A survey of authentic teaching in secondary math and science classrooms

The Authentic Teaching Alliance (ATA) is a project funded through the National Science Foundation GK-12 program in which University of Oklahoma Fellows from engineering and education disciplines team with local teachers to design, implement, and assess authentic, inquiry-based activities to teach secondary science and mathematics. This paper discusses the adaptation and implementation of an instrument to survey the students' science and math classroom experiences and to assess whether the ATA activities had a measurable effect on the students' desire to learn. The search for a validated instrument to serve our needs led to a survey developed in the Netherlands by Roelofs and Terwel (1997) ¹. The survey was modified to elicit information about the existing state of the science and math classroom environment as perceived by the teachers and the students. Pre-post implementation was utilized to help us evaluate the success of the project by comparing responses before and after implementation of the ATA activities.