Moonsnail Project: A Scientific Collaboration with Middle School Teachers and Students

Design, Implementation, and Assessment of an Earth Systems Science Course for Secondary Teachers

“…Harris's suggested reforms may help all students, including pre-service teachers, learn the content more thoroughly than is typical in courses taught more didactically. Other efforts (Gosselin and Macklem-Hurst, 2002;Hansen et al, 2003;Buck, 2003) are specifically designed to benefit teachers and include targeted content enrichment, field or research experiences, and developing research partnerships, although some may span these categories. Attempts to measure the effectiveness of these efforts in the short-term (Gosselin and Macklem-Hurst, 2002;Huntoon et al, 2001) and long-term (Slater et al, 1999) indicate that they hold promise as means for positively influencing K-12 science education either through improving teacher content knowledge, pedagogy, or attitudes toward science.…”