A proposal to the National Science Foundadtion
submitted September 1, 1996
Introduction
Goal Two of the National Educational Goals (1989) asserts that the students in the United States will be number one in the world in mathematics and science achievement. National policy choices were publicly debated, partially resolved, and finally encapsulated in the 1992 report of the National Council on Educational Standards and Testing (1992). The Report generated subsequent legislation (Goals 2000, and the Improving America's Schools Act, 1994), administrative directives, and incentives, that together supported the creation of high quality content standards in all areas. Using the model of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the initial work of Project 2061 scientists and teachers worked together to create a set of voluntary standards for students, connected model assessments, and recommendations for teaching practices. The National Science Foundation has lent its support to this effort through its Systemic Initiatives programs in states and in urban settings
Educational reform is actively underway in each of the fifty states, with 48 states having completed or committed to the identification of explicit expectations in subject matter, many making good progress on assessments of student learning, and others grappling with the problem of teacher development.. Yet, in many high school science classes, classroom practice remains essentially unchanged. Although textbooks periodically change and include some updates on new developments in science, the fundamental rhythm of teaching and learning for most teachers and students is the same as it as been. What aspects of educational reform this time around make its prospects for success more likely?
Educational reform is conceived as a systemic process, with interdependent elements including goals, teaching practices, teacher preparation, student assessment and testing. All elements of the system are simultaneously engaged.
The direction of change is no longer from the university to the teachers, for in the area of teaching and the assessment of student outcomes, many teachers are far ahead of their former mentors in Universities. Changes in practice are reciprocal between pre and post-secondary educational settings.
Cognitive studies over the last two decades have consolidated our knowledge about human memory, knowledge acquisition, and the development of complex performances. Although the emphasis on active learning began more than forty years ago, recent understanding has focused on processes involving knowledge representation, use of prior knowledge, problem solving, communication, and teamwork,,.
The major tasks of doing scientific research now require interdisciplinary collaborations, for example, the mapping of the human genome, weather prediction, and the study of nonlinear systems. Interdisciplinary approaches to scientific research legitimate the focus in secondary schools on similar tasks requiring integrated approaches for their solution.
The communications revolution has finally begun to affect the extent to which teachers and students in secondary schools can communicate with one another, with experts, and with databases and other sources of knowledge.
Enormous agreement exists among teachers, policy makers, educational psychologists, and scientists about the most appropriate types of classroom practices.
Despite the rosy glow of these facts, there are a number of major obstacles to overcome before the teaching of science in secondary schools can approach its potential to prepare our students for a future rife with technical knowledge and expectations. Barriers include:
1. The lack of high quality models of integrated science in teaching settings.
2. The overwhelming demands of the science content standards in contrast to the limited expertise of teachers.
3. The limits of time, expertise, and resources for professional development
4. Disincentives in the educational system to maintain the status quo.
5. The increasing gap in technology between schools serving students of various backgrounds. Even in schools with reasonable technology, far too often it is used in a trivial way.
Our goals then are to create generalizable models of science teaching practice, working collaboratively with teachers , students, and university scientists on complex problems involving a range of cognitive demands, various domains of scientific knowledge, the use of state of the art procedures for science problem solving, and sophisticated forms of network collaboration.
Three years ago the Los Angeles Physics Teachers Alliance Group was formed. LAPTAG was created so that universities and colleges could interact strongly with High Schools to strengthen the high school science educational process. The organization now has about sixty members in 32 institutions. Many in the group have been in education for decades, and have developed innovative curricula and effective demonstration materials. What they have in common is a dedication to science and a desire to broaden the educational experience that their schools offer. The LAPTAG group is strongly supported by the administrations of UCLA, USC, the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), who will partner with us on the seismology component of our project, and by the participating high schools and colleges.. The schools involved cut across a wide variety of social, economic, and geographical communities: Santa Monica, the San Fernando Valley, South Central Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, Woodland Hills, Simi Valley, Lakewood, Sylmar and Camarillo as illustrated on the map on the next page.
