Exploring the impact of longer term intervention on reforming Life Science teachers' approaches to science instruction: Seeking a more effective role for laboratory instruction

This research explored the effects of longer-term intervention designed to prepare a group of ten life science inservice teachers to reform their teaching strategies and to restructure their course organization to begin units of instruction or sequences of related lessons with laboratory investigations and to utilize the data and observations from these experiences to drive further instruction. A 15-week, 3-semester hour course in The Teaching of Chemistry, designed to model this approach, was utilized as the vehicle for this inservice experience. The ten inservice life science certified teachers were part of the 24 teachers enrolled in this course. They observed three modeled lesson sequences, taught and modeled lesson sequences to their peers and designed and taught a sequence of lessons in their own classrooms. This classroom based instruction was observed and videotaped by the researcher. The videotapes were analyzed using the MR-STBI.; Of the ten LSTs, nine actually prepared for and attempted to teach a lesson sequence that used laboratory experiences as the driving force for further instruction. From this group, five reformed their instruction and restructured the sequence of presentation, in that they became more oriented toward the modeled instruction. Two additional teachers who had taught this way before were able to continue with this approach. The pre- and post-laboratory teaching behaviors exhibited by these LSTs were those characterized by and consistent with those used by the Model instructor and antithetical to those exhibited by a teacher who taught traditionally.; All but one teacher had over ten years of classroom experience; otherwise there were no other similarities in professional background. In addition, the availability of laboratory facilities was not common across these teachers. Therefore, the conclusion is drawn that length of professional background and availability of laboratory facilities had minimal impact on ability, over the short haul, to reform the instructional approach to fit the modeled instruction. The data related to changes in students' attitudes, as expected, was not significant over the two to three month period of the study.