The knowledge integration framework is used to analyze studies on professional development in technology-enhanced science involving more than 2,350 teachers and 138,0000 students. The question of how professional development enhances teachers’ support for students’ inquiry science learning is the focus of the work. A literature search using the keywords technology, professional development, and science identified 360 studies from the past 25 years, 43 of which included multiple data sources and reported results for teachers and/or students. Findings suggest that professional development programs that engaged teachers in a comprehensive, constructivist-oriented learning process and were sustained beyond 1 year significantly improved students’ inquiry learning experiences in K–12 science classrooms. In professional development programs of 1 year or less, researchers encountered common technical and instructional obstacles related to classroom implementation that hindered success. Programs varied most considerably in terms of their support for teachers’ use of evidence to distinguish effective technology-enhanced practices.

We investigated how student understanding of complex science topics was impacted when 27 teachers switched from typical to inquiry instruction in a delayed cohort comparison design study. For the same set of science topics, the teachers used typical methods of instruction in the first year and online, visualization rich inquiry units in the second year. Both cohorts of students were tested on knowledge integration at the end of both school years. We obtained students' knowledge integration estimates by applying an Item Response Theory analysis based on a Rasch Partial Credit Model. We used a mixed effects analysis of variance to investigate effects related to inquiry instruction, teaching context, and science course. We found significant main effects of inquiry instruction and teaching context as well as significant interaction effects between inquiry instruction and science course and between inquiry instruction and teaching context on student knowledge integration. We triangulate these findings with teacher surveys, interview transcripts and project records to explore potential factors associated with successful implementation of inquiry instruction. ß 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: [71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90] 2010

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The results suggest that there is a SANE effect for articles about educational topics among the general public when they are accompanied by both extraneous verbal neuroscience findings and brain images.