Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

8-2022

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

Educational Leadership, Evaluation and Organizational Development

Degree Program

Curriculum and Instruction, PhD

Committee Chair

Tretter, Thomas

Committee Co-Chair (if applicable)

McFadden, Justin

Committee Member

Larson, Elisabeth Ann

Committee Member

Munoz, Marco

Author's Keywords

NGSS; Science education; teacher feedback; constructed grounded theory

Abstract

Feedback has been a highly effective means to enact change. In the classroom teachers provide feedback to students concerning their performance, how they compare to the learning goal, and what students need to achieve those goals. For teachers, they utilize feedback from students to examine content focus and instructional practice in order to reflect and make positive changes. In this study, feedback is once again provided in order to enact change. Kentucky stakeholders, mainly teachers, in science education offered feedback about the implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In their feedback they highlighted the challenges that occurred after reflecting on the classroom practice. Teacher comments called into question some of the content focus of the standards as well as sometimes the application of the standard. Teachers informed authors of the standards by questioning the lack of resources, the standards are not clear to students, and some of them perceived no coherent way to align and teach the standards. The overwhelming majority of teacher feedback provided was negative which is likely due to sampling bias in that those with negative perceptions are more likely to volunteer comments than those with positive. However, they also offered suggestions for the NGSS to be improved. Teachers asked for specific resources, such as, assistive technology, data for instruction, and targeted professional development to understand science and engineering practices. Also teachers stressed the importance of a coherent approachable science storyline, scaffolding language for students, and creating a climate of achievement for students. I was able to frame the study within my subjectivities which matched the most common participants’ experiences, in order to make meaning of the data. To further the trustworthiness of the study, a constructed grounded theory approach was used. This approach is appropriate to discover emerging themes in the public comment data, compare and organize those themes, and to create explicit hypotheses of participants’ comments.

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