Purpose The paper aims to illustrate primary pre-service teachers’ understanding of argumentation based on a study using quantitative methodology. In particular, it aims to illustrate how these teachers view quality of arguments and teaching strategies related to argumentation in the context of a socio-scientific issue on energy.
Sample 332 pre-service teachers enrolled in a university teacher education programme in Spain were investigated. Many studies on argumentation have been conducted with small sample sizes of teachers. Hence, given the sample size, the study provides findings that are likely to be generalisable.
Design and methods A questionnaire was administered to the participants. The design of the questionnaire was guided by some existing analytical tools which were adapted for primary education purposes in the context of socio-scientific issues. This adaptation is novel in that the questionnaire items can potentially be used as diagnostic questions to assess primary teachers’ understanding of argumentation.
Results The results suggest that pre-service teachers had difficulty in understanding arguments and different pedagogical strategies to promote argumentation in classroom. For example, they did not understand the role and the meaning of warrants in scientific arguments and their understanding of the use of different kind of strategies is limited to debates, open discussions and experiments. The age range of the participants and the length of teaching experience had no impact on the quality of their understanding of argumentation.
Conclusions Pre-service science teacher education will benefit from incorporation of more robust and lengthy sessions on argumentation. For example, sessions could focus on quality as well as structure of arguments in science and more diverse pedagogical strategies to support argumentation in science lessons, such as the use of writing frames and presentations. 相似文献
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess pre-service science teachers' TPACK over a semester-long Science Methods.
Sample: Twenty-seven pre-service science teachers took the course toward the end of their four-year teacher education program.
Design and method: The study employed the case study methodology. Lesson plans and microteaching observations were used as data collection tools. Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge-based lesson plan assessment instrument (TPACK-LpAI) and Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge Observation Protocol (TPACK-OP) were used to analyze data obtained from observations and lesson plans.
Results: The results showed that the TPACK-focused Science Methods course had an impact on pre-service teachers’ TPACK to varying degrees. Most importantly, the course helped teachers gain knowledge of effective usage of educational technology tools.
Conclusion: Teacher education programs should provide opportunities to pre-service teachers to develop their TPACK so that they can effectively integrate technology into their teaching. 相似文献
Purpose: The focus of this research is development and testing of a new classroom observation protocol specifically designed for SSI-based instructional contexts.
Design and methods: Development of this SSI-Observation Protocol (SSI-OP) took place in four distinct phases: review of existing protocols and SSI-based instruction frameworks, writing and revision of protocol items, initial testing of the draft protocol, and soliciting feedback from SSI experts.
Sample: Following the four stages of SSI-OP development, we progressed to a series of field tests. The field tests were conducted with three different samples. The first sample was an experienced (10 + years) high school biology teacher and one of her honors biology classes. The second sample consisted of seven Turkish Pre-service Science Teachers (PST) participating in a science methods course. The third sample included two Thai PST from a field experience course embedded within a teacher education program.
Results: The final version of the protocol addressed five dimensions of SSI-based instructional activities: focus of instruction, teaching moves, role of teacher, role of students, and classroom environment.
Conclusions: The SSI-OP could be used in a variety of ways for research including documentation of current practices, impacts of professional development and/or curricula on teaching practices, and changes in teaching over time. We offer the SSI-OP as a new tool with the potential to contribute to science teacher education and research that may advance the teaching and learning of science through SSI. 相似文献
Purpose: LBD uses the context of design challenges to learn, among other things, science. Previous research shows that this approach to subject integration is quite successful but provides little profit on (scientific) concept learning. For this, a lack of (knowledge of) proper teaching strategies is suggested as an important reason. This study explores these strategies and more specific the interaction with concept learning.
Sample: Six Dutch first-year bachelor’s degree science student teachers, between the ages of 16 and 18, and two science teacher trainers (principal investigators included) were involved.
Design and methods: A mixed methods study was used to study LBD’s teaching practice in depth. Based on a theoretical framework of (concept) learning-related teaching strategies video recordings of a guided LBD challenge were analysed to unravel teacher handling in detail. Complemented by questionnaire and interview data and students’ learning outcomes (pre- and post-exam) the effectiveness of teaching strategies was established and shortcomings were distracted.
Results: Students reached medium overall learning gains where the highest gains were strongly task-related. Teacher handling was dominated by providing feedback and stimulating collaboration and only 13% of all teacher interventions concerned direct explication of underlying science. And especially these explicit teaching strategies were highly appreciated by students to learn about science.
