Coastal was an NSF supported Noyce Track 1 project at the University of California, Santa Barbara conducted in collaboration with the Dos Pueblos High School Engineering Academy (DPEA) located in the high-needs Santa Barbara Unified School District (SBUSD), Santa Barbara City College (SBCC), and the Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation (MOXI). The purpose was to increase the quality and diversity of science and mathematics teachers by providing a pipeline into careers in teaching through offering internships to SBCC and UCSB undergraduates.
A responsive progressive evaluation was conducted, collecting project artifacts, interviews and surveys with interns and teacher candidates while they were in the program and follow up questionnaires to track their career trajectories in subsequent years. Overall the project was relatively successful in its main goal of recruiting diverse science and mathematics teachers in to the profession. Of the interns who completed the program, Results indicated that: (1) opportunities to participate in exemplary classrooms that illustrate practice-based teaching are crucial for interns since most have not had opportunities to see this kind of teaching in their own education or the way that students respond to it; (2) interns and teacher scholars had multiple opportunities to explore teaching across multiple grade levels and subject areas, understand pedagogically how to facilitate hands on learning from a variety of mentors, as well as expand their own ideas about and knowledge of engineering. They also learned that with appropriate pedagogy all students are engaged in and capable of learning engineering and science; (3) on graduation beginning Noyce teachers earned exemplary scores on their teacher performance assessments as compared to a National sample of mathematics and science teachers.
Deliverables to date:
- Five yearly reports have been prepared and submitted to project leaders and the funding agency.
- Aminger, W., Carpenter, S. L., Hough, S., Iveland, A., Meier, V., Moon, S. & Bianchini, J. A. (2017). Learning to Teach Science to English Language Learners: A Study of Preservice Teachers. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of NARST. April, 2017. San Antonio, Texas.