An Interdisciplinary RET Program: Assessment with Concerns-Based Adoption Model (RTP)

In 2008, the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced fourteen Grand Challenges in engineering that require solutions in the 21st century. A Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) site at Virginia Tech (VT) is motivated by this Grand Challenge and aims to educate local teachers (and through them their students) about the interdisciplinary aspects of water research to make them aware of water-related issues, and to guide them to develop appropriate solutions to address these challenges. In this work we share details of our RET site and our assessment findings for the first two years of the RET program regarding teacher concerns for adoption of innovative curricular material and their levels of implementation of the activities in their classrooms. We conducted a small survey, focus group, and utilized two instruments from the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM): the Stages of Concern questionnaire (SoC) and Levels of Use (LoU) interviews, on the first two cohorts of our RET program. Eleven of the teachers thirteen teachers interviewed have implemented in their classes at least once. We did not find a generalizable correlation between creative achievement and level of implementation, but the teacher with the highest creative achievement questionnaire (CAQ) score implemented three projects within the semester immediately following the summer professional development program. The focus group revealed teachers had enthusiasm and gratitude for the summer program overall.