Evaluating the Effects of Intervention on Teacher Learning in an Online Heat and Temperature Course.
From the results of these studies, the Fulcrum Institute realized that course revisions were necessary before the second piloting of the Fulcrum Program:
- A more coherent set of experiences was redesigned for the teachers including a new F1, a revised Summer Institute, and extensive revisions to F2 and F3.
- Several investigations that were part of the online and face-to-face science sessions were deleted or changed to improve the understanding of the concepts.
- The application process was revised to more closely match that of the Tufts University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Fulcrum faculty from both departments of Education and Physics commented upon the applicants.
- Two science educators with master's degrees were hired to facilitate all the forums (both science and pedagogy). Each facilitator is responsible for half of the online discussion groups. Both facilitators had previous online facilitation experience.
- It became a requirement that each teacher take a turn as "Discussion Leader" in the online science and pedagogy discussion forums.
- A new forum was created in each course where the facilitators and discussion leaders "meet" for the purpose of having facilitators guide teachers in discussion leadership by modeling meta-cognitive processes.
- Face-to-face large group discussions followed each investigation during the Summer Institute to model "good" discussion techniques.
- All teachers were required to attend a workshop to learn how to use the probes and associated software.
- Four Fulcrum physicists rotate online contributions each week after one of the science session by responding to teacher findings, teacher questions, and any misunderstandings that may have occurred during each session.
If our expectations are met, the performance of Cohort Two on the pre and post assessments of F2 will yield large gains in the number of ideas used by the teachers to explain a range of thermal phenomena. It is expected however, that the absolute number of normative responses will be substantially greater in Cohort Two than in Cohort One. The effectiveness of the course modifications will be determined by looking at the overall difference between the pre and posttests of the two cohorts (heterogeneous groups of K-8 teachers) as well as by completing the same type of analysis that was done of the radiation session. It will be hard to disentangle the effects of the course content revisions from the effects of a more sophisticated and sensitive participant selection process.
With the number (tens of thousands) and types of data that the Fulcrum Institute has generated (online discourse, pre and post test for each course, video of face-to-face sessions, pre and post data of teacher classroom videos), we see our future work as contributing toward
- the building of a theory of effective online teacher education programs,
- the teachers evolving notions of heat and temperature, and
- to theoretical analyses of group cognition.
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