LAPTAG Seed Projects:
LAPTAG has proven itself as a viable working organization. It has a track record of fostering several ongoing collaborations such as a distance astronomy class and an air quality assessment program. Members of LAPTAG have made presentations at AAPT and other meetings. LAPTAG arranged tours for high school teachers and their students to half a dozen laboratories. Seminars were conducted, high school classes visited universities, and members engaged in numerous discussions about the educational process.
In the past year a number of the LAPTAG schools initiated pilot projects as precursors to our proposed Distributed Experiments Project. For example, five LAPTAG schools formed the Santa Monica Air and Weather Group known as SMAWG. The consortium consists of Crossroads School, Van Nuys High School, Grant High School, Santa Monica High School, and Santa Monica College (SMC). The project is directed by Joe Wise and Mark Govatos of Crossroads School. Funding was provided by a GTE GIFT Grant that seeks to support innovative ways to integrate math
Map to be pasted in here
and science (see attached modules). Dr. David Phillips and Professor Bill Selby of SMC are serving as expert consultants for the project.
In addition, professionals from UCLA, the Air Quality Management District (AQMD), and other environmental groups have agreed to offer assistance. Several conferences are planned with guest speakers. Students will collect air samples using AQMD-approved equipment that was purchased with the GTE grant. Weather data and air samples will be collected, tabulated and analyzed at each school. Statistical analysis and the relationships between variables will be discussed at conferences and via e-mail. A composite of the results will be posted on the LAPTAG web page.
Several schools in LAPTAG participate in the Telescopes In Education project (TIE). This program allows students to dial-in via modem to control a research-grade, 24-inch telescope. The students actually control the telescope in real-time through the computer. Schools as far away as Australia, Japan and Great Britain have successfully accessed the telescope. Images can be shared between schools that are located in different time zones. This project is considerably different than others at Bradford University, England; the University of Iowa, or The University of California, Santa Barbara, whose programs allow access to the telescope, but not in real-time. In those programs a request is submitted for an image and the image is sent; sometimes a month later.
Recently, Grant High School purchased a Geosense seismometer and it is being connected to their school-wide networking system. If a significant seismic event occurs it will be stored on the Grant High school server and anyone on the school network can look and see at what happened. Grant High School has purchased software to analyze the frequency spectrum, the distance to the quake, and the "signature" of the quake. This is just a beginning ; it is a new dimension for secondary education in science.
Steve Cooperman of the Westridge School for Girls attended a two-day seismic workshop sponsored by FEMA. The Westridge School will purchase a seismometer this fall and initiate seismic activity experiments. This will impact the 8th grade Earth Science classes, the 9th grade Physical Science classes , and the 12th grade Physics classes. Further, Web site access, which was a result of the school's administrators attendance at Network Day at UCLA, will be used for Chemistry and Biology/Physiology classes so that most of the Westridge Middle and Upper School -- about 300 students or about 70% of the school population -- will be affected by this as early as October 1996.
An educational tool that is emerging with high speed Internet connections is real-time data merging. This concept allows schools, in real-time, to merge their existing data. These seed projects will be greatly enhanced by the real-time control capability that will be added if an NSF award is made. For example, the SMAWG group is collecting weather data that could be merged in real-time via a high speed link so that at any monitor at any school, students could view a graphic of changing weather patterns as they move across Southern California. We envision real-time data manipulation as a centerpiece around which our activities will radiate, and as a vehicle to provide the resources to enable every school associated with LAPTAG to participate in distributed experiments.
The high school teachers in LAPTAG have a great deal of experience in innovative projects, science fairs, curriculum development and the like. Their experience has led to the following observations:
1. Students of all backgrounds, particularly minority students, are "turned on" by project-oriented tasks. They seem to come alive when asked to work with high-tech equipment, particularly when they understand how it works.
2. The need for relevance in high school science education is tremendous. The average student is bored and sees no reason to pursue the study of science. Parents do not relate the importance of the study of science to their children and teachers do little to steer them in that direction. A relevant topic, such as the study of earthquakes, would be a strong motivator to all students in the school in their study of science.
3. Many of the jobs emerging in today's society are technology driven. Few students have seen any of the modern tools used in such endeavors. Using and studying the use of modern seismometers and using modern computers would be a thrill for the students in our secondary schools and would certainly help bridge the technology gap.
