Science Education Policy

This study explores the roles that regional partners play in helping to support implementation of the GLOBE program, an international earth science and education initiative. Researchers at SRI International conducted case studies of two GLOBE partners’ practices in an effort to identify the factors that contribute to effective implementation of the program within a teaching approach that emphasizes student research. The chief finding of the case studies is that intermediary organizations in GLOBE help teachers both to address obstacles to implementing GLOBE-based student research in their classrooms and to align their curriculum to state standards and assessments. Such intermediary organizations may play similar roles in other science education programs, helping teachers to find ways to make nationally or internationally oriented science curriculum materials locally relevant and easy to adopt in diverse school settings. C © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 89:956–979, 2005 The work has been supported by National Science Foundation grant #0223068. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Correspondence to: William R. Penuel; e-mail: [email protected] This paper was edited by former Section Editor Angelo Collins. C © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. PARTNERS IN EARTH SCIENCE EDUCATION 957 REFORM INTERMEDIARIES AS CATALYSTS OF CHANGE AND IMPLEMENTATION This study explores the role that intermediary organizations play in taking an earth science program successfully to scale. Beginning in the late 1990s, implementation research has increasingly focused on the role intermediary organizations play in carrying out large-scale school reforms. Intermediary organizations are typically nonprofit companies, universities, or other entities which are not part of the K-12 school system, but maintain school improvement as a key goal. Many schools now employ these organizations to provide professional development, materials, and teacher support in the implementation of school reform. Researchers have argued that intermediary organizations may be critical to the reform process because they can provide the knowledge, skills, and resources necessary to scale up reform efforts (Cohen, 2000; Fullan, 2000; McDonald, McLaughlin, & Corcoran, 2000). Getting an educational reform or program to scale is itself a difficult undertaking, and many successful educational reforms and programs come to rely on a network of affiliates or intermediaries to help support scaling (Elmore, 1996). Organizations that design and test new reforms may not have the necessary skills within their organization to shift from sheltered implementation in a few classrooms to the support of broad-scale implementation. Furthermore, while some organizations do have the skills, they are rarely large enough to support implementation beyond a limited geographical area. The costs to support a national or international program quickly exceed the resources typically allocated to educational programs and reforms. As with the adoption of new technologies in business, the scale-up process inevitably comes to depend on people and organizations outside the direct purview of the reform designers (Moore, 2002). Therefore, reliance on intermediary individuals and organizations may not only be desired, it may be necessary if the goal of a reform is to scale up and reach many classrooms. Furthermore, as outsiders, intermediary organizations can be better positioned to pose challenging questions to entrenched interests within school systems that have historically blocked the implementation or scaling up of significant reforms. For their part, teachers may need people from intermediary organizations to help them adapt new curricular materials to their own classroom situations. This may be especially true when the program or reform seeks to reach diverse national and international classroom contexts where the challenges teachers face vary tremendously. Despite scores of studies that point to evidence to the contrary, the idea that new programs and scripted teacher curricula can be made “teacher-proof” has been a persistent belief of some policy makers in science education (Atkin & Black, 2003). In fact, teachers will always need to explore how a new reform fits into their existing curriculum, and adapt the reform to meet the unique demands of their classrooms, school, district, and state. As a result those providing local support should have a good understanding of the setting where teachers are expected to implement a reform, and maintain relationships with both the designers of the reform and the teachers who enact it (Carpenter et al., 2004). Neither these claims about the need for intermediaries nor claims about their functions in implementing reforms and programs have been systematically investigated in science education. Even in studies of schoolwide reform, where the work of intermediaries has been closely studied, there remains little research on the capacity needed for such organizations to succeed or which strategies are needed to succeed (Nuefeld & Guiney, 2000). This study investigates some preliminary hypotheses about the roles that intermediary organizations can play in an international earth science education program in promoting broadscale