This grant sponsors research, planning meetings, and team building leading to preparation of a multi-institutional grant proposal to be submitted in spring, 2003. The foci of our project will be (1) disseminating good middle school science education practices and (2) models of scaling based on facilitated online teacher professional development. Our goal is to identify two well-defined scalable approaches to middle school science that have documented potential for high impact on student achievement, and to implement those approaches on a large scale through "Facilitated Online Learning Communities," a successful program currently operated by Wisconsin Education Communications Board, which is a regional affiliate of PBS. Our study will test alternative theory- and research-based designs for the online implementations, manipulating program-design variables that are most likely to affect program effectiveness. The relative effectiveness of designs will be measured both in terms of sustainability, changes to teacher practice, and student achievement.

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