Betsy Davis - Applied Science Meets Teaching in Assistant Professor's Classrooms
As a young engineer with Hewlett Packard, U-M assistant professor of education
Betsy
Davis would often visit schools to talk to students about what it was
like to be a woman engineer. Davis enjoyed the kids’ frank curiosity,
and began to realize “I was enjoying my volunteer work more than my real
work.” After
four years, she returned to school to earn a PhD in education from the University
of California at Berkeley. Davis wanted to do more for woman engineers, she
says, than just be their “cheerleader.”
Today, Davis is a rising star in the field of science education. In 2002 she became one of sixty recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Davis was the only educator among the scientists and engineers who received the award, which recognizes “the most promising young researchers in the nation.” The National Science Foundation had already given her its own Early Career Award, which included a $723,676, five-year grant, which is now being used to create a sophisticated website called CASES (Curriculum Access System for Elementary Science), targeted at new elementary and middle school teachers. Now beginning the fourth year of the grant, Davis is gaining insight into teachers’ on-the-job struggles and at the same time offering them a lifeline they can use immediately in the classroom.
CASES offers several different kinds of help to elementary and middle school teachers, starting with four-to eight-week unit plans. Each unit is organized around a major question. A unit intended for K-2 asks, “How are animals the same? How are they different?” Teachers who have used CASES praise the unit plans; most sites on the web, they say, offer only daily lesson plans. Davis points out that CASES is also one of the few websites designed expressly for new teachers.
Teachers who have used CASES are enthusiastic. New teacher
Colleen Cushing, now teaching second grade in Bloomfield Hills, says, “CASES
really strives to come up with activities meaningful to the unit of study.” Amanda
Trestrail, a recent U-M grad now teaching third grade in Chicago, says that
CASES not only has lessons written out “in an easy-to-follow manner” but
also “has links to the 
science behind the lessons, so I can make sure
I understand the concepts I am teaching.”CASES embodies Davis’s
commitment to “inquiry-oriented” science teaching. With inquiry-oriented
science, students learn how to “apply the science rather than just memorize
ideas.” For
example, explains Davis, elementary students studying plant growth in a traditional
class might simply read from a textbook or color a picture of a plant. But
in an inquiry-oriented class, the students might go into the playground and
make observations of the plants they see, or experiment with what makes plants
grow by putting them in a dark closet. They might also read and color, but
only “as a part of a larger inquiry
into a question they cared about,” Davis says.
Davis believes that inquiry-oriented science may be one of the answers to the problem of underachieving American students. For many years, American kids have scored below those from many other countries on tests of mastery of science. Their knowledge of science is wide but not deep, say Davis and other researchers. “By engaging in inquiry-oriented science,” she says, “the teacher and the students all slow down and get into a concept in depth. Teaching for understanding and inquiry-oriented teaching go hand in hand.” This is especially important given current legislation such as No Child Left Behind, with an emphasis on helping all students understand core ideas.
Davis and other U-M education school faculty members Helen Harrington and Bob Bain are following the progress of several education majors in their undergraduate careers and student teaching. Through interviews and analysis of student work, the three faculty members are studying how students gradually become more sophisticated learners as they move from course to course. The three are also looking at how the students’ ideas of teaching change. Davis and her colleagues are still analyzing the research, but she notes that the findings can contribute to an area of pedagogy that is not very well understood. “Most teacher education research looks at preservice [student] teachers during one semester,” observes Davis. “We’re trying to get a sense of how their ideas change and become more sophis-ticated over a longer period of time.”
One of the challenges of being a science educator, Davis notes, is that many new elementary teachers feel intimidated by science and don’t come to her class with much confidence. It pleases her that at the end of every term, “one or two students will say to me, ‘I was really scared, because I’ve always hated science. After taking this class, I feel I know what I’m doing when I teach science. I feel like I can do it now.’”
by Eve Silberman
This article appeared in the Fall 2004 edition of Innovator
