Immersing All K-12 Students in Full-Cycle Inquiry Science and Design : Barriers and Recommended Solutions

How can we produce high quality, full-inquiry cycle science experiences (called immersion units) for all students in large urban school districts given the current realities of US education in urban settings? The function of the paper is to bring curriculum designers, learning scientists, and school districts onto the same page for future coordinated curriculum design and adoption of immersion units. An interdisciplinary team of science and engineering university faculty, curriculum designers, learning scientists, and school district representatives conducted an analysis on the factors that influence the adoption, spread, and sustainability of immersion-like units in K-12 settings. The team found 18 dimensions of choice for how immersion units had been previously designed in different ways and which influenced the outcomes of adoption, spread, and sustainability of the immersion units. This paper reports 1) the analysis of the barriers to adoption, spread, and sustainability, 2) the theories and past research findings that influenced their analysis, 3) the dimensions that were found, and 3) recommendations on each dimension. Immersing All K-12 Students 2 Immersing All K-12 Students in Full-Cycle Inquiry Science and Design: Barriers and Recommended Solutions Consider our best public and private high schools. Think of their honors sections of 11 and 12 grade science classes. In those rarified settings, many students have experiences that fundamentally change their views of science and technology. They conduct extended scientific experiments, asking and answer scientific questions of their own choosing; they take part in serious design challenges in which they build functioning prototypes to solving difficult problems. These experiences move the students from disinterested consumers of surface information to active participants of processes important to science—in other words, apprentices on the way to becoming scientists or engineers. We refer to these experiences as science immersion units. More formally, science immersion units are defined as units of curriculum in which students learn science content by engaging in authentic scientific (or engineering) inquiry processes. Note the three key parts to this definition. First, immersion units have an instructional goal of teaching content. Second, immersion units involve authentic inquiry processes (i.e., have a close resemblance to the processes by scientists and engineers). Third, the inclusion of inquiry processes is not secondary or for demonstrational purposes, but rather the core method by which the scientific content is learned. Why are these immersion experiences typically restricted to such rarified settings? Some of the challenging realities include: frequent leadership turnover (Czaja & Harman, 1997), communications gaps and politics between the many layers of the district leadership (Leithwood, 1995), battles between superintendents, school boards, and teacher unions, shortages of qualified science teachers (Murnane & Olsen, 1989), high turnover rates among science teachers (Boe et al., 1998), high levels of English language learners, weak support for after-school learning from the students’ homes, high levels of mobility of students from school to school between and within school years (Rumberger & Larson, 1998), pressure towards state mandated textbook adoption through textbook lobbyists, extreme pressure to teach to state tests that are heavily biased towards content standards, and strong competition for classroom time from frequent student testing and higher emphasis on literacy and mathematics performance. Given these overwhelming challenges to wide implementation of immersion units, one could ask whether wide implementation is possible, especially in a way that is sustainable. Moreover, would such a system-wide implementation plan so radically dilute the experiences that they would be mere poor cousins to their original forms? Are all implementations of immersion units doomed to narrow or unsustainable or weak implementation, or are there some instantiations of immersion units that could flower in full form across a wide variety of settings? In order to answer these questions, an interdisciplinary team was convened, under the name Immersion Design Team. The Immersion Design Team consists of university science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) faculty with considerable experience in developing high quality immersion units that are used in K-12 settings, learning scientists (cognitive psychologists, science curriculum designers, teacher trainers, school policy researchers), school district curricula coordinators, lead teachers and other representatives, and district change consultants. Over the course of a year, the team considered many options and issues, and came to a blueprint that met each of the stakeholders’ needs, was built upon existing learning theory, and was considered scalable in the current US urban setting. This paper describes the options that were considered, the choices that were made, the reasons for those choices, and some examples. The goal of this paper is twofold: 1) help designers of immersion units design units that will have maximum impact on students with wide and sustainable implementation; and 2) help school district decisionmakers decide whether to use, how to select, and how to implement immersion units. Because the design challenge is a large undertaking and the results, by intention, will be widely applicable, we feel it important to address those two groups in the same document to help bring them onto the same (literal) page. A Brief History of Prior (Failed) Attempts at Wide Implementation of Immersion To understand why the choices must be carefully made, it is useful to examine what has happened to previous attempts at bringing immersion-like projects into K-12 settings. Fleeting interactions of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers from universities, research laboratories, and industry with K-12 classrooms and teachers have been a common phenomenon. After all, many of these professionals also are parents, and often they at least visit the classroom of their children with some interesting artifacts and presentations. These might be seen as nascent immersion-like projects, since they expose children to authentic science and design artifacts, but they do not engage students in the processes themselves. Considerably fewer (although still a sizable number of) researchers and organizations have gone to the next step: bring the processes of science and engineering into the K-12 classroom. Often these attempts have come with significant local and federal funding (especially from NASA and the National Science Foundation). Many of the Immersing All K-12 Students 3 attempts were very exciting to students who experienced them and teachers who taught them (e.g., Wisconsin Fast Plants, Hands-on Universe, and City Technology). However, all of the attempts failed to meet our goal of systemwide, high-quality, sustainable implementation. Some failed on the breadth of reach, making contact with only the top 5 or 10% of teachers in a region. Others did better on breadth of implementation within a region, but did not spread beyond a small region. Historically, many did not meet the goal of sustainability, disappearing within 5 years after school adoption. Finally, other immersion units did become part of widely adopted curricula, but at the cost of becoming a pale imitation of the original, typically moving from open-ended inquiry to a very closed form of inquiry with only nominal similarity to the intent and form of the original. In other words, just because it was good for students, does not mean it was sustainable, and just because it was sustainable, does not mean it was good for students. In fact, given the typically observed paths of implementation, one might even argue that high quality and sustainability are in opposition. Some of the factors underlying these problems are obvious, at least in retrospect. From the district’s perspective, immersion units often do not appear to meet their core needs. While open-ended, hands-on inquiry has become a core value in K-12 science education with few exceptions, content coverage remains a stronger focus. Moreover, the immersion units do not typically provide a clear articulation of their goals, structure, and involved concepts, at least not in the language that curriculum coordinators and teachers speak. This apparent mismatch is not surprising, since immersion units come out of the STEM disciplines in university and other non-K-12 settings. Thus, immersion units appear to involve too much process and too little core K-12 content. Moreover, the immersion units come to the districts in a haphazard fashion. For a district trying to develop a coherent curriculum across grades and across schools, the immersion units are not easy to assimilate. As a result, in the districts that make careful choices, the curriculum coordinators will actively avoid immersion units no matter how good they seem. Another significant factor is that the primary personnel involved in developing and disseminating immersionlike resources have been university faculty and staff. The dissemination model typically used is some variation of workshops advertised locally or nationally, directly to teachers. Although the teachers’ school districts might be involved, such involvement is typically tangential and secondary. Because of this direct-teacher contact method and the fact that districts are not seeking them out, immersion-like projects that do see some success in spread come in under the school district radar, working with particular teachers and relying upon regional volunteer networks. As a result, typically only the strongest teachers adopt the immersion units. Moreover, without district incorporation into the curriculum, if the creators of the immersion-like resources stop providing support, the immer