Share Paper: The Impact of Professional Development on Science Teachers’ Inquiry and New Literacy Practices: Using ICTs as Cognitive Tools
Abstract: The national science standards and science educators have been advocating inquiry-based. However, inquiry-based instruction is still not a common classroom practice. Technology integration might provide a direction to solve the problem. The purpose of the study is to investigate the effectiveness of adopting a situated technology integration framework (new literacies) on teachers’ inquiry practices. The team worked with 11 middle school science teachers throughout a two-week professional development (PD). Mixed-methodology was adopted to assess teachers’ change in content knowledge and scientific literacy, as well as their inquiry-based instruction and new literacies practices. The preliminary results indicate an improvement of teachers’ ...