A Survey Of Authentic Teaching In Secondary Math And Science Classrooms

The Authentic Teaching Alliance (ATA) is a project funded through the National Science Foundation GK-12 program in which University of Oklahoma Fellows from engineering and education disciplines team with local teachers to design, implement, and assess authentic, inquiry-based activities to teach secondary science and mathematics. This paper discusses the adaptation and implementation of an instrument to survey the students’ science and math classroom experiences and to assess whether the ATA activities had a measurable effect on the students' desire to learn. The search for a validated instrument to serve our needs led to a survey developed in the Netherlands by Roelofs and Terwel (1997). The survey was modified to elicit information about the existing state of the science and math classroom environment as perceived by the teachers and the students. Pre-post implementation was utilized to help us evaluate the success of the project by comparing responses before and after implementation of the ATA activities. The Authentic Teaching Alliance In recent years, the nation’s educators have expressed growing concern as they witness the dwindling numbers of students entering math, science, and engineering fields. According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), enrollment in engineering dropped by more than 20 percent between 1983 and 1999, and continues to decline. Interest in math and science seems to be at an alltime low. The National Center for Education Statistics (2002) reported that attitudes toward math have been shown to decline from grade eight to grade twelve for the majority of students, and are generally more negative for females. This is also reflected in the national math and science performance figures reported in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study-Repeat (TIMSS-R) conducted in 1999, which showed a drop in performance from the eighth grade to the twelfth grade. Internationally, the math and science achievement scores for students in the United States were significantly lower than 14 countries, including Singapore, the Republic of Korea, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong (SAR), Japan, Flemish Belgium, Australia, the Netherlands, the Slovak Republic, Hungary, Canada, Slovenia, the Russian Federation, and Finland. In response to this looming problem, the NSF Graduate Fellow K-12 (GK-12) program was initiated to attempt to reverse this alarming trend, and to encourage students to consider occupations in math and science-related careers. The Authentic Teaching Alliance (ATA) at the University of Oklahoma was one of 24 projects selected for funding by the NSF GK-12 program P ge 829.1 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright 2003, American Society for Engineering Education in 2001. The ATA utilizes a cross-curriculum design that combines the talents of engineering, science, and education professionals to devise new ways to teach math and science to secondary students. The ATA also seeks to reduce the fear and confusion surrounding new technologies, and to build and renew the students’ desire to become involved in technological fields. This is accomplished by allowing the students to experience math and science in ways that are exciting and meaningful to them in their everyday lives. The ATA utilizes project teams consisting of an education fellow, a science or engineering fellow (one is an undergraduate fellow and the other one is a graduate fellow), and a participating secondary school teacher to develop and implement relevant, hands-on lessons to teach math and science concepts in the classrooms. The lesson activities are designed to introduce the required curriculum concepts in a fun and interesting manner, to demonstrate the students’ potential to understand and enjoy math and science, and to enhance their knowledge about careers in math, science, engineering, and other technical fields. Beyond bringing their experiences and knowledge into the classroom, the ATA fellows also serve as mentors and role models to the secondary school students. The diverse population of ATA fellows helps demonstrate that science and math degrees are truly within the reach of females, African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, and other minority students. After selection for participation in the program, the ATA fellows are required to complete an in-depth course of formal training for which they receive college credit. This course was designed to provide the fellows with the educational theory and scientific background necessary to create effective, authentic classroom activities. For a more detailed discussion on the goals and structure of the ATA program and the content and objectives of the ATA course, see Rhoads, Nanny, and O’Hair (2002). The ATA program encourages lifelong learning, and is designed not only to benefit the secondary students, but all who are involved in the program. It is hoped that the fellows will benefit from their participation by enlightening them to the need to become involved in educational issues and to recognize their ability to meaningfully affect the lives of others. In interviews conducted at the end of the first year, several of the ATA fellows reported that they have begun to consider roles in teaching or other educational pursuits due to their participation of the program. The program supports the participating teachers in their efforts to further their education, to expand their math and science knowledge, and to improve their teaching methods. The program also benefits the teachers by allowing them to develop partnerships with higher education and by creating avenues that provide them easy access to new information and technology. If the ATA classroom experience is positive, reports of its impact could spread to other students within the schools, and might extend to the friends, families, and even the communities of the students. Assessing Authentic Teaching Practices in the Classroom One of the founding principles upon which the ATA was built is that authentic teaching practices enhance understanding and retention of math and science concepts. Newman & Associates (1996) studied the impact of authentic teaching in more than 1500 secondary schools. The authors reported that students who experienced authentic, inquiry-based teaching in their classrooms excelled over students who were taught using traditional teaching methods. We believe that the success of the ATA program is directly linked to our use of authentic teaching P ge 829.2 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright 2003, American Society for Engineering Education 1 = never, 2 = seldom, 3 = sometimes, 4 = often, 5 = very often Question 5 In Peter’s class students sometimes carry out tasks which are not assigned by the teacher. These tasks are related to English. For instance reading an English book for young students, or completing extra tasks. The teacher encourages the students to do this. 5. In your class, do you ever do tasks which 1 2 3 4 5 are not assigned by the teacher? practices. Therefore, we began a search for a validated survey instrument to evaluate the effectiveness of the ATA program in promoting authentic teaching practices in the participating math and science classrooms. We hoped to locate a survey that could be used to compare the state of the teaching environment before and after implementation of the ATA projects to help us evaluate the success of the program with respect to the way it was received and perceived by the students and the educators. Unfortunately, no existing survey was wholly appropriate or sufficient to meet our needs. However, in order to build upon the existing base of knowledge and experience, we decided that the next best option was to adapt one or more surveys to meet our needs. We ultimately chose a set of survey instruments developed by researchers at the Department of Educational Studies and Center for Research on Cognition and Learning and the Educational Research Institute at Utrecht University in Ljubljana, The Netherlands. The surveys were developed and tested in response to a national push in the Netherlands to improve teaching and encourage authentic teaching methods. A pair of Authentic Pedagogy questionnaires created by Roelofs and Terwel were designed to elicit information from secondary students relating their experiences with authentic teaching practices. The instruments initially consisted of two separate surveys: one for foreign language (English) courses and one for mathematics courses. A separate teacher’s manual was provided with each instrument that contained instructions for administration of the individual questionnaires. The original questionnaires contained excerpts describing a classroom situation that illustrated a characteristic of authentic teaching. The excerpts were followed by questions related to the student’s experience with that particular characteristic in their own classroom. Responses to the questions were given on a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 representing ‘never’, and 5 representing ‘very often’. An example of the original format for the student questionnaire is shown in Figure 1. The student questionnaire for the math classrooms contained 23 items, while the questionnaire for the English classrooms consisted of 26 items. Figure 1. Sample Format of the Authentic Pedagogy Student Questionnaire by Roelofs and Terwel (1997). A similar Authentic Pedagogy questionnaire was developed by Franssen and Roelofs (1997) to assess teachers’ attitudes toward and use of authentic teaching practices in their own classrooms. The teacher questionnaire also employed a situation-specific format, and originally contained 67 items designed to evaluate the four characteristics of authentic teaching: construction of knowledge, connection of the knowledge to the students’ personal world, value P ge 829.3 Proceedings of the