inservice education: it can make a difference

Inservice Education: It Can Make A Difference

Paul B. HounshellSchool of Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel HillChapel Hill, North Carolina 27514

and

Larry R. LiggettDirector

Environmental Education CenterAsheville, North Carolina

Rarely has a model for inservice education been proposed, imple-mented and proved effective in bringing about desired change inteachers and their students. Such has been the case with an inserviceeducation program in a nine-system consortium in western NorthCarolina under the direction of the Environmental Education Center,Oteen, North Carolina.

Inservice Education

Inservice education has long been proposed as a necessity foreffective educational practice and this is more true today than everbefore. Teachers, like so many others, are victims of change broughtabout by a very rapidly changing technological society. And as theabundant literature so graphically describes, the rate of change hasonly begun to accelerate. Change, then, is making intense demandson teachers and these demands come from subject matter itself,particularly in science.Undergraduate on-campus teacher education programs and even

graduate on-campus programs serve a function but they cannot doit all and in some areas they cannot do it as well. Individuals whohave not taught "on their own" are not capable of handling so muchof what is of benefit to those who teach. But through inservice programsthe "teaching teacher" who has experience and is gaining moreexperience can begin to comprehend, to analyze, to plan, to experi-ment�all with the meaning that comes with "the real thing."Research in the area of inservice teacher education is meager and

often poorly planned, organized and executed. Most effort is in thecognitive realm and directed either at the teachers involved in theprogram or at students of these teachers, but rarely at both. Manystudies have vague and largely immeasurable objectives and thesemust rely on subjective comments and analyses. They have not

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indicated that inservice programs make a difference on student behaviorand student learning.

A Model

Through a federal grant in 1971, the Environmental Education Centerwas established in Oteen (Asheville), North Carolina. With a profes-sional staff of the director and four consultants, the Center servesa nine-system consortium of public and private schools in westernNorth Carolina. Activities involve curriculum development, materialsproduction, workshop presentations, classroom presentations andmany other related tasks. In addition, the Center maintains an extensiveenvironmental education materials pool containing audio-visual, textand reference sources.For the 1972-73 school year, the Center decided to focus on a

specific group of teachers and their students. Sixth grade teachersand their students were the target group and, in the target area, allsixth grades are self-contained.The Center sponsored three, ten-week cycles during the school

year. Each session or "activity cycle^was divided into four distinctphases with staff involvement in all four phases, teachers involvedwith staff in two and students involved in one.Phase I was the case study, on-site feature that required one week.

During this time staff specialists and consultants visited the schooland surrounding community to assess the total environment for likelyelements to be included in curriculum considerations at a later date.The Center approach is interdisciplinary, and data included availabilityand access to sources such as historic sites, streams, lakes, cemeteriesand museums plus any number and variety of human resources. Theysurveyed the school�building and grounds�and visited and inter-viewed principals, teachers, and students. They catalogued resourcesfor later analysis and use with teachers in the workshop, or PhaseII.Phase II began the second week of "cycle" activity, and lasted

for five days, Monday through Friday. Teachers reported to the Centerrather than to their schools (substitutes were provided) and wereinvolved in intensive sessions for 7 hours each day. Activity rangedfrom developing an environmental awareness to planning learningactivity programs to take back to their schools, to field trips to relevantpoints of interest. Data collected in Phase I were utilized by teachersand staff as materials were developed and proposed for use in aparticular school. Throughout all activities, techniques utilized werethose deemed appropriate for teachers to use in their own classes.Particular emphasis was placed upon individualization through a varietyof activities and approaches.

In-Service Education: It Can Make a Difference 495

For evaluation purposes, participating teachers were administereda battery of instruments during the first session of Phase II. Thebattery consisted of an environmental knowledge test, an environ-mental attitude survey and a teaching "behavior" inventory. Teacherswere again tested at the end of Phase III.Phase III, the on-site classroom portion of the cycle began the

Monday after Phase II ended, when the teachers returned to theirclasses. This phase was a cooperative venture between the classroomteacher and the Environmental Education Center staff but with thestaff playing a supporting role. It was during this phase that theteachers could implement, with or without staff assistance, the ideasand new approaches which were explored and developed in PhaseII. Center staff analyzed data and experiences from Phase I andII and assisted the individual teachers in developing viable approachesto the study and analysis of environmental situations and concernsunique to the school setting and the community. Staff activity duringthis phase ranged from program presentations to the various classesto conducting field trips to working with small groups on individualprojects. Staff worked with the classrooms of all teachers involvedin Phase II and with the individual teachers upon request.At the beginning of Phase III all sixth grade students of teachers

in the project were tested with the Environmental Knowledge andOpinion Survey to assess their knowledge and their attitudes aboutthe environment at the beginning of their involvement with Centeractivity.Phase IV was devoted to a week of evaluation and analysis, involving

staff, teachers, administrators and others involved in the projectactivity.

Evaluation

The thrust of all activity in the program of the EnvironmentalEducation Center was to bring about cognitive and affective changein students by bringing about cognitive and affective change in theirteachers. In essence, then, the question "Can an inservice programwith teachers make a difference with their students" was being tested.The evaluation design provided data to examine the teacher’s influenceon students from eight weeks to eight months.The evaluation design included pre-post testing with both experi-

mental and control groups. Teachers were pre-tested on the first dayof the one-week workshop and post-tested on the last day of involve-ment with the program or approximately two months later. Studentsof teachers who were in the workshop were pre-tested on the firstday their teachers were back from the workshop and post-tested atthe end of the school year. For some students (approximately one-


third), post-testing came immediately after they were involved in theprogram; for another third, post-testing came after approximatelythree months of "disengagement" with the project and for anotherthird, post-testing came six months later. The nature and organizationof the program allowed an investigation of not only the influenceof the nine-week inservice program on teachers and their studentsbut on the long-range (six months) effect as well.