4. When given the choice between test driven assignments and project driven assignments most students eagerly embrace the latter. At science fairs, the motivation, sense of identification, and sheer effort are a thrill to behold. (Minority students particularly like this approach and are amongst the top students involved). In a recent bridge building contest, sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers, two groups of minority students emerged to take first and second place.
5. Professionals in science and medicine frequently go to intensive seminars and workshops to learn about the most recent advances in their field. We propose to use this model to supplement the education of high school science students and teachers. The project would involve teachers and lecturers from high schools, universities and industry. Teachers would be able to grow professionally while giving their students an opportunity to involve themselves with meaningful, research projects and relevant work. We envision that teachers and their students will attend these workshops as colleagues. Learning opportunities for teachers, like those for students,
need to be authentic and collaborative tasks like curriculum
development, not traditional menu-driven workshops and
packaged training programs. Only under a system with
opportunities to learn new ways of leading and teaching, and
the flexibility to put them into action, is it possible to imagine
the process of school transformation unfolding."
At the high school level this might prove to be a great motivator for marginally interested students with a latent potential in science.
We are, therefore, designing a program in which the students and teachers from the eighteen collaborating high schools, along with two Universities and a college, will build and maintain modern scientific equipment. The first of these instruments will be a seismometer. The students and teachers will participate in seminars in order to learn about the design and construction of the apparatus, computer networks, data collection, data analysis and the concepts relevant to the science that they are doing. Many of these seminars will be given by university professors and professional working scientists. We will also use graduate and undergraduate students as both mentors and computer consultants. Our program will bring dedicated university professors into a direct working relationship with high school teachers and their students. Project participants will be linked to the World Wide Web and become part of the community of scientists.
We will explore the effectiveness of using real-time systems as well as professional software analysis packages in a high school setting. Experimental results will be digitized and disseminated to the world over the Internet. Results will also be disseminated in conferences sponsored by LAPTAG at which both the high school teachers and the students will make presentations.
The LAPTAG collaboration has led us to a new vision of what a teacher enhancement project should be. We propose to pilot a new model of teacher inservice. No longer must inservice be relegated to a one-shot summer workshop, but it should be an on-going experience in the teacher's own educational setting. Current trends in teacher inservice support the need for more collegial relationships between teachers. A Carnegie Corporation study identified teacher isolation as a major deterrent to meaningful change in schools . Teachers need to be supported in their efforts to try out new forms of pedagogy in the classroom. This support must be available during the entire academic year. The support comes not only from other teachers, but from students and members of the scientific community. To ensure success, this proposal requires the active participation of industry and research laboratory partners. Our partners are the Southern California Earthquake Center, General Telephone, Visual Numerics and Sun Microsystems.
Project Narrative
A New Vision of Teacher Enhancement
The primary motivation for this proposal is to give students a chance to receive a quality science education. This includes meaningful research and hands-on laboratory experiences; both of which are not routinely pursued, or offered, at the secondary school level. Meaningful science experiments tie all institutions together and allow for strong, continual interaction among participants. This philosophy is in accord with that of the National Research Council.
Teachers should focus inquiry predominantly on real phenomena,
either in a laboratory setting where students are given experiments
or guided toward fashioning experiments that are demanding but
within their capabilities -- or outdoors -- where they can observe
and analyze events in nature."
In order to actualize this philosophy in an authentic school setting, teachers need guidance and support. Teachers have not usually been trained to work in a collaborative scientific enterprise. They need to establish more collegial relationships with their students, with experts, and with the scientific community at large.
LAPTAG members have observed that students work at their highest level when given open-ended assignments that allow them to stretch out and explore. For example, Fred Carrington at Grant High School assigned his students the task of building a functional camera furnishing them only a simple lens. They came up with functioning shutters, single lens reflex viewing systems, aperture controls, focus controls and a myriad of other innovations. Students like this kind of work and respond to the praise of a job well done. Just as there was no way to see the explosion that occurred when the World Wide Web was initiated, we believe that the most astonishing things to come out of our projects may well originate in the students themselves. We plan to make use of the enormous connectivity of the Web to maintain a continuous communication and collaboration among the participating teachers and their students.
