Abstract
This small-scale comparison case study evaluates the impact of an innovative approach to teacher professional development designed to promote implementation of a novel cutting edge high school neurological disorders curriculum. ‘Modeling for Fidelity’ (MFF) centers on an extended mentor relationship between teachers and biomedical scientists carried out in a virtual format in conjunction with extensive online educative materials. Four teachers from different diverse high schools in Massachusetts and Ohio who experienced MFF contextualized to a 6-week Neurological Disorders curriculum with the same science mentor were compared to a teacher who had experienced an intensive in-person professional development contextualized to the same curriculum with the same mentor. Fidelity of implementation was measured directly using an established metric and indirectly via student performance. The results show that teachers valued MFF, particularly the mentor relationship and were able to use it effectively to ensure critical components of the learning objectives were preserved. Moreover their students performed equivalently to those whose teacher had experienced intensive in-person professional development. Participants in all school settings demonstrated large (Cohen's d>2.0) and significant (p<0.0001 per-post) changes in conceptual knowledge as well as self-efficacy towards learning about neurological disorders (Cohen's d>1.5, p<0.0001 pre-post). The data demonstrates that the virtual mentorship format in conjunction with extensive online educative materials is an effective method of developing extended interactions between biomedical scientists and teachers that are scalable and not geographically constrained, facilitating teacher implementation of novel cutting-edge curricula.
Highlights
The poor performance of high school students against international benchmarks raises concerns about the current state of U.S science education [1,2,3,4]
The four teachers included in this case study represent a wide range of experience; a novice first year teacher; a teacher with extensive neuroscience experience; a teacher whose background was in chemistry rather than life science; and an expert teacher who had been recognized as State Biology Teacher of the Year
The data presented here make three important contributions to research about Professional Development: First professional development (PD) programs that incorporate virtual interactions between a teacher and a science partner by incorporating layers of asynchronous and synchronous interactions over an extended period of time can produce outcomes like intensive ‘gold standard’ PD
Summary
The poor performance of high school students against international benchmarks raises concerns about the current state of U.S science education [1,2,3,4]. Students value learning about health and disease, and high school biology curricula focused on health and disease stimulates interest and engagement in science, and concomitantly, academic performance [14]. This type of curricula may foster students’ health literacy capacities [15]. Targeted to Biology II (elective biology), ‘The Great Diseases’ has a modular framework focused on four globally significant diseases: Neurological Disorders, Infectious Diseases, Metabolic Disease and Cancer It is inquiry-based and aligned with the most recent science education standards that relate to authentic science practices and the three dimensions of the NGSS (See Fig. A in S1 File) [16]. The GD is comprehensive (each disease module takes about 6 weeks of in-class time) and has been designed to build scientific understanding and foster health literacy by teaching students how to critically evaluate scientific health claims and make connections between current developments in biomedical science and their health
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