The National Research Council advocates for students’ engagement in authentic science practices at the secondary level. However, science educators at the secondary level often lack experience with practices that the research community uses to generate knowledge. At the University of Michigan (U-M), an inter-professional STEM learning community was established to bridge the gap between educators and the scientific community. The exigency for the formation for the community was a series of instructional modules that were developed and implemented in a teaching methods course for pre-service science teachers. The exploratory laboratory, based on current environmental chemistry research, was designed to expose students to the research cycle, including the development of research questions, collection of environmental samples, chemical analysis, data interpretation, and presentation of the results of their work. As a part of the instructional modules, pre-service and mentor teachers participated in the curriculum development process by tailoring the module to suit their students’ educational level and learning needs. The ways in which participants experienced the curriculum and their conceptions about its application in their own classrooms were investigated using qualitative analysis of written reflections and video-recorded classroom observations. Results of this analysis will inform best practices for authentic science practice instruction at the secondary level, while contributing to improvement of the design and implementation of the instructional modules in iterative cycles. The inter-professional learning community will serve as a model for how members of the education and research communities can collaborate to improve STEM teaching and authentic learning efforts.

Authentic environmental chemistry research in the high school classroom

255th National Meeting (2018)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.