For Administrators

Create a high-quality learning experience for your teachers leveraging the resources and online community available in the NSTA Learning Center!

If you are responsible for coordinating or developing professional learning experiences for your school, district, or state, the NSTA Learning Center contains a variety of online resources and tools to fit any educator’s learning style, content, and pedagogical needs and can be accessed by the teacher 24/7. NSTA is committed to providing the very best personalized professional learning to teachers who teach science.

• Convenience and Accessibility: NSTA’s Learning Center allows educators to access excellent and engaging science content and pedagogical implications any time of the day or night – 24/7 – to fit their schedule
• Fully Customized: NSTA's Learning Center allows educators to evaluate their content knowledge and teaching skills and choose a path designed specifically for their learning needs and preferences
• Autonomy: NSTA's Learning Center enables every teacher to manage their learning plan, track their experiences, and document their accomplishments
• Research-Based and Proven: NSTA Learning Center’s learning experiences are research-based, proven to significantly improve teacher science content knowledge and science-teaching confidence*

• NSTA Resources
• About the Learning Center (pdf)
• How To Videos
• NSTA Position Statement on e-Learning

Accountability and Affordability NSTA offers administrators a special opportunity to access a large set of resources in the NSTA Learning Center with a special suite of accountability tools built in - for one low annual subscription price per educator.

• Assist your teachers in designing their own learning plan to meet their content and skills needs for your school, district or state’s unique needs
• Review "real-time" reports of your teacher's completed learning experiences as a group and as individuals for interactive web modules (SciPacks), and via their activity points records and profile page
• Review your faculty’s log-in and frequency-of-usage rates for SciPacks
• Review the overall number of faculty who have taken and completed SciPacks and view individuals who have passed SciPacks
• Easily build reports to document your teacher’s participation, progress, and performance of a series of SciPacks
• Review all online activity tracked by the educator’s activity points (forums posts, collections shared, resources reviewed, web seminars attended, etc.)

Research-Based & Proven

NSTA has been rigorous in the development of all Learning Center materials. External research shows a STRONG POSITIVE impact on teachers who participated in NSTA online Professional Development – both in terms of content knowledge and level of confidence in teaching science concepts.*

Visit the Impact page

Complete Support

• Setting-up Your Cohort: We help you get started and provide advice on ways to maximize your usage and investment.
• Unlimited Content Help: Access through your subscription to specialists to help with any content questions, problems, or issues on content.
• Online Advisors: Assist users in finding resources, using tools, and with recommendations for best practices.

Getting Started

NSTA Online Professional Learning via the Learning Center is a great value whether you are accessing NSTA’s FREE Learning Resources, or purchasing an annual subscription for a group of teachers to the larger suite of resources available in the NSTA Learning Center.

If you are an administrator at the state, district or school level, call to get information on our special group rates and highly valued administrator management tools.

Call 703-312-9250 or, e-mail fmendez@nsta.org.

*All NSTA materials have undergone extensive testing, content and pedagogy expert review, and efficacy research. Formative research was conducted by independent experts to ensure scientific accuracy and credibility.

External Research shows a STRONG impact on teachers who participated in NSTA Online Professional Learning.

• Before their NSTA learning experience: Over 91% of respondents in the study identified themselves as somewhat confident (64.6%) or not confident (27.8%) teaching the science concepts addressed before participating in NSTA Learning Center experience
• After participation in NSTA Learning Center learning experience, 0% identified themselves as “not confident” in their ability to teach the science concepts addressed and 60% of the participants felt “very confident” in their ability to teach the science content
• Teachers who participated in NSTA Online Professional Learning also showed significant content knowledge gains. A pre/post-test instrument developed and administered by Horizon Research, Inc., found significant gains in teacher knowledge after taking the Force and Motion SciPack. These research results are published in an article in the Journal of Science Education and Technology titled “Evaluation of Online, On-Demand Science Professional Development Material Involving Two Different Implementation Models, Volume 17-No 1, February 2008, Sherman, Byers, Rapp

FUNDING NOTE

NSTA was supported in the development of these professional learning resources by the generous funding of NSF, NOAA, FDA, US Dept. of Ed, DOT, NSTA Press, Sally Ride Science, and National Science Digital Library.