UC Berkeley

Teachers are currently facing a major instructional challenge, namely, supporting students to meet the three dimensional learning goals of the Next Generation Science Standards without adequate curriculum materials to do so. In this paper, we report the design and outcomes of professional development activities that support teachers and researchers to collaboratively customize Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) units to help students develop coherent science knowledge. The WISE units and professional development activities were developed using the Knowledge Integration (KI) Framework. We show that the KI framework functioned as an effective scaffold to support teachers in modifying their teaching practice to make curriculum customizations that are evidence-based and aligned with a theory of learning. We discuss how our study results informed the design of an online curriculum customization and implementation interface and offer the principles of the KI framework as design principles for the development of other collaborative professional development endeavors.