Learning progressions for effective environmental science teaching

Background/Question/Methods

How can teachers use insights and tools from learning progressions to improve their environmental science teaching? We addressed this question in the Culturally Relevant Ecology: Learning Progressions and Environmental Literacy Math Science Partnership project at 4 LTER sites over the past 6 years.  We carried out research with thousands of MS and HS students, using interviews and written assessments, to describe their understandings in 3 areas: 1) water movement and substances in water, 2) carbon cycling and ecosystems, and 3) biodiversity and evolution. Responses were coded into four distinctive levels that represent a learning progression towards principle- and evidence-based reasoning. Several hundred teachers participated in professional development workshops aimed at helping them understand and use learning progressions in their classrooms. Instructional units crafted to help students through the transitions among the levels were provided to the teachers, and their implementation of learning progression-based teaching was supported by in-school visits from project educators. Teachers completed written assessments of their content and pedagogical content knowledge and written surveys of their knowledge, practices, motivation and constraints. A subset of teachers (16) were interviewed and observed to gain more insight into the factors supporting and limiting their use of learning progression in their teaching.

Results/Conclusions

We developed a framework for effective teaching informed by learning progressions that recognizes three overlapping pools of teacher knowledge and skills: 1) science content and curriculum; 2) students’ scientific understanding and practice; and 3) instructional strategies. Our assessments of students and teachers revealed that most used force-dynamic (Level 1 and 2) or phenomenological, school science (Level 3) reasoning.  Teacher content knowledge usually was higher than their students, but many didn’t give principle-based (Level 4) responses and most articulated learning goals for their students that are more aligned with Level 3 understandings. Teachers entered our project with limited understanding of learning progressions, and many developed more nuanced and sophisticated grasp through their involvement. Teachers’ ability to interpret students’ ideas benefited from having a learning progression framework. However, their ability to act on their insights was more limited. This interface between their understanding of students and teaching lies at the heart of the challenge of using learning progressions in teaching. Some teachers were able to describe effective “next instructional steps” when confronted with fictional student responses in assessments, but classroom practices observed in a subset of teachers’ classrooms showed only rare cases of effective responses to student thinking based on learning progressions.