PATHWAYS TO INQUIRY: ONLINE TOOLS FOR EARTH SCIENCE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPERS AND TEACHERS TO ASSESS AND INTEGRATE SCIENCE AS INQUIRY INTO EARTH SCIENCE TEACHING

The NSF Teacher Professional Continuum Proof-of-Concept Project, Pathways to Inquiry (PTI): Earth Science, is creating two interrelated Internet-based tools to help professional developers and classroom teachers assess science process skills in the context of earth science. The Inquiry Skill Analyzer (iSA) is a short online assessment to help teachers (and students) to: 1) identify strengths and weaknesses in their understanding of science process skills in the context of earth science, and 2) track their progress in these process skills as they strive to improve their expertise over a period of time. The iSA contains assessment items that cover 34 inquiry process skills across seven of the eight Science as Inquiry strands of the National Science Education Standards (NSES) (Content Standard A, Gr. 5-8) as well as the NSES Earth and Space Science strands (Content Standard D, Gr. 5-8). The iSA will allow geoscience professional development staff (or teachers) to formatively assess inservice teachers (or students) in their science as inquiry skills.

Once an inquiry skill area has been identified, teachers can go to the Inquiry Activity Portal (iAP) to find an online lesson that has been keyed to both earth science topics and specific inquiry skills they wish to develop. The iAP contains a matrix of inquiry activities that represent a mix of newly developed and/or adapted online lessons in which the specific inquiry skills utilized by the students have been identified. Each online lesson will be accompanied by an “inquiry overlay” clearly identifying the inquiry skills used in the lessons, as well as an overview of the pedagogical strategies used, additional worksheets to support any adjustments to the activity, other supporting resources, and assessment ideas.

The PTI website will also include video interviews of geoscientists explaining how they approach their research, teacher inquiry blogs, and the ability of participating teachers to submit an inquiry activity to be included in the iAP. One of the most important purposes of the PTI tools and website is to help increase users' proficiency in the area of science process skills within the context of earth science content. PTI: Earth Science is in Year 2 of development. Today's presentation will give a brief demonstration of both the iSA and the iAP.