Sharing and Communicating IERI: Addressing the Invisible Challenge Nancy Butler Songer

1. Sharing and Communicating IERI: Addressing the Invisible Challenge Nancy Butler Songer The University of Michigan www.biokids.umich.edu

2. Disseminating Research:Insights from Mature IERI Projects • What obstacles have you come across in trying to deliver and share your information? With what audience(s) do you have trouble? • How do you overcome these obstacles? • What outlets have you used (e.g. media, print) to communicate outside the academy? • What has been the result of your efforts?

3. BioKIDS: Kids’ Inquiry of Diverse Species Nancy Songer, School of Education, Univ. of Michigan Phil Myers, Department of Zoology, Univ. of Michigan Michelle Astolfi Cesar Delgado Tanya Dewey Karen Dvornich Roger Espinosa Mike Giordano Amelia Gotwals George Hammond Pier Sun Ho Anne Huber Ben Kelcey Hee-Sun Lee Silvia Lee Scott McDonald Tom Vlajkov

4. PADI: Principled Assessment Design for Inquiry Geneva Haertel, SRI International Robert Mislevy, University of Maryland Sub-Contract Principal Investigators: Nancy Songer, University of Michigan Mark Wilson, University of California, Berkeley Kathy Long, Lawrence Hall of Science, Berkeley

6. Educational Challenge Between fourth and eighth grade, American students’ achievement and understandings of complex science decline relative to their peers internationally. Declines are pronounced for urban students, and in many cities standardized test scores remain among the nation’s lowest.

7. Educational Challenges Within High-Poverty Detroit Public Schools • Extreme pressure to perform well on high stakes tests • Extreme levels of student, teacher mobility • Nearly double national poverty rate: 70% free/reduced lunch • Class sizes often over 30 • ~ No substitutes, outside recess • Virtually no experience with complex reasoning in science or digital resources Focus Audience: ~30,000 high-poverty Detroit middle school students; 95% African American, Hispanic or Mixed Race

8. Addressing The Challenge • Research Areas • Guiding Complex Reasoning in Science • Assessment Systems for Science Inquiry (with PADI) • From Digital Resource to Cognitive Tool • Focus on Persistence Within Individuals (scaling) • Empirical Results on Longitudinal Learning • www.biokids.umich.edu

9. “A tremendous amount of money has been allocated to educational research…. • What have you learned? • Which programs work? • Which programs should Congress allocate money to, and why?”

10. “A tremendous amount of money has been allocated to educational research…. • What have you learned? • Which programs work? • Which programs should Congress allocate money to, and why? • Not my educational challenge!

11. Visible Challenges • Concrete empirical evidence • Concrete empirical evidence within the entire Detroit Public School District • Logistics • Recruitment • Barriers to randomization

12. Additional Invisible Challenges • Concrete empirical evidence • Concrete empirical evidence within the entire Detroit Public School District • Logistics • Recruitment • Barriers to randomization • Language • Presentation

13. Addressing The Challenge: Language • Research Areas • Guiding Complex Reasoning in Science • Assessment Systems for Science Inquiry • From Digital Resource to Cognitive Tool • Focus on Persistence Within Individuals • Empirical Results on Longitudinal Learning

14. Cognitive ToolCyberTracker for field-based data entry Enter in the field via PDA Visual Maps Icon-based entry

16. Addressing The Challenge: Language • Research Areas • Guiding Complex Reasoning in Science • Assessment Systems for Science Inquiry • From Digital Resource to Cognitive Tool • Focus on Persistence Within Individuals • Empirical Results on Longitudinal Learning Blah Blah Blah Academic Blah….

17. “A tremendous amount of money has been allocated to educational research…. • What have you learned? • Which programs work? • Which programs should Congress allocate money to, and why?”

18. Coalition for National Science Funding Event “The U.S. faces competition from new centers of innovation. For example, the U.S. share of world-wide high-tech exports has been in a 20-year decline. From 1980 until 2001, the U.S. share fell from 31 percent to 18 percent. At the same time, the global share for China, South Korea, and other emerging Asian countries increased from just 7 percent to 25 percent.”

19. “ Since 1980, the number of Science and Engineering positions in the U.S. has grown at almost five times the rate of the civilian workforce as a whole. However the number of Science and Engineering degrees earned by U.S. citizens is growing at a much smaller rate.”

20. What can your IERI project tell us about these issues?

21. Addressing the Invisible Challenge • Repackage your IERI findings into simple, persuasive language

22. Coalition for National Science Funding • “Examples of major innovations spawned by NSF research include… • In the mid-1990s, two NSF-supported graduate students discovered a better way of searching data on the Internet and used their idea to found Google, Inc., a $50-billion company that employs more than 2,000 people. • Fundamental research supported by NSF led to the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which is used widely to detect cancer and internal tissue damage and is predicted to be a $110-billion industry by 2007.”

23. Addressing the Invisible Challenge • Our results suggest that understanding science and math involves: • increased time on topics • systematic guidance in developing more complex ideas, and • an ability to revisit and deepen understandings in a systematic manner.

24. Addressing the Invisible Challenge • Our results suggest that understanding science and math involves: increased time on topics • Both groups made significant improvement on declarative knowledge • However groups using our full program made much larger gains on higher order thinking While less time on topics does not have a large impact on students’ learning of facts, it does make a large impact on students’ ability to reason about complex scientific problems “Wide reading beats rereading”

25. Addressing the Invisible Challenge • Repackage your IERI findings into simple, persuasive language Examples of major findings spawned by IERI research include: 1. [Yours] 2. [The person next to you]

26. Addressing The Challenge: Presentation What can your IERI project tell us about these issues? Who is your audience?

27. Conclusion: An Educational Researchers’ Perfect Day • It is the year 2008 and your have reams and reams of amazing, methodologically-sound research results • You write the next grant, and they fund it, providing you with MORE MONEY THAN YOU ASKED FOR • Who, besides your partner and your mom, can describe your findings? • Is this your educational challenge?

28. For more information: www.biokids.umich.edu