We are asking primary and secondary teachers to complete a short survey as part of a stocktake of resources that support science teaching and learning. This link https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NZCERScienceSurvey will take you to a short electronic survey about your use of science resources in your teaching programme. Overall the survey has ten screens. Almost all the responses are tick boxes and the survey should take no more than 20 minutes to complete. There are several optional open questions. We’d love you to do those too if you can.
We really hope you can help us. The more completed surveys we get, the more robust our findings will be. Please pass this message to other teachers you know who might want to help.
Your responses will be anonymous: we will not be able to tell who has replied unless you choose to add contact information. That’s why the last question asks for a few demographic details to help us make sense of differences in patterns of responses. There is a place at the end of the survey where you can add contact details if you would like to get involved in the next stages of the project but this is optional. Alternatively, you can contact Rosemary Hipkins on rose.hipkins@nzcer.org.nz or the overall project leader Ally Bull on ally.bull@nzcer.org.nz if you prefer to send a separate personal message.
If you start the survey but then decide to stop, the data from any pages you have completed will be saved but we might not use it. You can stop at any stage but we hope you won’t because completed surveys will tell us so much more.
This research forms part of the MInistry of Education's response to the recent report on science education developed by Peter Gluckman. The three-pronged project is being carried out by a team that includes people from NZCER, CWA/Learning Media and Waikato and Massey universities. This is the first step and will collect information for all three projects (science curriculum, e-learning in science, and science education resources in the community).
The Ministry wants to know which resources are currently being used and why. They are interested in how well NZC is being supported, especially the Nature of Science strand, and what else might need to be done to support ongoing changes to the curriculum so that it meets the needs of all our students in the rapidly changing conditions of this century.
Thank you in anticipation of your help. We will notify everyone, via the TKI curriculum alert and through the NZCER website when any reports of the results are available to download.
Rosemary Hipkins (for the wider research team)