Brown Bag - Dr. Sean Smith
Please join us for the second Brown Bag seminar of the semester. The seminar will be held on Wednesday, September 23 in the Collaboratory Commons at the Friday Institute on NC State's Centennial Campus. Refreshments will be available at 8:30am and the seminar will begin at 9:00am. The speaker will be Dr. Sean Smith, Senior Research Associate at Horizon Research, Inc. His topic is New Tools for Studying the Relationship Between Teacher Content Knowledge and Student Learning.
Most educators would agree that teacher knowledge of disciplinary content directly and positively affects student learning, but the empirical support for this claim is thin. Few valid and reliable measures exist for investigating the relationship between teacher knowledge of specific science content and student learning of the same content. The ATLAST project (Assessing Teacher Learning About Science Teaching) has created psychometrically rigorous assessments of teacher and student knowledge. In this talk, DR. Smith will describe the development of these pairs of multiple-choice assessments, using the teacher assessments to illustrate the development cycle. The types of teacher items included in the assessment will be described, as well as the validity and reliability of the measures.
Sean Smith received a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry, a Master’s Degree in Science Teaching, and a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining HRI in 1991, Dr. Smith taught high school chemistry and physics. In addition, he was a member of the Education Studies Department at Berea College, where he taught courses in elementary science methods and the philosophical foundations of education. He is currently the principal investigator of ATLAST (Assessing Teacher Learning About Science Teaching), a project that is creating instruments to measure teacher and student science content knowledge, as well as teacher and student opportunity to learn. He also directs the evaluation for IQWST II, an NSF-funded project that is creating a comprehensive middle school science curriculum.