Curriculum Research Development Group

Students in the Summer Science Enrichment program spend most of the time in each course conducting laboratory or field investigations.

Year in Review 2003

FOCUS AREA 01.
MATHEMATICS & SCIENCE EDUCATION

On Beginning the Romance Among Curriculum, Teaching, and Assessment (Romance Project)
CRDG, in collaboration with the Stanford Education Assessment Laboratory at Stanford University, continues to work on a National Science Foundation funded study to improve learning for middle-school science students. The FAST curriculum is being used to study ways to strengthen the link between content, teaching, and assessment.

This project includes a feasibility study to develop a framework for linking science achievement with methods for assessing different aspects of achievement. The framework is then used to create a set of assessments, both formative (embedded within a unit) and summative (end of unit) for a sequence of investigations from FAST. If the framework and methods have a positive effect on teaching and learning, a full-scale research and development effort will be conducted.

Using Hawai‘i’s Unique Biota for Biology Education GK–12
Generally referred to as the GK–12 project, this is a joint effort of CRDG and the faculty of the Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology (EECB) program at UH Mānoa. Selected EECB graduate students receive a fellowship paid through a National Science Foundation grant to work in K–12 education. The program focuses on improving the fellows’ communication skills, upgrading classroom teacher content knowledge about Hawai‘i’s endangered environments, and reducing the time between generating new knowledge in science and influencing student learning in classrooms. CRDG faculty provide the education component of the fellows’ preparation, and work with them to engage students and teachers in inquiry investigations related to research each fellow is pursuing. In 2003, ten graduate students completed their education component training at the ELS.

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