Houston Elementary Science Alliance

Purpose

The Houston Elementary Science Alliance (HESA) sought to provide elementary school teachers with content and hands-on activities that would enable them to feel comfortable teaching science and passing on their training to colleagues.

The training involved two-person teams from eleven Houston-area elementary schools--over a hundred people in three years--in five Saturday workshops and an intensive six-week summer session. The sessions, conducted by university and secondary school science faculty, covered a full range of topics from physical and natural science. Teachers were instructed in the presentation of scientific concepts through hands-on exercises and classroom projects that use low cost, readily available materials. Each teacher developed a detailed action plan for using the new knowledge in the classroom. Teachers were also expected to pass on their training to colleagues in their schools.

Innovative Features

While training elementary teachers in hands-on science teaching techniques is a common undertaking, this project is unusual in its size and scope. It operates under the sponsorship of a prestigious science teaching institution and includes faculty from three research universities (Rice University and the University of Houston along with Baylor College of Medicine) and the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and involves secondary and elementary teachers. The program is remarkable in its length (180 hours) and in the wide range of its curriculum. It represents one of the earliest curricular reforms teaming teachers with disciplinary scientists.

HESA is designed to create an extensive "cascade" effect: learning passes from Alliance faculty to teachers who attend the workshops, to their colleagues in the schools and from them to all their students. Requiring that teachers participate in teams of two from each school provides for mutual support when they return to teaching. The likelihood that the learning will find its way into the classroom is further increased by requiring participants to complete an extensive action plan. The commitment of teachers to making three in-service presentations to their colleagues involves the entire faculty of their schools in improving science knowledge and pedagogy.

Evaluation

The knowledge gained by the participants was assessed through two standardized tests and an interview. A questionnaire allowing teachers to express their opinions about different aspects of the program and to report on the applicability of the workshop experience to their teaching permitted additional evaluation./

Project Impact

Teacher response to the program was overwhelmingly positive. Of the 38 participants in the last grant-sponsored offering of the course, 29 recommended it at the highest level, while only two indicated that they would not recommend it to their colleagues. The teachers were unanimous in believing that they would use both the content knowledge and the teaching strategies they had learned in the classroom. Nearly 90 percent expected that their colleagues would be responsive to their in-school presentations.

On a test of science knowledge administered before and after the training program, teachers in the most recent group showed an increase of more than 80 percent. On the basis of his classroom observation of a sample of these teachers, the evaluator concluded that all were employing the teaching strategies emphasized in the training program, in most cases fully and apparently successfully. The participating teachers held in-service sessions for their colleagues according to their commitments, but the results of these sessions were not tracked systematically.

Project Continuation and Recognition

One group of three HESA participants provided in-service programs for over 500 teachers in the Houston Unified School district. The successor projects to HESA have extended beyond the city of Houston to surrounding school systems as well as to schools in Dallas and San Antonio.

The program continues with support from a variety of funding sources, including the National Science Foundation. The summer institute now focuses on integrating mathematics and technology into science instruction, and on helping teachers to react to new science education standards. The project currently involves teachers from 15 elementary schools in the Houston area, and promotes activities throughout the year to support systemic change in science education. The current project, the "Harris County Alliance for Science, Mathematics and Technology Education," is a three-year partnership of Baylor College of Medicine, the Harris County Department of Education and three school districts, and includes a year-round project called Tackling the Tough-to-Teach Science Topics.

Available Information

Information about the Houston Elementary Science Alliance's programs and other educational outreach programs of the Baylor College of Medicine is available from:

Nancy Moreno
Division of School-Based Programs
Baylor College of Medicine
1709 Dryden, Suite 545
Houston, TX 77030
713-798-8200

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