Instruments used in the evaluation program were designed to providedata on cognitive and affective elements of the environmental realmin both students and teachers and to provide a measure of teacherbehavior and subsequent changes.The test instrument for students was the Environmental Knowledge

and Opinion Survey (EKOS), consisting of fifty items and yieldingan attitude score and a knowledge score.1

For teachers, three separate instruments were used. To assesscognitive elements, the Environmental Science Test2 was administeredand for affective elements, the Environmental Attitude Inventory2was used. The Environmental Education Behavioral Inventory yieldedinformation on the teachers’ judgment concerning their use of selectedtechniques and approaches on teaching about environmental concerns.To summarize, students in the project were tested as follows:

Cycle 1 Pre-tested Post-tested(experimental and control) 10/16/72 5/18/73



Teachers were tested as follows:

Cycle 1

Cycle 2

Cycle 3

Pre-testedPost-tested10/9/7212/5/72Pre-testedPost-tested1/3/733/1/73Pre-testedPost-tested3/12/735/18/73

Analysis

Research reports with detailed information on design, statisticalanalyses of the data and interpretation are on file with the Environ-

1. For more information see "Assessing the Effectiveness of Environmental Education" by Hounshell andLiggetl in The Journal of Environmental Education, Vol. 5, Number 2, Winter 1973, pages 28-30.

2. Both of these instruments were designed, developed and published by George Fleetwood, North CarolinaDepartment of Public Instruction, Division of Development, Raleigh, North Carolina.

In-Service Education: It Can Make a Difference 497

mental Education Center project director. The essence of these reports,however, is that every question asked was answered in the affirmative.The inservice education program for the teachers involved was effectivein bringing about change in their students.Almost two thousand tests were administered to students in the

pre-post, experimental/control testing cycles. The experimental stu-dents were taught by thirty-six teachers from eight different schoolsystems and those teachers were tested as indicated earlier. Analysisof variance was utilized to compare pre-post scores of experimentaland control students.The research design specified five major questions and, paraphrased,

these were:

(1) Will participating sixth graders show an increased knowledge of the environmentand environemntal concerns?

(2) Will participating sixth graders show a positive change in attitude toward theenvironment and environmental concerns?

(3) Will teachers of participating six graders show an increased knowledge aboutthe environment and man’s role in the environment?

(4) Will teachers of participating sixth graders show a positive change in their attitudestoward the environment and man’s role in the environment?

(5) Will teachers of participating sixth graders show positive changes in their teachingbehavior as this relates to environmental education?

The answer to each of these questions was "yes." The data wasconvincing because it was significant at quite acceptable levels ofstatistical significance of (.01 and .05).Of most profound significance, however, was the revelation that

student learning was influenced by "treatment" of their teachers throughinservice education.Another question that was answered because of the organization

of the project was "what effect does time have on the cognitiveand effective considerations of the environmental factors being test-ed?" In other words, is the "impact" on teachers lasting in theirstudents?Data revealed that time of exposure to teachers who had been

in the project was significant for attitude scores of students but wasnot significant for knowledge scores of the same students. Studentknowledge did not increase significantly with additional exposure totheir teachers but their attitudes did become more positive as measuredby EKOS.The model for inservice education in the area of environmental

concerns was effective in bringing about desired change in teachersand their students. The model involved a variety of approaches andmany different techniques and it was implemented by a staff ofdedicated, knowledgeable and effective former classroom teachers.It required enthusiastic participating teachers and fully cooperative


school administrators. It took time, 10 weeks minimum, and it requiredmeeting wherever was most appropriate, from science laboratoriesto local historic cemeteries to the school classrooms.As significant as the positive research findings, however, were the

results of a teacher survey of those who participated�they enjoyedthe experience!

PHYSICS CONTEST

The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and the AmericanPhysical Society (APS) announces a "Store Front Physics Exhibit Contest."Individuals who wish to enter the contest should design, build, try out andevaluate an exhibit whose purpose is to present information about physicsconcepts to the general public. Prizes of $200 each will be awarded to thethree best exhibits.

Prize-winning exhibits will be those which are judged to most effectivelydemonstrate and interpret physics concepts to the general public. An exhibitwhich does this can be of simple construction, cheap, durable, physicallyattractive, and is usually interactive. In addition, it is desirable that the exhibitbe easily replicated, so that it can be used by others who want to becomeinvolved in educating the public in this way. As a crucial part of each project,the exhibit must have been available to the general public (away from astrictly academic setting) for at least one day. An academic building corridordisplay is not eligible, but an exhibit which has been placed in a shoppingmall for at least one full shopping day is most appropriate. Exhibits shouldbe attended and exhibitors should demonstrate that they have made someattempt to evaluate their exhibit. A count of the people stopping at theexhibit, the amount of time that they spend there, and the completion ofa brief questionnaire by a random sample of the visitors might constitutean appropriate evaluation.

This competition is jointly sponsored by the AAPT, the APS, the Ontario(Canada) Science Center, and the Association of Science Technology Centers(ASTC). Members of the AAPT/APS Committee on Science Education forthe General Public and representatives of the sponsoring organizations willserve as judges. All entries are due by December 1, 1976. In order to assurethat your ideas are made widely known and that the exhibits are availablefor others to use, the process of formally entering the competition is consideredacknowledgement of permission for others to reproduce all or part of yourexhibit for the purpose of the education of the general public but not forcommercial profit. For further information, or to submit entries, please writeto Dr. Dean Zollman, American Association of Physics Teachers, GraduatePhysics Building, SUNY at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York 11794.

inservice education: it can make a difference

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