Although students who participate in LAPTAG projects will vary from school to school, the following general pattern has emerged from our pilot projects and is representative of all the LAPTAG schools:
1. The intensely involved students, usually small in number, who will be consumed by the project. They will become very enthusiastic with the computer-network capabilities and they will become project leaders.
2. The interested students, who number about twice as many as the first group. These students are usually the close friends of the project leaders; they appreciate that something interesting is going on and are willing to contribute their time and skills to the project.
3. The students who must do the teacher's assignments have the potential to encompass the entire student body in a given school. As both Math and Physics teachers are beginning to appreciate the value of data that is created by a real experiment, assignments are finding their way into classes, even though the students themselves did not participate in the actual data acquisition. The knowledge that their school is involved in a real and important experiment serves as a motivation to all of the students although the data are simply presented as assigned work
It must be appreciated that the LAPTAG schools are located in the Los Angeles basin which has an enormous ethnic diversity. Our student population mirrors this. The majority of the schools in LAPTAG have student populations which are predominately Hispanic, African American and Asian. These are the students that will be involved in our projects.
To make these projects a reality in our classrooms, teachers have to be well-trained and well-supported in this educational experiment. Members of LAPTAG are aware that most traditional teacher enhancement programs involve placing a teacher in an unfamiliar university setting. Teachers are flooded with new information in a very short period of time. When teachers try to apply the new ideas in their own classrooms they encounter innumberable obstacles and unanticipated outcomes. Teacher enhancement should occur in the teacher's own classroom setting in the regular academic year with the full dynamic of student interaction. The enhancement program will provide support to teachers in their attempt to change the educational experience of their students. We cannot divorce teacher enhancement from the intellectural growth of their students nor can we divorce the pedagogy of science from the actual experimental process of science.
Distributed High School Science Experiments
Scientists "do" science in a collaborative manner, they learn from each other in seminars and workshops, as well as in informal interactions within the laboratory setting. In the traditional science classroom, students are learning science in isolation, using an algorithmic mode of instruction, and in a competitive classroom environment. Studies have demonstrated that this mode of instructional practice is ineffective in promoting student achievement in science. In addition, these practices do not convey to students the true spirit of the science enterprise. We propose to let students learn the collaborative nature of science by duplicating, as closely as possible, what scientists really do through a series of distributed experiments. Our ideas are in concordance with the approach to scientific research that is adopted by the Southern California Earthquake Center. In the SCEC workshops students conduct research in multidisciplinary teams called "working groups."The distributed experiments will have the following characteristics: collaboration between schools and the university; computer network linkages; and the use of real-time data methodology.
To accomplish this, professional researchers will be recruited to give special lectures and seminars on the specific research project being conducted. LAPTAG already has among its members a number of prominent researchers that have volunteered to contribute their expertise to this project. The seminar series will encompass relevant scientific theory, construction of scientific instrumentation, calibration of scientific instruments, computer networking, and data analysis. The seminars would take place on Friday afternoons or Saturday mornings during the academic term, and during the summer break at a geographically convenient location. All participating schools have agreed to offer their facilities for these activities. This schedule will have the least impact on the school day, and will promote greater involvement from both teachers and students, by allowing them to maintain their regular commitments.
In addition to these formal interactions with experts, the students and their teachers will be encouraged to establish ongoing communication with the professional community via the Internet. These interactions will be possible due to the students having access to the powerful SUN workstations in their classroom. SUN Microsystems is an important partner in this effort. { SUN will donate ten workstations (valued at $100,000) and sell us ten more at half price. The money for the purchase will come from the Deans of the College and outside donors. (See appendix I).} No funds for the purchase of these computers are required from this grant. The experiments are designed to validate the contribution of individual students by making their results accessible to the world. High speed networking of the high schools and universities will decrease the separation of all involved to a keystroke.
The first-year project, a template for future efforts, is the construction and installation of seismometers at all the LAPTAG high schools. Ray Griffin from Monroe High School, who has extensive experience as a professional geologist, has made contact with officials from the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), who will partner in this project. The SCEC group is headed by Curt Abdouch who is the Director for Education Southern California Earthquake Center at USC. Walter Gekelman (one of the founding members of LAPTAG), from UCLA, is an expert in data acquisition and computer technology. We would like to make it clear that this proposal is not about building a seismic network. It is designed to teach students how scientific teams work, how distributed experiments are planned and how to integrate modern measurement equipment with computers and the Internet. When the earthquake experiments are running we will set about the task of designing another class of experiment using some of the technology we developed for the first.
