Esther Dabagyan
SED 625SC
9/20/2006
Dr. Rivas
Current Event #1
In July of this year I, along with many middle school teachers in LAUSD,
attended training on how to implement an Immersion Unit focusing on particular grade
level standards. For the 8th grade, that standard was regarding density and buoyancy. This
Immersion unit was based on the inquiry model that many schools have adopted in the
science departments in the form of Project-based science (PBS). I have already
implemented much of this immersion unit this school year, but I wanted to know if there
is research was there to back it up. As I searched for this evidence I found an excellent
article called Performance of Students in Project-Based Science Classrooms on a
National Measure of Science Achievement. I am aware that the article is not exactly
current, since it was accepted and published on the 24th of October, 2001; however, it was
so relevant to my inquiry that I decided to write my current event about it.
The article presents evidence through scores from a national test called The
National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) from 1996. This test is used across
the nation and across many subject matters. The researchers were able to pull out the
science portion from a now released version and compare the mean scores for population
groups that were similar to the population group that they were testing (mostly White and
middle to upper middle class). They chose an alternative public high school that has
about 450 students and is located in an urban university town in the Midwest. The school
is considered alternative because students must apply to attend, however, admission is
granted by a lottery based system and by first-come, first served.
The high school is not a magnet school; however, the teachers in the science
program had developed and implemented a 3-year PBS curriculum for all students called
Foundations of Science (FOS) in conjunction with educational researchers at the
University of Michigan. The FOS program runs from the 9th to the 11th grade, after which
students have the option to take a separate physics course. There are 4 teachers in the
FOS program and they are all certified to teach secondary science. Laptops were
available for the students at a ratio of 2 students per laptop and students were also
allowed to check them out overnight. The school seems to have a very unique setting in
that while the students are comparable to White students throughout their state, they have
a very liberal atmosphere; teachers are known by their first names, there are no bells,
students can create their own courses with mentoring and there is little pressure for
students to attend class.
The results of the comparison showed that PBS students scored significantly
higher on more than half of the items when compared to the sample of national averages.
After looking over the data, I believe the researchers did an excellent job in trying to
make sure their population was not miss-matched with those of the national sample. They
even compared the PBS students to two different national samples; one sample consisted
of White students and another of students who were not eligible for the lunch program.
The study found that students in an inquiry-based science curriculum could perform as
well, if not better that students nationally on an achievement test. The research seems to
be well conducted and the conclusion reached is valid. Although they only tested 142
students, the range of scores that demonstrated the difficulty of test questions were very
closely aligned and confirmed to me that although the PBS students found the same
questions that were hard for the national population also difficult, they were able to
answer them more correctly.
As I read the article, several objections came to mind regarding the possible
implications of the study and the methods of testing. When I arrived to the conclusion, it
seemed that the authors had predicted exactly what my critiques were and addressed
them. For example, the national test is taken by 12 graders who may not even have a
science class their last year, whereas the PBS students were 10th and 11th graders that
were in the middle of their science course work. The authors acknowledge this point as a
possible further reason why the PBS students performed better on the test. I also found it
interesting that the PBS students would do better on questions that required a constructed
response compared to the national student sample. Project-based learning tends to be very
collaborative where students must exchange and develop their own ideas; I believe this
aids students in developing their skills in explanatory writing.
In conclusion I found the article to be confirming of my existing thoughts
regarding Project-based science. Not only do I enjoy teaching the immersion unit, I feel
the lengthy process of asking questions, discovering answers and formulating their own
experiments and ideas truly helps empower my students. I would like to see this type
study expanded to include a greater sample size. The article made no mention of class
size which can be a very large factor in how science in taught, especially PBS. If the
study were done again, perhaps not only with a larger total student population size, but
also taking note of the class size I would be further convinced of the effectiveness of
PBS. I also believe that studies must by done using populations that are mostly minority
students. Because much of inquiry science relies on students constructing their own
knowledge, not only from new things they learn, but also prior knowledge, student
background begins to play a far more important role in PBS than acknowledged in this
article. I will continue to pay close attention to the impact of PBS in my own classroom,
especially when my students take their first science Periodic Assessment.