November 1997 Center To Create Useful Tools in Math, Science
Kit Peixotto brings more than a decade of experience in the fields of science education and standards-based curriculum and instruction to her position as Director of NWREL’s new Mathematics and Science Education Center. A former Professional Development Associate with the Laboratory, Peixotto returned to NWREL last year after serving with the Oregon Department of Education in the areas of curriculum, instruction, and field services. Before earning her master’s degree in teaching at the University of Louisville, she taught middle school science in Virginia and New Mexico.
In this interview with Northwest Report co-editor Lee Sherman, Peixotto talks about the scope and direction of the center’s activities.
Q: What are the biggest areas of need in math and science education in the region?
Peixotto: There’s a real focus on mathematics, both within the region and nationally. Much of that is being brought about by the Third International Mathematics and Science Study—TIMSS (see Editor’s Note). It is a powerful piece of research, different from the first two studies because it looked not just at the achievement levels but at a number of other factors contributing to achievement. It looked at curriculum—at how curriculum is intended to be delivered—and then at instruction—how curriculum is actually being delivered. TIMSS gives us information about how those factors are affecting achievement. It gives us a way to look at achievement scores in countries that are doing better in certain areas than the United States, and suggests how their curriculum and instruction are supporting those areas.
Q: It gets behind the scores.
Peixotto: That’s right. It goes beyond just looking at the horse race. We want our students to be achieving at high levels and meeting standards. State and national standards point to the things kids should know and be able to do if they’re going to be productive citizens and successful workers. What TIMSS does is provide us some information about how curriculum and instruction can help kids to achieve high standards. Because of TIMSS, and also because of initial scores on state- wide assessments in mathematics in some of the states, the indication across the region is that mathematics is an area we need to focus on.
Q: Is that because U.S. math scores were lower than science scores in relation to other nations?
Peixotto: Yes. That’s right. It also comes from looking at the percentage of students in the states who are not meeting state standards. In some cases, those scores show that only 20 percent of the students are meeting the standards. It’s causing many people—teachers, students, parents, superintendents—to say: "We need to pay attention to this. We need to look more closely." What TIMSS suggests, I think, is that we need to look closely at our curriculum and our instruction.
Q: So curriculum and instruction in mathematics are a high priority for the center. What other priorities will you focus on?
Peixotto: Closely connected to curriculum and instruction is classroom assessment. Many Northwest states are going to statewide assessments—and statewide assessments that are very different from what they’ve had in the past. The kind of assessment I’m talking about is one that nudges instruction toward a focus on conceptual understanding—the kind of learning that national and state standards are calling for. There is also a need for teachers to be able to incorporate those kinds of assessments on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, into their instruction. Students need opportunities to experience those assessments, to practice doing them, to understand what the expectation is, to know what success looks like in a open-ended problem-solving type of a test as opposed to one that focuses only on arithmetic and computation. We will be looking at developing some tools that will help teachers understand and use those kinds of assessments, to make that very explicit connection between instruction and assessment. Many of the new assessments have the power to inform instruction—to help teachers understand not only where their kids are, but perhaps how their instruction is helping kids to get to a certain goal or, sometimes, hindering them. The focus for the center will be on developing tools to help them do that. Accompanying those tools will be services to help them understand and implement the tools. One of the very interesting findings of TIMSS is that many teachers in Japan have incorporated the tenets from the NCTM standards into their instruction, especially the important focus on depth of understanding, conceptual understanding. The study shows that for U.S. teachers, the goal was more typically how to solve a problem in a particular way using a particular procedure. In Japan, the focus was on the concept and getting students to understand that concept.
Q:Instruction is aimed at a different level of understanding.
Peixotto: It is. A very different level. Conceptual understanding is something that everyone knows is important, but we seem to be struggling with how to get there. So as I envision it, the classroom assessment work is going to be tied very closely to the instruction and how to teach—and assess—in a way that will help students move toward that conceptual understanding.
Q: Will you be working with the Laboratory’s Assessment and Accountability program?
Peixotto: Yes, very definitely. We’ll be taking the six-trait writing assessment model that was developed there and moving it into the math arena.
Q: What about other regional needs and priorities?