For the seismometer project we propose to have two, one-axis seismometers at each school. The students and teachers will build the first instrument from a parts kit provided by a grant from the University of California Office of the President. Successful seismometers built by amateurs have been reported for many years. Several high schools have already constructed seismometers out of PVC pipes and using simple electronics. The second instrument will be a an inexpensive ($ 500.00), commercially available unit , highly recommended by SCEC. The commercial unit can serve as a reference instrument during the development stages of the student-built unit. When satisfactory performance of the two units has been established, each will then be used to measure seismic activity on different axes. In the second year we plan to add a third seismometer to complete our three-axis system. The seismographic data (which will be digitized and time stamped) will be placed on a computer network where it will be overlaid with a map of the city. Since the schools represent a large geographical base, various phenomena can be studied, as they unfold, over a wide area. Displays will be created to show local and global activity, average activity and other activity patterns. Our goal is to post the data as it is acquired on the World Wide Web and make it available in image and movie format where it can be studied by students everywhere. We also plan to expand the project in subsequent years to include other instruments such as magnetometers.
We will partner in the seismic research effort with The Southern California Earthquake center. Ray Griffin. a professional geologist, and Gerry Simila (California State University, Northridge), a geologist, will be part of our team and give us guidance on detection schemes, computer algorithms and instrument choices. They will also make their seismic database available to LAPTAG so that we may be able to compare and integrate them with our own. Curt Abdouch, Director of Educational Outreach for the Southern California Earthquake Center, will make his organization's resources available for these projects. LAPTAG members Steve Cooperman, Keith Barker and David Schilp attended a seminar series offered in the summer of 1996 by SCEC.
SCEC has promised to provide the following support to LAPTAG:
LAPTAG members will be invited to SCEC's monthly scientific seminars, providing current information on issues and developments in seismology, geophysics, and active tectonics.
All LAPTAG members will receive a complimentary subscription to SCEC's thirty-page quarterly newsletter.
The members of LAPTAG will be included in special-topic workshops such as the SCEC Data Center educational users workshop on the access and utilization of SCEC data; a Caltech/United States Geophysical Society Broadcast of Earthquakes (CUBE) educational users workshop on the installation of CUBE software for participation in the earthquake reporting system; and a Seismic Instrumentation workshop.
LAPTAG members will be invited to participate in the development and field testing of SCEC multimedia science modules.
There are several commercially available seismometers with a variety of specifications ranging from inexpensive one-component accelerometers ($450) to very expensive and sensitive three-component velocity transducers ($10,000 to $15,000). Guust Nolet at Princeton University established PEPP (Princeton Earth Physics Project), another project that places seismometers in high schools. PEPP is affiliated with TERC, one of the oldest and most established science and mathematics reform efforts in the United States. PEPP is currently using CMG-PEPP1, a seismometer developed in England, which uses long-period velocity transducers. Long-period seismometers are useful for teleseismic work in a relatively quiet seismic area, and, therefore, would not be useful in a very active seismic region such as Southern California. We propose to use a short-period version of the velocity transducer in use at Princeton. This will allow us to tie into and collaborate with the network already established by PEPP. One difference between the PEPP project and ours is our commitment to real-time systems. The Princeton project uses PCs and modems and data are analyzed and moved slowly from site to site.
During the early stages of the development of the system , the challenge is to bring individual seismic equipment on-line. As the project progresses, the focus will shift to address the task of bringing all of the individual sites together via the Internet. When this occurs the individual schools will become part of a wider team. Decisions on data reduction and display will be discussed and implemented by the students and teachers in engineering team meetings, just like the ones that occur in large aerospace or scientific projects. We feel that the challenges involved in this distributed experiment will inspire the students to form an intense collaboration with their peers.
