Organization: Horizon Research, Inc.
Funding agency: National Science Foundation
HRI Role: Research
The goal of the Assessing Teacher Learning About Science Teaching (ATLAST) project was to develop instruments that researchers could use to study the effects of professional development for middle school science teachers. The instruments developed include:
- Content Clarifications (detailed descriptions of target content);
- Teacher assessments of science content knowledge,
- Measures of student opportunity to learn,
- Student assessments of science content knowledge, and
- A teacher questionnaire about views of effective science instruction.
For all instruments except the teacher questionnaire, three versions were developed, one for each of three science content areas at the middle grades level:
- Flow of matter and energy in living systems;
- Force and motion; and
- Plate tectonics
More detail about each of the content areas can be found in Content Clarifications.
More detail about the instruments and their development process can be found in Instruments.
The project was lead by P. Sean Smith (PI) and Iris R. Weiss (co-PI).
Project Link: https://horizon-research.com/atlast/
Research Purpose
Professional development for science teachers operates with an implicit theory that is largely untested. The theory asserts that professional development brings about changes in teachers’ science content and pedagogical content knowledge, which then leads to changes in classroom practice, ultimately improving student achievement. Testing this theory requires a coherent set of tools. Without these tools, professional development providers often lack data they need to inform revisions to their program designs and implementations. ATLAST created and disseminated instruments that measure changes in teacher science content knowledge and changes in student achievement. The tools that were be developed, and the processes used to create them, increased the capacity of the field to design and implement professional development experiences with documented impacts on teachers’ science content and pedagogical content knowledge and student achievement.