PI's: O. Keith Baker, Hampton University; Marjorie G. Bardeen, Fermilab; R. Michael Barnett, LBNL; and Randy Ruchti, University of Notre Dame
Funding: QuarkNet will be co-funded by NSF ESIE, NSF EPP and DOE and cost sharing from universities.
Goals and Objectives: Considerable literature supports the position that students should be investigators/researchers who construct their own knowledge and that teachers must facilitate this process. Our vision is for students and teachers to be online with researchers when Fermilab's Run II and the LHC turn on. Students will confront vanguard science issues, analyze live data and remotely operate cameras in the experimental areas and in the control rooms of the experiments and accelerator. Physicists and students will establish online dialogs to discuss experimental goals and progress and collaborate on data analysis. Small groups of students will travel to Fermilab and CERN to report back to the schools on the status of the experiments and to interview the physicists involved. Students will collaborate with other students around the country and the world.
One major goal is to engage students and teachers with scientific investigations: how to formulate questions, how to perform computations, how to evaluate data, and how to build an experiment to gather more data. Students will practice the kinds of inquiry, interpretation and judgment that are key to the thoughtful understanding of science. They will have access to particle physics computational and experimental resources appropriate for student investigations consistent with national standards. These experiences will improve student attitudes toward physics and maintain their interest in studying science, with special emphasis throughout to reaching student groups underrepresented in science. Teachers will enhance their content knowledge and awareness and understanding of current science and technology research, increase their abilities to solve science-related problems and engage students in scientific inquiry, prepare a plan to facilitate the transfer of this knowledge to the classroom and develop responsibility for their own professional development. Some will take on leadership roles with their colleagues.
Our second goal is to confront particle physicists with current issues in science education, including what constitutes age-appropriate content and instruction for high school students. Physicists will improve their understanding of the National Science Education Standards and local science education needs. They will increase their abilities to work with teachers as equal partners and raise the level of physics teaching by participating in the design and implementation of student investigations based on real experimental data. Physicists will become advocates for this reform effort in our local communities encouraging school districts to "translate the standards into programs that are consistent with the content, teaching and assessment standards, as well as reflect the context and policies of the local district and to provide appropriate and sufficient resources, equitable access and explicit support for reform efforts." (National Standards)
Project Design: QuarkNet is based on a vision of the reformed classroom with direct links to the AAAS Benchmarks and National Science Education Standards. The classroom vision is one in which teachers create constructivist learning environments that provide students with opportunities for an in-depth engagement in science. Teaching strategies emulate closely the way scientists build knowledge through inquiry. Students develop scientific knowledge and habits of mind by working alongside scientists to make sense of the world using real experimental data.
QuarkNet will address the Science Content Standards in three major areas. Students will:
In order to have students and teachers as electronic participants in Run II and LHC, we face two major challenges-developing the capacity of the teachers to guide student inquiry using particle physics data and creating appropriate instructional materials necessary for those investigations. A program of teacher research experiences will be the foundation of this development work.
QuarkNet will be led and coordinated by four staff teachers, one of whom will act as the project director. Funding support and interface with the various experiments and accelerators will be handled by the four principal investigators who are co-signatories of this proposal. One of these four will act as the project spokesperson. We will establish an advisory group with eight members, four will be scientific representatives and four will be education experts. This part of QuarkNet will be fully established during Summer 1998.
The staff teachers in conjunction with the principal investigators will select, in a given year, twelve new university/laboratory sites to be added to QuarkNet. To facilitate the pilot project for the Tevatron Run II, it is likely that the majority of the initial sites will be involved with either the CDF or DØ experiments in addition to having LHC experimental affiliation (ATLAS or CMS). In five years, QuarkNet could include all 60 university/laboratory groups participating in LHC experiment and a significant number of HBCUs. These sites will provide excellent national coverage.
Site selection will be contingent on the identification of two capable lead teachers who will be responsible to the project staff and who will coordinate and manage the site activities. The lead teachers will be paired with mentor physicists at the site whose job is to act as research advisors to the lead teachers and to assist in the scientific coordination of site activities. The lead teachers will be responsible for attracting additional teachers called associates to the site. We envision a typical site to have eight associates. Such a site will have up to ten high schools providing several hundred student researchers who will be an integral part of TeV Run II and LHC experiments. Sites operate as a partnership of teachers and scientific researchers.
Lead Teachers: Based on research and best practice, the QuarkNet summer research experience will include eight-week research appointments for the lead teachers. These teachers will have the opportunity to attend lectures and seminars and read materials on particle physics and to participate in research team meetings including critically reviewing their own and others' work and presenting oral reports on what they are learning. (Loucks-Horsley et al, 1998) One of the staff teachers will facilitate an instructional materials development component. Participants will meet regularly to develop follow-on implementation plans and online materials and inquiry activities that engage students in scientific investigations. Physicists will guarantee the accuracy of the physics, and computer specialists will help create the data sets and solve technical problems with quasi-real time delivery. This will require a major in-kind contribution from the experiments. An outside evaluator will review the instructional materials for overall quality and alignment with standards. Graduate credit will be available for summer and academic-year activities.
