Search

Increasing public concern over the use of animal dissection in education is driving development and testing of alternatives to animal use. Clay modeling has proven successful in achieving comparable or superior learning at postsecondary levels, but it has not yet been tested at secondary levels. This study tested the effectiveness and appeal of clay models vs. cat cadaver dissection in teaching human anatomy to high school students. Student performance on a content knowledge assessment increased following both the model and dissection laboratories. The use of clay models produced better short-term learning outcomes in human anatomy for high school students than the use of cat dissection techniques, although this improvement was not retained in students' final examination scores. Students found the clay models both useful and enjoyable. Overall, the majority of students chose dissection as the preferred technique; however, after the laboratory exercises, the proportion of students who chose dissection decreased, for both the clay modeling and cat dissection laboratory sections. In the clay modeling group, the proportion of students expressing preference for clay modeling was slightly higher than the proportion preferring cat dissection.

In this article, we examine classroom observations from a 3-year large-scale randomized trial in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to investigate the extent to which a professional development initiative in inquiry science influenced teaching practices in in 4th and 5th grade classrooms in 73 schools. During the course of the study, LAUSD introduced an additional districtwide scientific inquiry professional development initiative, which complicates the experimental analysis but allows us to conduct a quasiexperimental analysis of the second Multilevel models predicting the presence of science inquiry in observed classroom lessons show that both interventions increased the incidence of inquiry-based science teaching, but the impact was limited to selected features of the inquiry process. We also found that the experimental impacts on teaching practice correspond with the features of scientific inquiry to which the teachers were most frequently exposed during the professional development. (Contains 8 notes and 6 tables.)