Norms for science teaching and their implications for policy and practice [electronic resource]
Keywords: Education.

Norms for teaching are the informal rules for how teachers should teach. There is substantial evidence that these norms affect how teachers translate policy into classroom practice. However, it is an open question as to whether the findings extend to science teaching. This dissertation contains three studies, each of which describes norms for science teaching and offers further insight on the implications for policy and classroom practices. The first study of this dissertation compares the strength of internalized and social norms for science teaching. High school teachers from San Francisco Bay Area were surveyed about the internalized and social norms for Kloser's Core Science Teaching Practices, which reflect the goals of the Next Generation Science Standards. The internalized norms for Core Science Teaching Practices were stronger than the social norms. Interviews with a subset of survey participants revealed that teachers perceived social norms and held internalized norms for engaging students in hands-on activities. Corroborating the survey results, interviewees indicated that the internalized norms for science teaching are stronger than the social norms. The second study describes how teachers perceived the views of their students, administrators, and colleagues of hands-on science, facilitating deliberative discourse, and the teaching of scientific texts. The participants in the second study were the same teachers interviewed in the first study. First, teachers watched videos of teachers engaging in the science practices of interest. Then, teachers were asked about how students, administrators, and their colleagues would evaluate the quality of science teaching. Finally, teachers were asked whether the views of others affected their own pedagogical practices. The teachers perceived students, administrators, and their colleagues to hold overwhelmingly positive views of "hands-on" activities. By contrast, teachers' perceived views of class discussion and teaching of scientific texts varied depending on the group the teachers considered. Administrators were perceived as being supportive of the teaching of scientific texts, but students were typically perceived as thinking scientific texts are "boring." While some teachers perceived their colleagues as appreciating deliberative class discussions and teaching scientific texts, others did not. As for the reported effects on teaching practices, it was most common for teachers to say that the views held by students and administrators affected how they teach. The third study makes the connection between norms for science teaching and actual classroom practices. There were three stages to the study. First, I surveyed 14 Vermont middle school science teachers about norms for facilitating classroom discourse. Second, I interviewed a subset of focus teachers who represented a range of norm strength. Third, I recorded videos of their lessons that featured class discussions. There were differences in the quality of discourse across types of responses by teachers along the range of norm strength. The teacher who perceived relatively weak social and internalized norms typically exhibited lower quality of discourse compared to the other teachers. The conclusion of my dissertation discusses how the three studies extend prior research of policy implementation. Additionally, it offers recommendations for using norms to improve the impact of policy on science teaching practices.