Abstract

Graduate students who are fellows in Cornell Science Inquiry Partnerships (CSIP) work with teachers to bring current science and research skills into middle and high school classrooms.

Issue

National and state science education standards call for students to engage in inquiry, asking scientifically-oriented questions, using evidence to address these questions, formulating and evaluating explanations, and communicating their results. Many teachers are interested in implementing inquiry-based teaching but do not know how to get started or lack the confidence to attempt such projects on their own. Especially teachers with no research experience tend to feel unprepared to lead students in carrying out authentic experiments. However, many science graduate students are interested in working with teachers through educational outreach programs that enable them to share their scientific knowledge while also learning effective teaching strategies that they will be able to employ in their future careers as professional scientists and faculty members.

Response

The Cornell Science Inquiry Partnerships (CSIP) program provides NSF fellowships to Cornell graduate students who work in middle and high schools as science teaching partners. CSIP fellows represent a variety of academic disciplines in the natural, physical, and social sciences and engineering. They spend an average of five hours per week in preparation and ten hours per week teaching collaboratively with partner teachers in about 20 rural and urban schools within 100 miles of Cornell.

CSIP makes it possible for teachers to collaborate in long-term partnerships with science graduate students. As CSIP fellows and teachers work together to facilitate student inquiry projects, together they deal with unexpected or unknown outcomes, address misconceptions, assess student learning, and determine how open-ended inquiry can best be used in various types of classes.

Impact

Working with CSIP fellows helps teachers overcome their initial hesitation about inquiry-based learning and see its benefits on motivation and achievement of students at a variety of grades and achievement levels. Participating teachers report that they have learned new science content, new teaching strategies, and the confidence needed to implement inquiry-based teaching on their own without further assistance from a fellow. Through partnering with teachers, Cornell graduate student fellows have gained improved teaching skills, greater awareness of the challenges of teaching, heightened interest in participating in outreach, and improved communication skills. Seventy two percent of their faculty advisors rated the CSIP experience more useful to the fellow's career than a typical campus teaching assistantship and cited beneficial impacts on the graduate students' skills in teaching, communicating, and time management. A fellow whose doctoral research focuses on insect pheromones worked with middle and high school biology classes to investigate the extent to which humans react to olfactory cues, producing research results suitable for presentation at the annual meeting of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences. An article about the students' research, co-authored by the fellow and her partner teachers, is under review by a professional science journal.

Funding Sources

• Other Federal non-USDA (e.g., NSF, NIH, DOA, DOD)

Key Personnel

• Marianne Krasny, Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University
• Nancy Trautmann, Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University
• Linda Tompkins, Department of Education, Cornell University