Interesting video, and I will definitely check out the website.  I am curious:  the middle-school teacher in the video talks about how it's nice to have the curriculum laid out, and then she can modify it as she sees need or opportunity.  This raised three questions for me:

1.  What supports do you provide for teachers' adaptations?  Are there adaptations they could make that would not "fit" with your intent for the students' experience?

2. This teacher values the curriculum in part because she had none before. Have you tested this with teachers who do already have a curriculum (or text book) as a "base" to work from?

3. is the whole curriculum delivered via the computer?  How do the teachers make use of the feedback they get about their students?  

Thanks!

-- brian 

Hi Brian,

Thanks for your post and your questions I am happy to answer them to the best of my ability: 

1.  What supports do you provide for teachers' adaptations?  Are there adaptations they could make that would not "fit" with your intent for the students' experience? 

When teachers participate in our studies we require that teachers implement the whole program with fidelity, this means that they have to teach all the lessons and are not allowed to skip any of them. However, we also allow them to make any additions they like and for the most part, these also facilitate science learning. 

ESCOLAR curriculum is also freely available to anybody that wants to use it and in that case, they can accommodate however they like. We support teachers as much as they require from us.

2. This teacher values the curriculum in part because she had none before. Have you tested this with teachers who do already have a curriculum (or text book) as a "base" to work from?

We get a variety of teachers (e.g. technology experience, textbook oriented) and while some of them have not used online based programs like ESCOLAR, there are others that have and they also have reported the value they see in our curriculum. Although, I like to say that ESCOLAR is unique in that it provides complete instructional units with lessons plans instead of individual lessons (which is what most online programs do like Brain Pop, Kan Academy, CK-12, among others) that teachers need to figure out how and when to integrate with their adopted program (if any). 

3. is the whole curriculum delivered via the computer?  How do the teachers make use of the feedback they get about their students?  

ESCOLAR is designed for teachers to use in their classroom and they are key to implementing the lessons and guide student learning experiences. Most of the content is delivered via the computer, but there are also a lot of hands-on experiments and investigations that students need to complete in the lab or field. In each unit, for example, students need to conduct a team project where either gather data to support an investigation or gather materials to conduct an experiment or model. 

In the online professional development, we encourage teachers to use formative assessment data to modify instruction as needed to make sure student make adequate progress. That is why we created the report system in the first place. Reducing the time that teachers need to spend on grading, automatic scoring by the computer and automated reports, gives teachers quick indicators of achievement that they can use to provide the needed supports for individual students. 

Thanks for sharing your work! I'm interested in hearing more about: a) the built in supports or students with learning disabilities - what do those look like for the teacher, and for the students? and b) your approach for measuring impact - what types of data are you collecting to determine impact on science knowledge development? Looking forward to hearing more!

Hi Sarah,

Thanks for your post and your questions I am happy to answer them too:

a) the built in supports or students with learning disabilities - what do those look like for the teacher, and for the students? 

eText supports are embedded in the units. They enhance text with additional media or information—such as pop-up definitions—so that students can better comprehend what they read. These include:

• Text to Speech
• Vocabulary Support
• Digital Note-taking
• Captioned Videos
• Alt-tags

eText supports are especially helpful for students who struggle, such as students with learning disabilities and English language learners. The following link has an image of how those look like on the website: eText supports image link.

Teachers have free access to an online professional development, answer keys, lesson plans, automated quiz reports, student's digital notebooks, and discussion forums. The following link has an image of how those look like on the website: Teacher resources.

b) your approach for measuring impact - what types of data are you collecting to determine impact on science knowledge development? Looking forward to hearing more!

In addition to gathering measures given at schools (e.g. smarter balanced assessments, other science achievement test), we also collect content-specific assessments that we developed in-house. While we created these content-specific assessments, we have tested their reliability and validity and have also found that they are highly correlated with other standardized measures.

These measures were specially designed to see if the students had learned main concepts required by the Next Generation Science Standards to make sure content learned in the units generalize to these standards. You can find more detailed information in our most current publication: 2018 publication.

Really helpful Fatima, thank you! 

Great, I am glad you found it helpful! If you want access to our site please ask.

Nice learning tool, Fatima.  Like Sarah, my question is on supporting students with learning disabilities.  I like the built-in eText supports, but how are you supporting them in a Constructivist approach through this online environment?  How do you know that all students are truly comprehending the material and the objectives of each lesson?  Can you share more about how the students are working together, rather than just completing each module independently?  Also, considering scalability, can you predict any barriers that teachers will face integrating this into their current classrooms?  

To add to some of Christopher's questions, does your team have any opportunities to speak directly with students, to ask them what aspects of the learning experience they think work really well for them, which pieces are trickier, and what they might do differently if they could change some aspect of the web platform? Thanks, Fatima!

Thank you for sharing your project! As a classroom teacher, I am wondering how you pull resources together and also, how does evaluation happen in the classroom. Above you mention focusing on formative assessments and also automating the grading (and reports) for teachers - how have teachers responded to this? Do they like it or do some of them prefer to grade differently than what you provide?

Hi Pati,

Well we have all the resources available in our ESCOLAR website. There you will find both the student and the teacher platforms. Teachers have the online instructional modules that provide instructions and guidance for using all the resources effectively. All evaluations, including formative and summative are online but there is the option of doing them by hand if teachers print our available pdfs. However, if you want the system to score them automatically students must complete them online. Experiment and lab sheets need to be scored by teachers and we provide answer keys, this is also true for other question prompts that are embedded in text to check on students' comprehension of material. Teaches have shared their appreciation for the answer keys.

For all teachers that participated in our studies so far we have required them to use the automated reports (once they become available) and we didn't get complains on that other than needing a bit of more instructions on how to access/use them. 

Sorry for my delayed response, I had a very busy day today!