Reaching for Excellence in Grade 3-5 School Science- Lessons Learned from A THEC-ETSU STEM PD Project

This professional development project seeks to enable elementary teachers to reach for excellence in elementary school science through Inquiry-, Standards-, Problem- and Technology-based (ISPT-based) learning environments. The project provided a total of 102 hours of ISPT-based PD by sponsoring five Saturday workshops, one summer institute and three school visits. It intended to build up two instructional infrastructures under the ETSU Northeast TN Innovation STEM Hub: (1) A Bank of Human Resource: creating a cadre of skillful science lead teachers; (2) A Virtual Instructional Network: building up a web-based instructional resource network.

Various summative and formative assessment instruments were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the project, including: Teachers’ Content/Pedagogy Surveys, Classroom Observations, Content Assessments, Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) Reports and Students’ TCAP Achievement Tests. Overall, this program demonstrated statistically significant growth in all measured areas, including teacher quality, teacher opinions, preparedness, content knowledge as well as teachers’ TVASS reports and students’ TCAP results.