The Elementary Teachers and Curriculum Materials (ETCM) Project researches the enhancement of pre-service elementary teachers’ capabilities to critique, modify, and enact curriculum materials for effective science teaching. The project uses AAAS Project 2061 curriculum evaluation criteria as a lens to help pre-service teachers evaluate and modify materials, while at the same time emphasizing somewhat different aspects of effective science teaching. This includes the manner in which pre-service teachers negotiate multiple discourses including the discourses of their own communities, the discourses of science, the discourses of science teaching, and the discourses in the elementary schools.

Analysis of our data indicates that overall, while the pre-service teachers learned how to use the AAAS Project 2061 evaluation criteria in evaluating curriculum materials, they did not integrate use of the criteria into their own practices. Additionally, while we found some uptake of certain frameworks and criteria, we also found some resistance to the notion of critiquing curriculum and to enacting instructional models that did not coincide with their initial views of good science teaching.

Overview of the unit:

The complete Instructor's Users Guide is now available.

This module is designed for instructors of elementary science methods courses to use to introduce pre-service teachers to the AAAS Project 2061 curriculum criteria. This module provides pre-service teachers with an understanding of
1) how to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of science curriculum materials using the Project 2061 criteria
2) how good curriculum materials support good teaching practices,
3) how to modify the instructional approach of curriculum materials that do not meet the criteria.

This module addresses 10 of the 22 criteria identified by Project 2061. The criteria examined in this module are:

Criterion IA - Conveying Unit Purpose
Criterion IC - Sequencing of Activities
Criterion IID - Building on Student Ideas
Criteria IIIA & IIIB - Engaging Students with Real World Phenomena
Criterion IVC - Representing Ideas Effectively
Criterion IVF - Providing Practice
Criterion VA - Promoting Student Thinking
Criterion VB - Guiding Interpretation & Reasoning
Criterion VIB - Assessing Student Progress

The activities in this module assume that pre-service teachers are in field placements and have access to science units taught in field placement classrooms.

It is intended that the course instructor use this module to supplement existing course material on science teaching methods. Each lesson addresses a specific criterion or set of related criteria and follows a general sequence of activities that is integrated in the the existing course content. The instructor can insert module lessons into the syllabus at the point where the module lessons fit with existing course topics. For example, if an instructor addresses topics related to assessing student progress, then the instructor would insert lesson #4 (assessing student ideas) at that point in the syllabus. As a result, the module lessons can be integrated into the many different course designs. An example integration is presented.

This version of the module includes approximately 10 hours of in-class instructional time and 2 to 3 hours of student homework time.