Do Highly Science Qualified Teachers Provide High Quality Science Instruction? Evidence from the Boston Science Partnership
This was a qualitative, descriptive study using data that were collected from 37 teacher interviews and classroom observations, conducted with 10 middle and 27 high school teachers in 8 Boston schools. Interviews lasted approximately 30-45 minutes; classroom observations lasted for an entire instructional session, regardless of how long a particular session took. Interviews employed a semi-structured protocol; classroom observations employed the BPS's science observation instrument. BPS has adopted Bybee's 5E Instructional Model (1997), which is operationalized within the district's observation instrument. The instrument was further modified by using MDRC's classroom observation protocol (Estacion, McMahon, Quint, Melamud, & Stephens, 2004) in order to systematically document how teachers' instructional time was used, and how much of their instructional time was spent enacting the district's specified pedagogy as compared to providing procedural instructions, lecturing, managing student behavior, and not being involved in the lesson at all. In addition, 16 middle and high school administrators were interviewed using a semi-structured protocol.
Teachers' qualifications were measured according to their certification and assignment status as follows:
Cert-0 = Not certified to teach any subject
Cert-1 = Certified to teach a subject, but not science
Cert-2 = Certified to teach a science subject, but not the science subject taught
Cert-3 = Certified to teach the science subject taught = highly qualified
Teachers' experience was operationalized as follows:
Low experience = 1-2 years of teaching experience
Medium experience = 3-5 years of teaching experience
High experience = 6+ years of teaching experience
High quality science instruction was based on the district's expectation that at least some class time should be spent on each component of the 5E model, albeit not necessarily equal time or even very much time. Therefore, our definition of high quality instruction corresponded to the number of components of Bybee's 5E model that were observed within a single class session.
All interviews were audio taped, supplemented with researchers' field notes, transcribed, and analyzed using Atlas.ti software. District data, interview data, and observational field notes were triangulated and analyzed according to the categories above, as well as teachers' and administrators' definitions of high quality science instruction and the challenges teachers' faced in their teaching. Of the 37 observations, the estimation of instructional time spent on district pedagogy during a single session was reliable enough in 26 classroom observations for us to confidently conduct additional analysis on the use of instructional time. The five-member research team consensually coded all of the interviews; our inter-rater reliability scores averaged .81. We met to record initial speculations, "tentative interpretations" of the meaning of the data (Murphy, 1980), and to identify themes and categories that emerged from the interviews.