In the third year we plan to add our next instrument, a magnetometer. The second experiment will study effects of "storms" in the plasma surrounding the earth. The schools will build magnetometers , or large pickup coils, (designed at UCLA) to record small fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field. These will be correlated with solar flare activity and magnetic storms. The students would be exposed to the study of plasma and geophysics of the solar wind, and the magnetosphere. This will expose them to an entire branch of science not normally seen in high schools. It will interface to a host of satellite projects funded by NASA in which supplemental information is available on the Web.
Commerical enterprises committed to this project will provide every participating school with an ethernet connection and one workstation powerful enough to act as a local server. The proper hardware and software to do this will be provided to each school. We seek grant support for "graduate student consultants" who will advise and help maintain these systems. We have established a WWW server at UCLA. Students from the individual schools have created home pages with information about their own programs and the projects in which we are engaged. This work is currently supported by a grant from the University of California Office of the President, and the UCLA Dean of the College of Letters and Sciences, in anticipation of implementation of a full-scale project. The LAPTAG summer distance-learning astronomy course has taken advantage of the UCLA-LAPTAG server.
Real-Time Data Systems:
Schools must communicate with one another as the experiments unfold. This necessitates the use of a real-time data acquisition system. A real-time system collects and analyzes data on the fly, as an event happens. This is necessary in situations where data have to be culled; that is unnecessary data are discarded by a program which inspects it as it is acquired. The LAPTAG system will go beyond this. In our distributed science network, real-time data will be acquired at the 18 participating sites. All systems must be synchronized and be subject to identical filtering procedures. We plan to synchronize the data acquisition computers in the schools by using either global positioning satellite (GPS) signals or time stamp signals which are presently available over the Internet. In doing so students will learn how GPS works and how accurate timing is accomplished worldwide. Since the data streams will eventually overwhelm the disk storage space, data must be reduced. This imposes the additional condition that the systems must communicate with one another and "decide" what to keep. For example, if a three channel seismometer digitizes at 100 Hz/channel; it will accumulate 52 Mb of data in a day. This is no problem for the Gigabyte disks we will have on each computer. But a great deal of this data will be uninteresting and must be culled. Over a period of months data can be shipped to UCLA or USC and archived on their very large (UCLA is upgrading its mass storage archive to 1/4 petabyte) storage systems. As multiple experiments come on-line the computer will have to discard meaningless data as it is collected/analyzed. We will build this capability into our experiments at the outset. The design of this process by a LAPTAG team of students and teachers will be another valuable educational experience for all concerned.
Fast Internet connections are a necessity so that the data acquired at the individual schools can be collectively processed on a simultaneous basis for all. Modems are useless in this context because of their slow transmission speeds. Last summer LAPTAG sponsored a distance astronomy course which used ISDN connectivity. It too was unsatisfactory. We have discovered that an essential ingredient for an effective and efficient link is a T-1 ( data rate of 1.2 Megabits/second ) connection to the Internet at every school in the project. During Network Day '96, sponsored by the Clinton Administration, most of the LAPTAG schools were internally wired for the Internet. The two local phone companies (Pacific Bell and GTE) have agreed to provide inexpensive T-1 lines to ISI, a local Internet access provider. Furthermore the Los Angeles Unified School District will provide Internet access at up to T-1 speed for any school that requests it. We will utilize what we determine to be the most flexible and inexpensive of these two options. The LAPTAG schools will have the bandwidth they need for this project! We underscore that the cost of the Internet connection and the computers will not be borne by this grant.
The constant collection of real time data will be processed using commercial scientific software (e.g. PV -Wave) with the objective of developing a seismic map of any earthquake activity in real-time. We will put the data on the Internet as we collect it. For example, a student in Indiana will be able to see the data as an earthquake occurs !
After much deliberation we have chosen UNIX workstations for this projects instead of PC's. There are several reasons for this. UNIX is presently the standard operating system in the science community. By learning how to use it, the teachers and students will be familiar with a tool they would have to master anyway. UNIX is capable of multitasking, that is smoothly running many processes simultaneously. Sun computers currently are used at 80% of the Webservers in the United States. Unix machines are very stable when running communications server software, whereas PC's and Macintosh are not. In short, they do the job we want done better than the others. Finally, the scientific software we have chosen for the project runs well on Suns.
