivism (STC) is an orientation to teaching and learning that connects multicultural education principles with social constructivism (a theory of learning Synthesis of STC.html). Utilizing this framework, one of the main goals of this project is to enhance the professional preparation of teachers in a way that will ultimately have a positive impact on the academic performance and participation of girls in SMET.

To this end, we received funding from the National Science Foundation and the New Mexico Commission on Higher Education to conduct a two-year, professional development research project. Two two-week professional development summer institutes for 25 elementary and middle school teachers were offered. The first institute had an emphasis on science education and learning technologies. The second institute had an emphasis on integrating science, mathematics (engineering) and learning technologies.

During the institutes, gender inclusive, minds-on activities were modeled by the principal investigators in collaboration with other experienced teachers. Participating teachers were also responsible for preparing a curriculum unit in teams according to the grade level in which they taught. The purpose of these units was to enable teachers to start implementing in their own classrooms some of the STC and gender inclusive pedagogical strategies we modeled and discussed during the institute. In this way, the research team could provide more focused and responsive feedback during our visits to the schools. The teacher-developed units also facilitated data gathering on the students' attitudes toward science and mathematics. In addition, more information about the students' conceptions of scientists and science was gathered using the classical Draw a Scientist Test (DAST, Chambers, 1983). An alternative form of this test was also developed to investigate more fully the positive indicators of change in the students' conceptions of scientists and science-related work. Ethnographic, focus group interviews were conducted with the participating girls (n=40), who were mostly Latinas (70%). Three interviews were conducted. One each at the end of the fall term and spring terms in Grade 4, one at the end of the spring term in Grade 5.

Five schools were involved in the project: three elementary schools, along with their corresponding middle schools. Every term, we placed a selected group of preservice teachers in the classrooms of teachers who participated in the summer institutes. In this way, we sought to increase the opportunities for professional development for both teachers and student teachers. The student teachers were selected on the basis of their commitment to teach science for diversity and understanding after having successfully completed the science methods course taught by the principal investigator. There were two sessions of the science methods course, a bilingual session and a monolingual class. Student teachers were interviewed at the end of their student teaching assignment.

Individual ethnographic interviews were also conducted with the participating teachers (25). One baseline interview was conducted at the end of the first summer institute. The second interview was conducted at the end of the first year, and the third interview was conducted at the end of the second year. Open ended questionnaires were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the summer institutes and to gather information on the teachers' areas of interest and/or concerns. We conducted monthly meetings during the academic year, and some of these meetings were taped or video recorded.

Research Questions

1. In what ways does a sociotransformative constructivist (STC) orientation to teaching enhance cooperating and preservice teachers' abilities to teach science, mathematics, engineering and learning technologies (SMET) to elementary school girls?

2. In what ways does a STC orientation to teaching enhance girls' attitudes toward SMET?

3. In what specific ways does a STC orientation to teaching help address the factors that negatively influence upper elementary girls' attitudes toward SMET over a period of two years (i.e., grades 4 through 5)?

Analysis

There is no question that many factors could have influenced the academic performance and attitudes of girls toward SMET during the course of this study. Similarly, many factors could have influenced the views of cooperating and preservice teachers on what it means to be an effective and gender sensitive teacher. Therefore, the ethnographic approach to data gathering and analysis employed here yielded critical contextual information needed to make reliable inferences. Using a constant comparison and interpretive approach, the research team read all documents several times to identify representative themes and categories (Spradley, 1979). By drawing from multiple quantitative and qualitative data bases (open-ended questionnaires, DAST - & the DAST +, transcripts of ethnographic interviews , field notes, artifacts of pupils' work, teachers' lesson plans and handouts, in-class observations, analyses of videotaped lessons, etc.), and by conducting the study over a two year period, we were able to triangulate the emerging themes and categories (Marshall, & Rossman, 1989; Wolcott, 1985). In accordance to the sociocultural constructivist orientation that states that knowledge is socially constructed, preliminary reports were shared with participants at monthly meeting discussions and summer conferences (Lincoln, & Guba, 1985). In this way, worked to ensure the internal validity of our analyses as a grounded theory of teaching (Glaser, & Strauss, 1967).

Two unique aspects of this project are its longitudinal design and the on-going in-school support the research team was offering. Since we followed the progress of the same group of girls at each of their schools from grade 4 through 5, we were better able to assess whether STC had an impact on the girls' attitude toward science, mathematics and learning technologies. Similarly, we were able to assess whether teachers and student teachers found STC to be a useful orientation to teaching science and mathematics for understanding in diverse classrooms. We found that by providing responsive, on-going and on-site support to teachers for an extended period time, multiple opportunities for professional development were established that allowed the teachers and researchers to use new insights as they emerged into their corresponding teaching practices. Overall, our findings are promising. Some of the data analysis has been completed and can be found under the Findings section of this web site. More information will be available as further data analysis is completed

For more information contact Dr. Alberto J. Rodriguez or Dr. Cathy Zozakiewicz (Co-Principal Investigators) at arodrigu@mail.sdsu.edu or czozakie@mail.sdsu.edu.