Suzanne Taylor
Montana State University, MT·Education Research
Young students often get hooked on science when a lesson starts from a striking, real-world event or observation, which educators call a phenomenon. Many elementary teachers, including those in small rural schools, lack access to good phenomenon-centered curriculum materials or the support to use them.
- Fields
Education Research
Social Science
- Topics
science education
elementary education
rural schools
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Oct 2028
What they work on
- Examine how a three-year professional learning system changes rural third- through fifth-grade teachers' pedagogical design capacity, their ability to adapt science lessons around locally and culturally significant place-based phenomena.
- Describe, through comparative case studies, the interactions among teachers, students, administrators and researchers that may facilitate shifts toward phenomenon-driven science teaching in rural schools.
- Compare teacher-administrator triads in Maine, Montana and Hawaiʻi to identify adoption mechanisms shared across rural schools and the local cultural contexts that produce place-specific implementation trajectories.
More about the research
This collaborative project asks how rural teachers and school leaders can learn to build science lessons around phenomena drawn from their own communities and cultures, and how that learning can spread across a whole school.
Why it matters
Findings could help rural elementary schools adopt science teaching that draws on students' own communities and cultures, making lessons more relevant and authentic for young learners. School leaders, curriculum designers and teacher-education programs could use the results to design professional learning that supports lasting, school-wide change in a range of rural settings.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
Montana State University: 15 labs on PI Pages, $258M a year on research, 85 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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