Several months ago LAPTAG sponsored a full day UNIX workshop at UCLA. All of the teachers that will be part of this project attended and learned about the operating system. We also loaded a SUN computer with a new operating system to illustrate that it is not a difficult task. There is a high level of excitement in both the teachers and students for the prospect of working on the UNIX workstations.
Project Time Table
Workshops for Teachers:
Set up, management of workstations
Unix
Construction of seismometers
Set up seismometers in school sites
Begin data collection at school sites
Students design experiments
PV wave training
Seminars for Students and Teachers:
Seismology, Data Analysis Techniques,;
First Annual LAPTAG Conference
Set up second set of seismometers
Workshops for Teachers
Networking, Initiation of new participants
Review of second year
Continue data collection at school sites
Seminars for Students and Teachers
Data collection continues
Second Annual LAPTAG Conference
Magnetomers, Initiation of new participants
Review of third year
Magnetism
Magnetometers
Solar Flares
Third Annual LAPTAG Conference
Curriculum Development, Review of fourth year
Complete Case Study
Complete summative evaluation
Teacher Enhancement Goals
Clearly a crucial aspect of this proposal will be the preparation of the classroom teacher to be able to coordinate these projects with their regular classroom activities. The eighteen high schools, and community college that have volunteered to pioneer this project have highly motivated teachers who understand the potential for learning inherent in this proposal, and are willing to devote many hours to become appropriately trained to carry out their responsibilities. Teachers in collaboration with professional scientists will learn how to build the instruments; how to set up, manage, and maintain a computer network; and how to participate in the culture of research. Through this project, teachers will develop the knowledge and skills necessary to build instruments, to set up and manage a computer network, to participate in a culture of research, and to guide and assess their students ' growing competence in the areas of study.
University researchers will develop stronger pedagogical interests, begin to shift their preferred teaching practices in the directions they advocate for high school teachers.
Undergraduate and graduate students (with teachers and students' help) will develop skills in translating complex knowledge into forms and problems accessible to educators and students.
The project will develop approaches for extracting key lessons for use by less motivated teachers in the future. These may include model projects, videos, and other media made available to existing networks of teachers to allow them to benefit from this effort.
Huberman and Miles have found that in order to insure the successful continuation of an educational innovation there must be a critical mass of educators who are skilled in the content and committed to the innovation. . The LAPTAG members constitute the critical mass of personnel required to initiate the project. LAPTAG members have already demonstrated their commitment to the project by their attendance at several planning meetings, and by the creation of school home pages that are linked to the LAPTAG home page. However, the teacher enhancement program is the means by which the teachers will acquire the content and skills necessary to construct the seismometers and manage their operation; as well as the pedagogical skills to cope with the shift in relationships as teachers and students work within a more collaborative context. The seminars, meetings, and Internet interactions will not only sustain the members in the project, but they will also offer other teachers an opportunity to become involved with the project. As new participants are added to the project in the future, experienced LAPTAG members will mentor the novices. Formal seminars and meetings will be arranged so that the diverse needs of the novice and more experienced participants may be met.
The Teacher Enhancement Staff
The LAPTAG members have many years of experience in teacher enhancement and staff development activities. For almost 30 years, Bill Layton has organized and hosted an annual meeting of high school physics teachers at Occidental College. Barbara Gonzalez has conducted in-service workshops for high school teachers and college instructors in the United States and Canada. Joe Wise has shared his innovative science curriculum with scores of visitors to Crossroads School and in presentations at local, regional and national professional meetings. Jatila van der Veen has worked with the Remote Access Astronomy Project at UC Santa Barbara since 1990, writing curricula in astronomy and physics and doing workshops for local and national groups. Fred Carrington is a mentor and workshop organizer for the Southern California Alliance of Mentors in Physics Instruction (SCAMPI). Keith Barker is a Physics Teaching Resource Agent for the American Association of Physics Teachers. Nuria Rodriguez is a member of the Science Advisory Council of the College Board.
