Inquiry in Motion: Increasing the Science Achievement of All Students by Improving Teacher Inquiry-based Instruction

Student performance in science classrooms has continued to falter throughout the United States. Even though proficiency rates on national tests such as National Assessment of Educational Progress are higher for Caucasian students than African Americans and Hispanics, all groups lack achieving desired proficiency rates. Therefore, much work is needed in our classrooms to achieve the new more rigorous performance expectations found in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). This five year professional development study sought to link the involvement of teachers in a sustained intervention, designed to improve the quantity and quality of guided inquiry-based instruction in middle school science classrooms, to student academic growth. Specifically we wanted to see if we could link higher quality inquiry-based instruction with the narrowing of the achievement gap between student groups. Findings show statistically significant gains for all student groups (aggregate, males, females, Caucasians, African Americans, and Hispanics) on all three science MAP tests (composite, science practices, science concepts) when compared to students of nonparticipating teachers. According to several indicators, American students have continued to perform abysmally in science education (Lauko, Grigg, & Brockway, 2006; Martin, Mullis, Foy, & Stanco, 2012; U.S. DoEd, Institute of Education Sciences, & National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). Additionally, large achievement gaps continue to persist ( Lauko et al., 2006; US DoEd et al., 2011). Within the current condition of languishing performance, a new benchmark for learning, NGSS, has been introduced that effectively raises the performance expectations for what all students in K-12 science classes should know and be able to do (Achieve, 2013; National Research Council, 2012). For decades, inquiry-based instruction has been encouraged as a teaching strategy that provides a vehicle by which teachers can engage their students in experiences that go beyond low-level thinking (Marshall, 2013). Despite knowing this, it is evident that effective inquiry-based instruction is far from the norm in most classrooms (Marshall, Horton, Igo, & Switzer, 2009). INTRODUCTION