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.

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 don't 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.

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.

Working with CSIP fellows helps teachers implement inquiry-based teaching and see its benefits on motivation and achievement by their students. Teachers report that they have learned new science content and teaching strategies. Through partnering with teachers, Cornell graduate student fellows gain teaching, communication, and scientific skills. Eighty-nine percent of faculty advisors have credited the fellowship with enhancing their advisees` teaching skills, 70% have rated it more valuable than a typical teaching assistantship, and 33% have noticed positive impacts on their advisees' research, for example through broadening their perspectives or helping them to reconnect with the basic science behind their disciplines. Because Cornell fellows create and use curriculum materials related to their own expertise, they gain experience integrating education with research. Through implementing and evaluating student-centered teaching strategies, they also engage in the scholarship of teaching in ways that many have said will carry over into their careers. A fellow whose doctoral research focused 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, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Chemical Ecology. Another fellow expanded her CSIP work into a book for teachers on the genetics of edible plants, published by the National Science Teachers Association.

Marianne E. Krasny, PI