LAPTAG organized a Network Day in April 1995 on the UCLA campus which was very successful. Over one hundred high school teachers and administrators participated in a Saturday workshop that included presentations from GTE, Pacific Bell, and Sun Microsystems on the logistics of linking one's school to the Internet. The participants were also provided with the opportunity to "surf the net" using several computer labs on the UCLA campus. The members of LAPTAG have a combined total of over a century of teaching experience. Within the LAPTAG organization, members have contacts with many experts in scientific and educational fields. LAPTAG is fully capable of producing high-caliber faculty enhancement activities.
Program Evaluation:
Program evaluation will consist of two major efforts. A major effort will be made to provide formative evaluation information, particularly that which can be used to improve the project during subsequent cycles. A second focus will be on determining the extent to which the project achieved its intended goals. On the formative evaluation front, an evaluator will participate during the course of the project in order to understand the nature of the experience had by teachers, students, and university personnel. This evaluator will be particularly skilled in qualitative methods and will be able to draft interpretations of processes for review by all participants at key points during the year. Summaries of these interpretations will be shared at the annual conference and included in yearly reports to NSF. For both the formative and summative components, assessment of four sets of participants is intended: participating secondary school teachers ( the group of most focus), their students, university researchers, and university students. The evaluation will address the specific goals articulated for the project. For those outcomes involving a change in achievement, that is, a different understanding of the relationship of scientific content, skill in problem solving, and the development of team work skills, assessment models developed by the National Center for Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) will be implemented in the specific subject matter domains of interest. These models will be implemented in the Los Angeles Unified Schools as part of a new assessment system, and have been developed in computer version for a DARPA assessment project (CAETI, 1996).
Specifically, the evaluation will collected and analyze data in the following areas:
1. The extent to which the program met its planned schedule, particularly the manner in which interactions with the teachers were developed over time.(data sources surveys by all collaborators, interviews with teachers).
2. The extent to which teachers changed their knowledge about the scientific content under study (data sources - knowledge representation and problem solving tasks, their analyses of student work, administered on a pre and post test basis during second, third and fourth years of the project).
3. Student acquisition of knowledge in the areas of focus, their ability to solve problems, represent knowledge, and engage in collaborative learning (data sources- modified CRESST model assessments, administered at the end of the first, second, third and fourth years to students in participating classes and controls in the same school).
4. Observation of university classroom practices to determine changes in the degree to which integrated problems are provided, students are actively engaged, and collaboration is encouraged.
5. A brief simulation will be administered to University students participating on the project requiring them to translate complex ideas into key issues and appropriate tasks for secondary school teacher use and student application.
6. In the last year of the project, drafts of the "replicability version" for widespread dissemination will be reviewed by teams of experts, teachers, and the evaluation staff for their usability.
In addition, an assortment of logs will be kept by teachers, including the type of instruction offered, their interpretation of events, and the type of assignments given students. These will be analyzed independently to determine whether the project is having spill over impact on teachers' pedagogical practices.
Dissemination:
We of course want to share what we learn as a result of this project with the rest of the scientific and educational community. This will be accomplished by a variety of means. The Internet allows for an ongoing sharing of data and continued dialogue among the players. The Internet is also a key to those outside of the project. LAPTAG has already designed a home page on the Internet:
http://highschool.physics.ucla.edu/laptag
This home page will be continuously updated with information regarding our experiments, plans, seminars, and special activities. Our seismometers will be linked to the Southern California Earthquake Center, thus the data collected by our students may become part of a larger, regional database.
Dissemination will also take more formal guises. We intend to publish a newsletter where students can report findings from their experiments. The newsletter will also be posted on the Internet. We will organize an annual conference that will allow students and their teachers to present papers on their research, and to provide a vehicle for professionals to contribute their expertise.
We believe that others may be able to initiate similar projects within the context of their own region. However, the number of participating schools must be small enough to allow the personal interaction to be sustained. To assist other educational communities in developing similar programs, we will provide written information about our experiments, our equipment, and a case study of our project. We expect to produce papers suitable for publication in professional educational and scientific journals. Members of LAPTAG will make presentations at professional conferences across the country about the project.
This teacher enhancement project supports the development of exemplary teachers who may serve as change agents in their home schools and deepen the disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge of the teachers. This LAPTAG project, rather than being a provincial undertaking is, on the contrary, a chance to contribute to the goal of exemplary science education for the entire nation.