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Orientations to Science Teacher Professional Development: An Exploratory Study

  • Published:
Journal of Science Teacher Education

Abstract

Just as individual teachers have orientations to teaching and learning science that influence their practice, we assert that professional development (PD) projects also have an orientation that guides the design and implementation of the entire project; a construct we term “PD Project Orientation”. The purpose of this study was to validate the existence of this new construct. Using various data sources from nine PD projects we generated and characterized five PD project orientations. We illustrate the characteristics of each orientation with descriptions from specific projects and show the frequency of the orientations and how these orientations were emphasized within each PD project. This study has implications for those designing and implementing PD for science teachers, as well as PD evaluators.

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Notes

  1. See Abell et al. (2007) for further details on the structure of the project profiles and how they can be used for evaluation purposes.

  2. The term educators is used generically here to indicate anyone listed in Table 1 as having a specialized knowledge base about educational practices; for example, science teacher educators, education administrators, and K-12 master teachers.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the contributions of other members of our evaluation team who assisted with data collection and analysis: Mark Ehlert, Patrick Brown, Kristy Halverson, Michele Lee, and Chia-Yu Wang.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. W. W. Wright Education Building, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA

    Meredith A. Park Rogers & James S. Cole

  2. University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

    Sandra K. Abell & Rose M. Marra

  3. The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

    Fran Arbaugh

  4. Howard Payne University, Brownwood, TX, USA

    Kristen L. Hutchins

Authors
  1. Meredith A. Park Rogers
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  2. Sandra K. Abell
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  3. Rose M. Marra
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  4. Fran Arbaugh
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  5. Kristen L. Hutchins
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  6. James S. Cole
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Meredith A. Park Rogers.

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Park Rogers, M.A., Abell, S.K., Marra, R.M. et al. Orientations to Science Teacher Professional Development: An Exploratory Study. J Sci Teacher Educ 21, 309–328 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10972-009-9179-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10972-009-9179-y

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