Energy Project professional development: Promoting positive attitudes about science among K-12 teachers

Promoting positive attitudes about science among teachers has important implications for teachers’ classroom practice and for their relationship to science as a discipline. In this paper, we report positive shifts in teachers’ attitudes about science, as measured by the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science (CLASS) survey, over the course of their participation in a professional development course that emphasized the flexible use of energy representations to understand real world scenarios. Our work contributes to the larger effort to make the case that professional development matters for teacher learning and attitudes.

Figure 1

Teacher enactment of Energy Theater for a hand pushing a box across the floor at constant speed (reproduced from Ref. [38]). Hand signs indicate forms—e.g., fourth person from the left is making a $T$ (symbolizing thermal energy), person in red striped shirt toward the center is making a $K$ (symbolizing kinetic energy), and rightmost person in black cardigan is making a $C$ (symbolizing chemical energy).

Figure 2

Comparison of shifts in percentages of favorable responses over the course of Energy Project professional development (red bars) and shifts in percentages of favorable responses over the course of other physics classes (blue bars). This figure may mislead one to infer that, on average, students in most physics courses post favorable gains on the CLASS. This has historically not been the case—in most typical physics courses, students perform worse on the CLASS after instruction than before [11]. Most of the courses in this figure represent reform-oriented or research-based approaches to teaching physics.