The National Science Education Standards (NSES) and the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) call for elementary school teachers to help their students learn science through hands-on, inquiry-based learning. Perhaps the best way to make this a reality is for preservice teachers to learn science in a hands-on, inquiry-based way themselves as part of their undergraduate education. PHY 160 together with GLY 160 comprise a two course physical science sequence at the University of Kentucky designed to fulfill this goal. PRISM support helped implement and evaluate the PHY 160 course.

PHY 160 meets for 6 hours per week for a semester. We mostly do lab work in small groups, but we have weekly whole-class sessions for reviews. We are using curriculum materials entitled Physics by Inquiry, developed through the physics education research done at the University of Washington. These materials focus on concept development including elicitation, confrontation and resolution of misconceptions that frequently have been observed. The six science topics addressed in the course are recommended in NSES and the Core Content for Assessment of KERA. Further, we are working with these materials in ways that fit with the Academic Expectations of KERA. We continue to refine the emphases and teaching approaches for the six topics as part of our implementation. We have documented where KERA Content and Expectations are addressed in the course, and we are making the document available to other faculty who are thinking about how to best educate preservice elementary teachers. (The document "Teaching University Physics in a KERA Environment." is available upon request.)

We have a strong interest in conceptions that students hold about selected topics in physics and astronomy and changes in these conceptions over time, as well as their attitudes about science and science teaching. While we have field tested an adaptation of the Revised Science Attitude Scale (RSAS) with both students in PHY 160 and in the science methods classes in the College of Education, we are disappointed with the sensitivity of the instrument and are continuing our search for an effective attitude measure.

We have been much more successful at assessing conceptual change, When we did not find a published physics concepts survey instrument suitable for our purposes, we developed and field tested one of our own. For the six content topics of special interest to us, we defined the important concepts that we wanted the students to develop and built questions around them. Before preparing test items we searched the literature for information on alternate conceptions that are frequently held by entering students, and incorporated these in the distracters of our multiple-choice Survey of Selected Concepts in Physical Science (SSCPS). We have also utilized individual videotaped interviews to gain insights into students' conceptions. While analysis of the interview data has not been completed, pre/post comparisons SSCPS results are very promising. Pretest scores typically average around 47% with a standard error of measurement (SEM) of 1.8% while posttest scores average around 80% with about the same SEM. This average gain from about 47% to 80% is highly significant and leads us to conclude that the course is helping students change their concepts to more scientific ones.

In the methods class that follows PHY 160 the students who have had PHY 160 tend to show a much richer understanding of physical science concepts targeted by PHY 160. With a better understanding of the underlying science, they are able to focus more of their effort toward the methods and materials they are to use to help elementary children construct an understanding of these concepts. Other students tend to be struggling to understand the science concepts, making it much less likely they will have the confidence and understanding to teach the concepts appropriately, which is our ultimate goal. They have expressed resentment bordering on hostility about the advantages they perceive their classmates as having. While this problem has been reduced as more student coming into the methods class have taken PHY 160, we still have students transferring into the program from other institutions that do not offer a comparable course. A student who has taken PHY 160, completed her methods class and is now completing her student teaching commented: " PHY 160 is a course that was very beneficial to me. It has already helped and will continue to help me plan lessons, organize thematic units and understand physics topics that were unclear before."

In addition to our work with preservice teachers we used the approach and materials in an intensive three-week summer institute for in-service teachers in the summer of 1998. The major purpose of the institute was to assist teams of leading elementary teachers from Central Kentucky in constructing understanding of selected physical science concepts needed in their classrooms to address state and national content standards. A modest amount of time was also devoted to analysis of exemplary instructional materials. Based on this work and follow-up activities we are convinced that intensive and extended efforts of this type are required to promote the needed conceptual understanding. Further, more follow-up support in classrooms than is now available is needed to maximize the potential for more than incremental improvement in student performance.

We strongly believe that higher education institutions must make a greater commitment to the improvement of teacher education by implementing standards-based instruction for both preservice and inservice teachers.

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