Based on positive feedback and previous years' success, high school students are paired with high school teachers. This year we had a rare phenomenon in which the teacher and the high school teacher in one of the labs would not work together but each did separate parts of the project and didn't work to learn the other's part. Their presentation was fine but it was unfortunate that each missed out on learning important and useful techniques.
The goal of the program is to enhance teacher effectiveness. There continues to be a dramatic difference in the two high schools in terms of the percentage of science teachers who have participated and tracking student performance continues to be hampered given the small population and other factors such as economic status of the student population. This is the same challenge we had last year and will continue to attempt to track the number of laboratory exercises and teaching modules incorporated into teachers' lesson plans as a means to quantitatively evaluate effectiveness of the teacher cohort portion of our program
