Reform in biology education: Teachers' implementation of a new biology curriculum

Biology: A Community Context (BACC) (Leonard & Penick, 1998) is a National Science Foundation funded high school biology curriculum designed to meet the goals of the reform movement in science education as envisioned in the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996) and the Benchmarks for Science Literacy (American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 1993). This study of a pilot implementation of the BACC curriculum illustrates some of the issues that emerged for teachers as they used an inquiry curriculum in the context of a district emphasis on meeting standards. In the first paper, “Teaching Biology Content Using an Inquiry Curriculum,” I discuss the issues involved with teaching biology content using this inquiry curriculum. Teachers had difficulty bridging the gaps they perceived between the content in the curriculum and the content in their district standards; they had difficulty using the inquiry activities in the curriculum to teach content, and they did not accept some aspects of the instructional strategy. Professional development for teachers implementing inquiry curricula in the context of accountability for content oriented standards needs to address these issues directly and in an on-going fashion.;In the second paper, “Is Science Education Reform Reaching the Classroom?”, I use a framework developed by the National Research Council (2002) to investigate the ways in which these teachers and their classroom practices were affected by national standards. This framework has three channels of influence: ways in which national standards might affect classroom practice and thus student learning. These are curriculum, teacher development, and assessment and accountability practices. In the pilot implementation of BACC, all three channels had been influenced by “Standards” based reform, but they were not internally aligned nor were they completely coordinated with one another. This led to implementation issues including increased breadth of objectives, increased time pressure and inadequate resources. These issues were barriers to teachers' full acceptance of BACC. Addressing alignment in more depth prior to implementation of new curricula could lead to better classroom practice.