Project Summary

ARISE is a Brown University program funded by the National Institutes of Health through its Science Education Partnership Awards program. ARISE is designed to engage students in inquiry-based approaches to learning about science, bring cutting-edge research into the classroom, and improve the understanding of the relevance of science to everyday life. The Education Alliance’s evaluation design for this program includes components to examine critical outcomes of the ARISE program, which are both developmental and performance driven in nature.

The core of Project ARISE is a year-long program for Rhode Island high school science teachers that is co-taught by Brown University faculty and graduate students. The goal of the program is to develop the tools and perspective that will enable high school teachers to integrate national science standards and high-level concepts in molecular biology and neuroscience into their science classroom instruction.

Development of the instructional modules will generate tools and instructional strategies to enable high school teachers to integrate National Science Education Standards and high-level scientific concepts into classroom instruction. This increased knowledge base will be leveraged through the use of inquiry-based teaching methods to incorporate high-level concepts into teaching and learning, both raising the capacity and skill of teachers and the performance outcomes for students.

Thus the key foci of the evaluation are to assess teacher knowledge and integration of high-level scientific concepts, teacher use of inquiry based teaching methods, and the impact of teacher participation on student performance in science education. Implicit in the evaluation task is analysis of the processes and tools implemented to effect teacher change and sustain or generate continued professional learning. The outcome component will include pre- and post-testing of students in ARISE Fellows’ classrooms and of students in a comparison group of science classrooms. Classroom observations before and after ARISE training will also be conducted to document changes in teacher practice and application of content knowledge.