Date of Award
3-1-1991
Document Type
Dissertation - NSU Access Only
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Department
Center for the Advancement of Education
Abstract
The State of Florida requires that all sixty-seven counties within the state participate in a Summer Inservice Institute Program (SIIP) that provides content area instruction to elementary and secondary public school teachers. Critical need areas such as mathematics and science take priority in the consideration for funding and programming in all counties. The state requires that the emphasis in these summer training sessions be placed on college-level content instruction. Workshops presented solely on methods are considered not appropriate. The rationale for funding the required program is that public school personnel, unlike their postsecondary level liberal arts counterparts, lack content-area training in critical areas such as mathematics and science. Their undergraduate and even graduate training is specialized in educational philosophy and methods, not academic content in areas such as science. Enhancement of their content area knowledge base is the goal of the program. The state further requires that all counties give priority to hiring postsecondary liberal arts professors from area higher education institutions to provide the course instruction in areas mandated by the state. Many of these instructors are unfamiliar not only with the educational background and needs of the program’s participants, but also with the intention of the state guidelines. As a consequence, the postsecondary instructors often fail to address the objectives of the program and project their institute content either above or below the participant's level. State SIIP officials, as well as county-level program administrators, have suggested that guidelines are necessary for the yearly summer training programs, especially for elementary and middle-school level science programs. These latter programs evidence the greatest differences between instructor expectations and participant preparedness. The purpose of this study was to create an instructional inservice program to be utilized by higher education consultants hired to facilitate SIIP training programs for those elementary and middle-level science personnel needing introductory level content area updating and training in science. The instructional program was developed based upon the state's established objectives for such an introductory level program, the results of a survey administered to all county-level SIIP directors, and the fourteen-point systems model of Gagne et al. The program includes a plan for implementation that reflects a tentative schedule for implementation as well as formative and summative evaluation procedures to be utilized in field-testing the program. The completed instructional program was reviewed for validity of instructional design by three Nova University professors with curricular expertise. The program was also reviewed for content validity by three community college instructors with content-area expertise. Three SIIP program coordinators also reviewed and validated the program for appropriateness and feasibility for use by SIIP instructors. Revisions of an item were planned if two of the three persons in each review category rated an item below three. A review for possible revision was planned if one judge rated an item below three. No such revisions were required, but several were made in response to suggestions for improvement considered by reviewers. A final copy of the instructional inservice program was sent to the state SIIP program specialist in Tallahassee for distribution to the county-level directors of SIIP&s throughout the state.