Collaborative Research: Exploring Teacher Tolerance for Ambiguity: Implications for Science Instruction

About This Grant

This research project explores how high school teachers' comfort with ambiguity in instructional situations--called Tolerance for Ambiguity (T4A)--affects science teaching and learning. Building on previous work showing that open-ended, model-based lessons help students better understand science, the researchers found that teachers who were more comfortable with uncertain or open-ended situations were most successful in supporting student learning. The new study will examine how classroom activities unfold differently across different teachers' T4A, co-develop a professional learning program to help teachers become more comfortable with ambiguity, and test the impact of this program on teachers' instruction and student learning. Ultimately, the goal is to create more effective science classroom learning experiences by helping teachers embrace and make productive use of scientific uncertainty in ways that support deeper learning and sensemaking. The findings from this work will help improve how teachers implement high-quality science instructional materials. Findings also will directly inform efforts in science education more generally that involve engaging students in rigorous and ambitious scientific reasoning. This project builds on an NSF-funded project that examined the efficacy of the Model-Based Educational Resource (MBER), which develops scientific understanding by engaging high school students in modeling. This study demonstrated a significant positive effect of the program on students' abilities to reason with scientific models, and that teachers' T4A was a significant moderator on student achievement. The present study includes co-design of a professional learning intervention to increase teachers T4A; an observational study and teacher interviews with 10 teachers to document results and distinguish instructional moves related to T4A; a subsequent study of 60 teachers to further refine the observational coding scheme; and measure development for T4A and teacher confidence implementing open-ended tasks. The findings will contribute to both theory and practice by advancing understanding of how teacher dispositions influence science instruction and by developing practical strategies to help teachers manage ambiguity in support of deeper and more effective sensemaking. The research is foundational to instructional materials development, professional learning design, and pre-service science teacher education. This study is funded by the ECR program, which supports fundamental research in service of STEM education. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.