Three new Centers for Learning and Teaching hope to enhance the world of science education, thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

NSF has earmarked $100 million for this project. The new centers will receive approximately $10 million each over a five-year period.

Each center will encourage the development of new faculty and materials to increase learning in grades K–12. Additionally, the centers will prepare graduate students in areas of critical national need to assume leadership positions.

The centers focusing on improving science education include the following:

Center for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS)

The CILS project will begin operating this summer and will be headquartered at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, a hands-on science and art museum. CILS was established to improve the understanding of how children learn in informal science settings such as museums and how these techniques can be applied to a school setting.

Bronwyn Bevan, CILS director, said the center aims “to connect the two worlds” of informal and formal science learning and to strengthen those connections. The program will focus on three areas, including generating new knowledge and research on how informal science institutions can help schools, developing leaders who can use that knowledge, and working with museum educators.

Participating researchers and graduate students will study science teaching methods, along with factors that affect the design of creative learning environments and alternative ways of teaching and learning science content. Research studies will be conducted at the Exploratorium and other science museums, zoos, and aquaria in the United States; the London Zoo; and other centers in Britain over the next five years.

Bevan added that students would participate in apprenticeships, working at such locations as the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History in Texas and the Seymour Marine Lab in Santa Cruz, CA.

Each CILS partner will provide faculty and courses under the Exploratorium’s direction:

• King’s College will enroll 12 doctoral students and two postdoctoral fellows in a funded program to pursue issues of learning and teaching in informal settings.
• The University of California, Santa Cruz, will accept up to 21 doctoral students and five postdoctoral fellows in psychology and education programs focused on informal science learning; the university’s education department will enroll 19 students in a master’s program on informal science education.
• The Exploratorium will coordinate a 120-hour certification program for 140 museum educators to help them support teachers, students, and the general public.

The Exploratorium will work with the college and the university to operate the center.

Center for Assessment and Evaluation of Student Learning (CAESL)

This program aims to address the national need for increasing the assessment capacity within science education in schools. CAESL officials define increasing “assessment capacity” as the expertise, designs, structures, and supports that enable local districts and schools to use assessment as a tool for enhancing science learning.

Steven Schneider, program director of mathematics and science at WestEd, the project’s sponsor, said the center would aim to improve student learning through classroom assessment practices. “We hope to be an assessment clearinghouse,” said Schneider, who will serve as director of the CAESL project.

Schneider said the center’s activities will revolve around five objectives:

• Enhancing the capacity of prospective assessment and evaluation professionals through graduate programs
• Developing and field testing models for enhancing the formative and summative assessment capabilities of practicing science teachers through professional development and developing teachers’ capacity to lead assessment efforts in their districts
• Enhancing the formative and summative assessment capabilities of preservice science teachers
• Conducting applied research to inform the center itself, the field, and practitioners on formative and summative assessment practices and technology-intensive assessment environments and using the findings from this research to generate new products
• Enhancing the capacity of parents, school administrators, policymakers, and the public to make decisions about and support the appropriate educational roles of different kinds of assessment and evaluation

Though the center’s primary focus will be on classroom assessment practices, the project also seeks to better align large-scale assessments with continuing formative classroom assessments that inform teaching and enhance learning.

Schneider said officials are recruiting students to participate in the CAESL project, which will be based at WestEd. The center will launch its academic programs in the fall.

Besides WestEd, the Concord Consortium; the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing/University of California, Los Angeles; Stanford University; Lawrence Hall of Science; and the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, will partner to work on the CAESL project.

Several major school district partners will collaborate with the center and serve as testbeds for CAESL activities and resources. The center will also work with San Jose State University to co-develop and integrate a variety of assessment resources into its preservice and graduate programs. Apple Computer Inc. will support the center by providing $1.25 million in the form of consulting, equipment, and dissemination.

Information Technology in Science (ITS) Center

A partnership between Texas A&M University’s Colleges of Science and Education, the ITS Center seeks to prepare science education specialists with expertise in the use of information technology to learn, teach, and assess science through a program of study involving interaction among scientists, education researchers, and education practitioners.

The ITS Center offers professional development opportunities for teachers of grades 7–12 and the education of approximately 60 professional development specialists with the capacity for national leadership. The center’s research objectives focus on the impact of information technologies in four areas:

• how science is done
• how science is taught and learned
• how the processes and products of learning science can be assessed and learned
• how a network can involve teachers of grades 7–12 and their students in a community of scholarship

Jane Schielack, ITS center director, said the program’s activities are conducted by teams of graduate students, faculty members, and teachers working with Texas districts involved in systemic reform. The teams participate in research and development projects that introduce modern science methods and integrate information technologies into science teaching.

The center’s main component is its Specialist Certification Program, which trains participants in the use of information technology to enhance the science education experience for teachers and students. Participants study the impact of information technology, including modeling, visualization, simulation, and data management, on how science is taught and learned. Participants also examine how science learning is assessed and how communities of scholarship are built.

Schielack said more than 70 secondary-level teachers and education administrators spent three weeks at the Texas A&M campus in September 2000 for the first of two six-hour summer graduate coursework sessions that comprise the two-year program. The second session is scheduled for July 2002.

“Through successful professional development programs, teachers will be better equipped to contribute to the overall science and mathematics learning experience,” Schielack said.

Other partners in the program include Texas A&M’s Corpus Christi campus, the University of Texas at Austin’s Charles A. Dana Center, Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, the Fort Worth Museum of Science, the Texas Rural Systemic Initiative, and various Texas urban systemic initiatives and projects.