Community partnership grant generates preservice teacher and middle school student motivation for authentic science and mathematics

School Science and Mathematics, Jan 2003 by Selover, Nancy J, Dorn, Ronald I, Brazel, Anthony J, Dorn, Denise

Linking to Middle School Teachers

The McKemy teacher volunteering as a partner teaches eighth-grade mathematics. Students involved in the field science experience took pre-algebra and honors algebra. The teacher organized the class to match each field experience with measurement and number sense performance objectives. Table 1 summarizes the student tasks organized by the partner teacher.

In the first field experiment, 150 MMS students were divided into 12 groups. The second field trip was reduced to 110 MMS students divided into 12 groups. A third trip included about 80 MMS students divided into 12 groups. ASU student volunteers accompanied each of these groups.

Data Acquisition and Analysis

In addition to the elementary education majors, a number of non-education ASU students volunteered for the field project. Interviews with 30% of these volunteer students generated results discussed later. ASU and MMS student participant interviews took place immediately after each field trip. ASU student interviews took the form of an e-mail response, with a 100% response rate (due to extra credit rules) within 2 weeks of the field trip completion. ASU students responded to the following questions:

* What grades) (if any) do you anticipate teaching? Did this trip influence your answer?

* Did you talk about college with the middle school students? If so, what did you talk about?

* Do you think there is potential in linking science and mathematics education through making realworld measurements? Did this field trip experience have anything to do with this opinion?

* Did you like science before taking this class? Did this field trip show you any ideas about bringing science into your future classrooms?

* Would you run a similar field trip when you are teaching? What would you do differently? Similar?

* What other observations do you have about the trip?

* Was the time worth the 50 [extra credit] points?

* Do you want any future contacts with MMS teachers for your future observations/student teaching?

The large number of ASU student responses were placed in three "bins" for each interview question: positive, negative, and ambiguous. Selected quotes derive from the bin with the largest number of responses. Thus, our selection represents an attempt to present the "mode" or most typical response. Interview responses in minority bins contained abundant extraneous comments, for example: "It's amazing how much respect you can gain from [middle school] kids by treating them like adults and having fun with them." Another ASU student responded,

There was a lot of paper work involved on this trip, and I think that the children could have had more fun by spreading the trip out. Keep the same worksheets and all, but when there was that much to do in one day, some got tired out, bored, and didn't even do their work.

Thus, our selection attempts to portray the typical response, even though the larger range of comments represents a valuable data set unto itself.

MMS student participant interviews took place in an open-ended format, whereby the middle school teacher solicited open-ended comments surrounding student interest in science, mathematics and college, in relation to the trip. The end interview form is called "taking stock" and is available from the authors upon request. MMS student comments were placed in two data bins initially: relevant to research question and irrelevant to research question. For those relevant to the research question, comments were then placed in subsequent bins related to the research questions with representative responses selected for presentation. In contrast to the purposeful portrayal of representative survey responses, we did not select "representative" scientific data. Figures 2-4 in the paper present the full student data collected from student data collection sheets.