Peixotto: The other need, and a priority for the center, is inquiry-based science teaching. Again, the national-level standards are saying that teaching through inquiry is the underpinning of good science teaching. Unfortunately, it’s not the way most teachers have learned science themselves. It’s not the way many secondary science teachers have been prepared. Most elementary teachers haven’t had experience in doing inquiry-based science teaching. So it’s not happening in a lot of places.
Q: How do you plan to address this need?
Peixotto: The publication that we did this year, Inquiry Strategies for Science and Mathematics Learning, is going to be supported by a video on inquiry-based teaching at the high school level. That came about because many people said: "It’s so difficult to do inquiry-based teaching at the high school level, where there’s pressure to get through this book and that course. How do we do it?" We’ve been out taping across the Northwest and have found some great examples of how teachers are doing it—how they’re meeting some of the challenges.
Q: What other projects are under way in the center?
Peixotto: We’re working on a video for mathematics right now that targets middle school parents. It gives parents an overview of how middle school mathematics is changing and why it’s changing. We’ve also done some interviews with business people talking about how they use mathematics in their day-to-day work. One of the interesting interviews was with a woman who owns her own advertising business, and she talked a lot about how she uses math. Construction is another area where math is used extensively. It isn’t just accountants who use math.
Q: Are these videos something you’re going to make available for people to buy, or will they be used as part of a training program?
Peixotto: My vision right now is that the videos will be available through our resource collection, and that people can check them out. We’re also planning to do some resource kits. One of the kits will be on inquiry-based teaching on, say, a ninth-grade science topic such as ecology. The kit will include support materials—the video, the publication—but will also include curriculum materials that link directly to the designated topic. The kit could be introduced by one of our staff, who would go to the school and present the kit and talk about how to use it. But it also could be a stand-alone product that doesn’t require a Laboratory staff member to present it. As school staff are working on moving their school to inquiry-based science, for example, they could borrow the kit from our resource collection, use it for three weeks, and do some of the activities. It will include guidelines for conducting workshops around the kit—you know, watch this video and then ask these questions. At the elementary level, a mathematics kit might include student literature—stories the teacher could read that would help engage the kids in a math concept, say, in the area of triangles.
Q: So the kit would help teachers make connections across subject areas.
Peixotto: Right, exactly. The real challenge is how to take the theory and translate it into practice. A focus across all of our services and priorities is helping teachers understand what research is saying about best practices—helping them translate that in a very practical way into their classroom. It’s hard work. It’s difficult for teachers because of all the other things they’re dealing with.
Q: Why does the region need the Laboratory’s program in math and science?
Peixotto: We have the capability to identify and stay on top of the important research in the field and the current thinking among the experts—to identify that, to bring it together, and to translate that into something that works for teachers. We try to do that in a way that is efficient, that engages the teachers, that models the idea of best practices. We can give them the tools that they, as the professionals, can use and adapt to their needs. In addition to the products we’re developing, the center has an extensive resource collection that targets K-12 teachers. It’s a lending collection, accessible through a searchable database on NWREL’s Web site at http:// www.nwrel.org.
Editor’s Note: Some 40 nations participated in the achievement portion of TIMSS, which measured the math and science performance of a half-million students at five grade levels during the 1994-95 school year. Results released earlier this year showed that seventh- and eighth-grade American students scored about average on the math portion of the tests and did only slightly better in science. For fourth-graders, U.S. science scores fell behind only Korea’s. Six other countries shared second place with the United States. The math achievement of fourth-graders, while not as strong, was still above the international average. Seven countries, including Korea, Singapore, and Japan, scored above the United States. Six other countries tied for eighth place, with national-average scores not statistically different from those of the United States. Education Week quoted William H. Schmidt—an education professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing and the U.S. national research coordinator for TIMSS—as saying, "Put in terms of report-card grades, American fourth-graders earned an A in science and pulled a respectable B-minus or C-plus in math." The TIMSS research- ers, working with the National Center for Improving Science Education, also studied the curricula in 50 countries, examining 628 math and science textbooks and 491 curriculum guides from around the world. In a report on that investigation, the researchers concluded that the math and science curricula in the United States were "a mile wide and an inch deep" (Source: Education Week, "Surprise! Analyses Link Curriculum, TIMSS Test Scores," April 2, 1997; and "Fourth-Graders Do Well in Math, Science Study," June 18, 1997. Find these articles and more on TIMSS on the Web at http://www.edweek.org/).
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