Using Educative Curriculum Materials to Support Teacher Enactment of a Geospatial Science Curriculum

As part of a science education reform initiative, a series of Web GIS tectonics investigations with educative materials and embedded supports were developed. These supports were designed to address the need to provide “just in time” professional development to help educate teachers about important tectonics concepts and to support their development of geospatial pedagogical content knowledge to teach with a novel Web-based curriculum. A curriculum implementation study was conducted with twelve grade 8 urban middle level science teachers that implemented the Web GIS investigations with 1,124 students. Data sources included a student pretest-posttest tectonics measure, 33 classroom observations, a post-implementation survey and a focus group interview. Results indicated that the educative curriculum materials were effective in supporting the science teachers’ professional growth during the curriculum enactment and supported their teaching of the Web GIS investigations. The available time within a school year to provide inservice science teachers with quality face-to-face professional development to adopt new science education technology-integrated curriculum is limited. During the past years, we have partnered with a unionized urban school district in a systemic middle level science curriculum reform effort. During this time, school financial resources have been extremely limited and science teachers have been allowed to attend only two or three days of face-to-face professional development during the school year. To address this professional development time constraint, we have developed and implemented a novel way of providing science teacher professional development that includes substantial materials designed to promote professional growth within Web-based curriculum materials. Curriculum materials can be designed to incorporate professional development learning opportunities for science teachers to assist them with deepening their understandings of science content in addition to accomplishing instructional goals for their students. They may influence teacher decision-making by conveying instructional practices, providing appropriate science content materials, or providing pedagogical implementation ideas (Davis & Krajcik, 2005). Curriculum designers can develop learning materials that better accommodate instruction by moving away from the traditional mode of instructional design models of curriculum as a “onesize-fits all students” model and instead provide for flexible adaptations to instructional implementation. Such curriculum designs can provide for different modes of instruction that are important given the diverse nature of students and their abilities in science classrooms. When curriculum materials are expected to take on the role of change agent and transform teacher practice ‐ the challenges of effective implementation are heightened. Unfortunately, research has shown that there are many obstacles that teachers face when they attempt to use curriculum materials that are based on an instructional approach to teaching and learning that differs from their own experiences as teachers or learners (Stein, Grover, & Henningsen, 1996). This is especially true when teachers enact instructional materials that utilize geospatial technologies (GT) to support inquiry-based learning environments. Studies have shown that teachers may experience technical issues pertaining to the interface design of software, have time constraints to learn how to use GT software applications to effectively teach