BSCS ViSTA for Pre-service Teacher Education

BSCS ViSTA modules are online, videocase-based materials designed to support teacher learning. Each of the five modules is designed to help preservice teachers deepen and advance their science content knowledge, their pedagogical science content knowledge, and their ability to analyze science teaching. Teachers engaging in the BSCS ViSTA program explore videos of science teaching, videos of teacher and student interviews, samples of student work, student pretests and posttests, lesson plans, and supplementary materials used in the lessons. The modules scaffold preservice teachers’ analysis of the videocases through a series of carefully sequenced tasks that challenge teachers to deepen their content understanding and to analyze the teaching through two lenses they do not typically use in looking at teaching: the Student Thinking Lens and the Science Content Storyline Lens.

A research study of the modules involving 30 universities compared preservice teachers’ learning in methods courses where a ViSTA module was used with courses at the same universities where no VISTA module was used. The results showed that, compared with control teachers, preservice teachers using a ViSTA module showed greater pre-post course improvement in their science content knowledge and in their ability to analyze science teaching in terms of student thinking and the science content storyline. Click here to read the research study results, presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST).