Impact of Authentic, Mentored Research Experiences for Teachers on Pedagogy (Fundamental)

Research experiences for teachers (RET) programs provide K-12 teachers with valuable professional development opportunities, increase teachers’ self-efficacy and allow them to gain further mastery in their subject. While these programs exist at universities across the country, the exact structures of the programs and the nature of the actual research experience vary broadly. This paper focuses on understanding how the structure of the research experience can affect teacher outcomes. More specifically, we will compare the research experience and teacher outcomes over four cohorts of teachers within the same Center’s RET program. These four cohorts total 41 middle and high school teachers from various disciplines who completed the 5-week summer program between 2015 and 2018. All four cohorts received similar training in terms of technical skills, professional skills, and overall exposure to the Center’s research. However, two of the cohorts had the opportunity to engage in an authentic independent research project under the mentorship of one of the Center’s faculty, while the other two cohorts had a broad introduction to a wider variety of research activities and completed a group engineering design project. All four cohorts were required to develop lesson plans for their classrooms based on the research experience. The individual lesson plans from all four teacher cohorts are analyzed to determine how the teacher’s experience in the program impacted their lesson planning in terms of overall quality, research themes addressed, depth of technical understanding, teaching strategies, etc. Survey and interview data are used in addition to the direct assessment of the lesson plan to determine other potential contributing factors such as the quality of the mentoring relationship and the teacher’s attitudes, perceptions, and self-efficacy before and after the completion of the program. In addition, teachers’ ongoing engagement after completing the program is assessed to discern any long-term impacts on pedagogy.