The purpose of the study was to measure the impact of a two-year STEM intervention on the science learning of gifted students in a Grades 2-5. The intervention, STEM Starters, provided sustained and embedded professional development to classroom teachers and to pull-out program teachers to support the implementation of a problem-based curriculum in their classrooms.
The current study was part of a larger randomized field study on the effects of teacher professional development and the implementation of an inquiry-based curriculum on teaching and learning in science. Only results for identified gifted students are reported here. Randomly selected from five low-income schools in a southern state, 70 teachers from Grades 2 through 5 were assigned to the experimental and control conditions. Students assigned to experimental teachers were designated as students in treatment classrooms, and students assigned to control teachers were designated as students in comparison classrooms. Randomization occurred at the teacher level.
During the intervention, randomly assigned teachers participated in 120 hours of professional development that focused on science content, inquiry-based instruction, specific problem-based curriculum units, technological applications, differentiation of instruction, and the identification of gifted students from underrepresented groups. As part of the intervention, teachers attended two summer institutes; the institutes were one week in duration. During the academic year, embedded professional development, defined in this study as peer coaching, supported teachers in the implementation of the problem-based curriculum and in building science content knowledge.
Although mutltilevel modeling is often the most appropriate technique for analyzing data collected from students nested within classrooms (O’Connell & McCoach, 2008), in this study gifted students were spread across classrooms and did not meet the suggested minimum cluster size of 10 (Bickel, 2007). For each measure (Process, Concept, and Content) researchers conducted two one-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) tests (one for the Year 1 data and one for the Year 2 data) to compare students’ posttest scores between the treatment and comparison groups using the pretest scores as a covariate to control for initial differences between the two groups on the measure. The researchers also used eta squared to report the effect sizes. Eta squared is the proportion of the total variance that is attributed to the independent variable (Becker, 1999).
Statistically significant gains in science process skills, science concepts, and science content knowledge by gifted students in the experimental group when compared with gifted students in the comparison group were found.
These results document the efficacy of sustained teacher professional development and a rich problem-based inquiry curriculum at the elementary level in developing the science talent of students.