Meaningful academic-year follow-on and continued dialogue among participants will be supported by the partnerships. Teachers will attend four follow-on days, and an electronic mail network will keep teachers in touch with each other and with their mentors. The sites will develop year-round academic programs including one-week summer experiences for all partnership teachers based on a successful research-based staff development model developed at nine DOE labs. Physicists will lead a group of teachers through a week-long research scenario, for example designing and conducting a cosmic ray experiment, and assist them to create similar scenarios for their students. Teachers will identify major organizing science concepts, attitudes and skills that students should know and demonstrate; pose questions that students care about; identify or create developmentally appropriate activities, emphasizing science inquiry; identify resources, including online data needed to conduct activities; design instruction to parallel the approach taken by scientists; and create a science "story" that provides meaningful context, motivates student investigators and creates a "real-life" situation to which students can apply their knowledge.
Staff will foster collaboration across the sites using substantial online interaction. Physicists and teachers will participate in online discussions using e-mail, mailing lists, discussion forum software and chat software to augment use of the Web site. Fermilab has experience developing online learning communities around staff development issues and will take the lead in developing and implementing these strategies.
We will recruit lead teachers who will develop shared goals and expectations for the project with the mentors. Mentors will be selected from among Fermilab, LHC and HBCU researchers. They will commit to maintaining long-term relationships with teachers through the partnerships and will develop research assignments where teachers have an opportunity to be more than "helpers," where they will be involved in the problem-solving process, "learning content, process, culture and ethos of scientific inquiry." (Loucks-Horsley et al, 1998) Assignments will be integral to or a spin-off of mentors ongoing research, carefully designed for success with respect to teachers' capabilities, time constraints and technology capability and have a definable end point or output, although the outcome is unknown. Careful orientation for mentors will support the development of collegial relationships between mentors and teachers.
The application and selection process will be based on the DOE TRAC experience. A team of the staff and physicists will select participants based on criteria that include academic background along with relevant work experience, teaching experience, leadership experience and potential to gain from and contribute to research. Schools must sign partnership agreements to facilitate change that will use the teachers' research experiences during the academic year.
Associate Teachers: A substantial fraction of teachers in QuarkNet will be site associates. These teachers will attend at least a nine-day staff development experience under the direction of the lead teachers and physicist mentors. The development experience will include an introduction to particle physics, Web-based interactives and data analyses. In part, the associates function as a test bed for student instruction, and we expect them to participate in the development and refinement of instructional materials appropriate to the site physics objectives. The lead teachers and physicists at a given site will recruit associate teachers regionally so that partnerships include teachers who can get together relatively easily. The project will be announced on the Web, in The Physics Teacher, on PEN, through area alliances, with PTRAs and to former participants in particle physics workshops and institutes. With the help of the project staff, the site leaders will make personal contacts to seek participants from resource-poor districts and those with large minority populations.
Site Partnership: Financial support for the partnerships will include teacher stipends and classroom implementation funds. Partnerships will submit proposals to the PI of their lead institution-ATLAS, CMS, Fermilab or Hampton University-which will be reviewed and funded according to a process established by QuarkNet. For budgeting purposes, a typical partnership grant will support ten teachers including, in the first year, two summer research stipends and two four-day follow-on stipends and, in succeeding years, follow-on one-week stipends for classroom transfer efforts of ten teachers and $250 per school per year to support classroom implementation. The partnerships will be phased in, approximately 12 per year in years one to five, impacting up to 600 teachers and up to 180,000 students in all. In years six and up, we plan to offer a second round of research experiences and staff development support.
Project Timeline: The timeline is set up to allow an initial contingent of secondary students and teachers to be online with the Fermilab Run II in 2000. As we learn from that experience and improve the programs, we will be preparing for a full complement of students and teachers to be online with the physicists on "Day 1" of the LHC in 2005.
| FY99 Year 1 - | Establish partnerships at up to 12 sites; Create program materials, experiments, staff development activities; and field test Fermilab project. |
| FY00 - FY03 Years 2-5 - | Establish and support partnerships at existing sites and up to 12 new sites per year with an expectation of 60 by the final year; Annual field tests using Fermilab Run II and LHC test-beam data. |
Prior to the beginning of the project, in Year 0, QuarkNet will develop the expertise of the staff by placing them in summer research experiences to become familiar with the work of the experiments. They will be chosen because they demonstrate instructional expertise aligned with national standards, have experience as leaders in staff development activities and have the potential to contribute to and gain from research experiences. Then the staff will work with the PIs and other physicists to develop the program framework, to create prototype online resources and inquiry activities for students and appropriate staff development activities to support their use in the classroom. After these resources have been field tested, the staff will mentor university-based physicists and teachers to help them develop a portfolio of programs within the QuarkNet framework, based on local needs and adapted from activities developed by the staff and participants.