Effectiveness

Designed
  1. For Teacher:
    1. A professional development template, including administrators as well as seminar outlines for their use, for teaching teachers how to conduct the research necessary to produce samples of student work with commentary, as well as how to use work samples as the basis for analyzing and improving their teaching.
    2. A facilitated set of discussions aimed at providing professional development hat helps teachers to learnt to articulate their expectations, raise them, and learn what they can do to improve the chances that all of their students will meet them.
    3. A groundbreaking use of technology to connect teaching peers from around the world, which will demonstrate what technology has to offer to professional development efforts, as well as the limits of current technology for such work.
    4. A standard of student achievement in science for the local community.
Actual
  1. For Teacher:
    1. Exposed themselves to more science teaching pedagogies around the world.
    2. Learnt how to use work samples as the basis for analyzing and improving their teaching.
    3. Learnt to articulate their expectations, raise them, and better realize what they can do to improve the quality of learning among their students.
    4. The project improved the frequency and the quality of the meetings among the teachers. The interaction and cooperation between teachers of the same school had been better developed.
    5. The ability of teachers for setting different standards for assessing student science performance had been enhanced
    6. Realised the shift from an over-emphasis on norm-referenced assessment to criterion-referenced assessments, and on summative to formative assessment.

Evidence

  1. In order to measure the overall effectiveness of the SAW project, surveys were being conducted to all of the member teachers, while more that half of them were invited for individual interviews before and after their participation in the project.
  2. For the SBSCD Program, surveys and interviews were conducted after its implementation. All of the teachers filled in the questionnaires and were interviewed.
  3. The Project team had evaluated the project during its progress by making frequent contacts with the participating teachers.
  4. The output of the projects were evaluated and refereed by both local and international science educators.
  5. Most of the SAW outputs were also commented by the officials of the Education Department as well as the participating SAW teachers on a continuous basis.
  6. The progress of the local SAW team was presented at each of the international steering meeting.