Volume 7, No. 2, Fall 2003

Contents | Two Revolutions | Monday's Lesson | Ready to Teach | CC Portal | Accelerator | PDF Version

The Education Accelerator Becomes a Reality

By Robert Tinker and Paul Horwitz

The Concord Consortium is one of the founders of the new Technology Enhanced Learning in Science (TELS) Center, a Teaching and Learning Center funded by the National Science Foundation at $2M per year for five years. By providing major funding for the Education Accelerator (see note), TELS supports applied research on the educational impacts on science of information and computer technologies.

Modeled on the large research institutions that do “big science,” the Education Accelerator will do “big education” — projects requiring collaboration and resources beyond the scope of most educational research. The portal and modeling software described in the “The Concord Consortium Portal” article (see page 10) is one example of the technology that will allow the Accelerator to undertake large studies using students anywhere. Research on the effectiveness of the Ready to Teach program (see page 8) also will be part of the Accelerator effort.

The goal of the Accelerator is to increase the number and diversity of teachers whose students are learning important concepts through the use of proven, technology-enhanced curricula. The Accelerator focuses on research that will generate the required proof by undertaking large-scale, collaborative applied research based on technology-enhanced curricula. The Accelerator’s research projects use powerful software tools and simulations embedded in online curriculum-based activities. These are designed to teach central topics in math, science, and technology through student inquiry and collaboration. Using sophisticated online assessment strategies, the curricula will be tested in numerous schools serving diverse student populations. All Accelerator software will be free and open source, and the supporting curricula and teacher professional development materials will be available free online for any non-commercial educational use.

Accelerator technology is aimed at fostering close contact between the researcher/developer community and the nation’s K-12 schools. A useful metaphor to describe the Accelerator is a tree, where the leaves are the schools, the roots are the researchers, and the trunk is a growing collection of educational software. Here’s how the Accelerator will nurture all three parts of the tree.

The leaves. The Accelerator will maintain a website where any school can go to obtain educational software and curriculum material, as well as detailed and timely reports on the academic progress of its students.

The trunk. The Accelerator will continually add to a library of inter-operable models and software components that researchers and curriculum developers can incorporate into their scripts.

The roots. The Accelerator will provide researchers with sophisticated tools that will simplify the implementation of scripts. It will link the researchers with testbed schools, enabling them to conduct projects on a national scale.

TELS is a highly collaborative effort led by Marcia Linn at Berkeley and includes Arizona State University, Berkeley Public Schools, Boston University, Cambridge Public Schools, Maynard Public Schools, Mills College, Mount Diablo Public Schools, Norfolk State University, North Carolina Central University, Pennsylvania State University, the Technion Institute of Technology, and the Tempe Public Schools. Other partners will be added as the project matures.

TELS will conduct internships that will prepare graduate students to become educational professionals and will support graduate faculty involved in teacher preparation and in-service delivery. Partners will incorporate the TELS materials into leadership programs, workshops for in-service teachers, and teacher professional development programs. Teachers will critique materials, customize curricula, test materials in teaching assignments, and shape design of new materials. TELS will provide graduate training for 20 Ph.D. students and 100 Certificate students. It also will provide teacher professional development for 1,000 pre-service students and for 500 teachers who will be engaged in Center workshops and online courses.

If you are interested in joining TELS as a student, post-doc, a research partner, or as a school, please contact TELS@concord.org.

Robert Tinker (bob@concord.org) is President of the Concord Consortium.

Paul Horwitz (paul@concord.org) directs the Concord Consortium Modeling Center.

Article Links & Notes

Technology Enhanced Learning in Science — http://www.telscenter.org

National Science Foundation — http://www.nsf.gov

Note: In the spring 2003 issue of @Concord, we dreamed out loud about the Accelerator. See http://www.concord.org/newsletter/2003-spring/perspective.html

Berkeley — http://www.berkeley.edu

The projects described in this newsletter are supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Noyce Foundation and others. All opinions, findings, and recommendations expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies. Mention of trade names, commercial products or organizations does not imply endorsement.

All Contents Copyright © 2005 The Concord Consortium. All rights reserved.