Towards Creating a Feedback Loop: Assessing Perceptions of Teacher Preparedness and Beliefs About Student Learning Amongst Math Teachers, University Faculty, and School District Administrators

Authors: R. Lorraine Bernotsky, Kimberlee Brown

One of the continuing barriers to successful STEM education across all levels of learning is the lack of a connection between the three constituencies that most impact secondary students in their STEM educational experiences: 1) the university faculty who prepare the teachers, 2) secondary STEM teachers, and 3) the school district administrators who employ them. We use multiple methodologies to examine and quantify three related questions that are central to the continuing development and sustainability of STEM education improvement efforts:

• To what degree is the content taught by STEM university faculty congruent with what secondary STEM teachers are required to teach by the school districts that employ them?


• To what degree do STEM teachers feel prepared by their universities to address numerous issues related to teaching secondary math and science and how do those perceptions compare to the perceptions of the principals and school administrators who employ them?


• What is the effect of sharing our research findings regarding these issues with university faculty, teacher graduates, and school district administrators on their desire and ability to create a feedback loop addressing issues related to STEM teacher preparation?

In other words, are math and science teacher preparation programs providing teacher graduates with what they need to successfully promote STEM learning as in-service teachers and if not, where are the gaps and what can be done about closing those gaps?
The National Science Foundation has invested considerable resources into math and science educational reform at the secondary education level.  These efforts have spanned a range of curricular reform, professional development activities for secondary teachers, and recruitment efforts to increase the quality and quantity of math and science teachers.  This study focuses on an area that has received little attention in peer reviewed literature, but may be critically important to systemic reform in math and science education: building data-driven communication between in-service teachers, the university faculty who teach them, and the school district administrators who employ and evaluate them.

While it is certainly true that pre-service teachers are by definition involved in a process that involves to some extent a university faculty supervisor and school district personnel (cooperating  teacher, administrator, etc.)  during their field experiences, there remains the largely unexplored territory of university faculty who are not field supervisors but who teach math and science education courses, in-service teachers who are no longer part of induction processes, and school district administrators who must contend with reform efforts in their schools.  It is the lack of quantitative research involving these constituencies and, most importantly, the relationships between and among them that speaks to the utility of our study.  

All teacher preparation institutions must be accredited at the very least by their respective state agencies, but if STEM education is to develop partnerships with school districts which are truly beneficial to all parties, there must be systematic communication between the educators who prepare future STEM teachers, the teachers themselves, and the people who employ them.  But what mechanisms exist for linking the needs of local and regional schools (who are likely to employ teacher graduates from local and regional universities) with the universities who prepare the teachers?  In fact there is no real way to test the efficacy of any school improvement effort until these issues are resolved because university faculty will continue to meet accreditation requirements by doing what they believe is best in terms of disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge and this may or may not (more likely the latter) be congruent with the improvements efforts of secondary schools. There is a potential clash of beliefs here that has less to do with who is right or who is wrong, but has do to instead with the lack of a reliable and meaningful feedback loop.  Until there is some aligning of these constituencies, we will not be able to effectively evaluate improvement efforts in a holistic manner.  Our study seeks to create a context in which we can provide the information stakeholders need to have data-driven discussions about STEM teacher preparation programs that result in all three constituencies (university STEM and education faculty, school district administrators, and in-service teachers) working towards enhancing STEM teaching and learning by revising teacher preparation programs based on feedback from local and regional schools.