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Project SCORE ends successful first year
Project SCORE (Schools’ Cooperative Opportunities for Resources and Education) places University of North Texas Health Science Center graduate students into Fort Worth high school classrooms. With a three year grant from the National Science Foundation, the program aims to get more high school students interested in science. Dr. Rustin Reeves, assistant professor and director of Project SCORE:
Reeves: “We’re working with ninth grade biology students. The main goal is to get those students interested in science.”
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Reeves: “We’re actually taking graduate students here at the Health Science Center, and we’re teaming them up with a high school in a high school biology classroom with a teacher. And they spend about eight to ten hours a week in the classroom, serving as mentors, as role models, tutors, content resource for the teacher; a little bit of everything.”
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Dr. Reeves, a former high school biology teacher, put together a team of students to work with Project SCORE for the 2002-2003 academic year.
Reeves: “This first year we had eight students, eight graduate students, actually called graduate teaching fellows, and they were in four high schools here in Ft. Worth ISD. This next year we’ve added another high school and two more students, so there’ll be another team, there’ll be another two students in another high school with another biology teacher and classroom. And each of these classrooms affects anywhere from, I think we’ve had four periods all the way through, some of these teachers have six periods of biology, so [it could] range anywhere from about 80 to 100 students up to maybe as many as 130 or 15 students, per classroom.”
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The graduate fellows work with teachers to try to present students with a more sophisticated and interesting curriculum.
Reeves: “One of their main roles is to take laboratory experiments that the teachers were already doing in their classroom and what we did, it was kind of like a ‘laboratory enhancement exercise’ is what we called it. And they were trying to take that lab, just maybe to the next level. Just to push the students just a little bit more into trying to ask questions about a little bit higher level of science thinking.”
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Feedback from teachers and students has been very positive. But the graduate fellows working on the project have also benefited greatly from the experience.
Reeves: “So there’s a lot of development things that these graduate students get out of this program, beside just being in there and being a content resource for the teacher, and being role models to the students. They’re actually gaining a lot of communication skills and presentation skills, which is a benefit to us because it’s helping them in their graduate work here, and it’s helping the Ft. Worth ISD from having their knowledge and their content they’re aware of in the classroom.”
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Reeves is excited by the prospect of graduate fellows going on to teach science in high schools.
Reeves: “And I think it’s very important for a student to have access to a person who is enthused about science at an early age, to carry that enthusiasm over into their lives. And really this is the same for any class, doesn’t matter whether it’s music or science or art or history or whatever. I think the more enthusiasm that teacher, that instructor can show in the classroom, a lot of that’s going to carry over to their students.”
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