Conclusions: In accordance with insights about knowledge transfer, LBD needs to be enriched with explicit teaching strategies, interludes according to poor-related science content important for cohesive understanding and de- and recontextualisation of concepts for deeper understanding. 相似文献
Purpose To investigate teachers’ and principals’ reflections on the competition in schools.
Sample Seventeen secondary school teachers and three principals from districts in the south-western part of Sweden participated in the study. All teachers had long experience of the competition, and their classes had reached at least the regional finals during the last year.
Design and methods Semi-structured interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and then analysed using content analysis. Focus was put on why the teachers decided to participate, how the teachers integrated the competition in their education and roles of the principals.
Results There were various reasons for participating in the competition. Teachers reported development of twenty-first-century skills such as better cooperation between the students. They also noticed an increased interest in science and technology and how learning in the subjects was stimulated. Furthermore, the teachers found participation in the competition to be positive for them too. They integrated the competition in ordinary education and gained teaching ideas as well as found connections to the curriculum. Participating in the competition seemed to be a tradition in most of the schools. The principals’ role was to facilitate the organisation around the competition and to provide social support.
Conclusions Participation in a school competition was considered as an instructional strategy with several positive outcomes. Use of this strategy can be supported by earlier suggestions to use pedagogies that are opposite to transmissive methods, enhancing students’ development of important skills for the future. 相似文献
Purpose: This is a report of teacher and student reflections on some of the tensions, reconciliations and feelings they experienced as they worked together to engage in inquiry learning. The study sought to find out how networked ICT use might offer new and different ways for students to engage with, explore and communicate science ideas within inquiry.
Sample: This project developed case studies with 6 science teachers of year 9 and 10 students, with an average age of 13 and 14 years in three New Zealand high schools. Teacher participants in the project had varying levels of understanding and experience with inquiry learning in science. Teacher knowledge and experience with ICT were equally diverse.
Design and Methods: Teachers and researchers developed initially in a joint workshop a shared understanding of inquiry, and how this could be enacted. During implementation, the researchers observed the inquiry projects in the classrooms and then, together with the teachers, reviewed and analysed the data that had been collected.
Results: At the beginning of the project, some of the teachers and students were tentative: inquiry based teaching supported by ICT meant initially that the teachers were hesitant in letting go some of the control they felt they had over students learning, and the students felt insecure in adopting some responsibility for their own learning. Over time a sense of trust and ease developed and this ‘control of learning’ balance moved from what was traditionally accepted, but not without modifications and reservations.
Conclusions: There is no clear pathway to follow in moving towards ICT-supported science inquiry in secondary schools. The experience of the teacher, the funds of knowledge the students bring to the classroom, the level of technological availability in the school and the ability of the students are all variables which determine the nature of the experience. 相似文献
Purpose: Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate Swedish technology teachers’ attitudes toward their subject, and how these attitudes may be related to background variables.
Sample: Technology teachers in Swedish compulsory schools (n = 1153) responded to a questionnaire about teachers’ attitudes, experiences, and background.
Methods: Exploratory factor analysis was used to inwvestigate attitude dimensions of the questionnaire. Groupings of teachers based on attitudes were identified through cluster analysis, and multinomial logistic regression was performed to investigate the role of teachers’ background variables as predictors for cluster belonging.
Results: Four attitudinal dimensions were identified in the questionnaire, corresponding to distinct components of attitudes. Three teacher clusters were identified among the respondents characterized by positive, negative, and mixed attitudes toward the subject of technology and its teaching, respectively. The most influential predictors of cluster membership were to be qualified for teaching technology, having participated in in-service-training, teaching at a school with a proper overall teaching plan for the subject of technology and teaching at a school with a defined number of teaching hours for the subject.
Conclusions: The results suggest that efforts to increase technology teachers’ qualifications and establishing a fixed number of teaching hours and an overall teaching plan for the subject of technology may yield more positive attitudes among teachers toward technology teaching. In turn, this could improve the status of the subject as well as students’ learning. 相似文献
Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore students’ perception of teachers’ feedback given on their texts in two genres, and to suggest how writing training and feedback-giving could become more efficient.
Sample: In this study were included 44 degree project students in biology and molecular biology, and 21 supervising teachers at a Swedish university.
Design and methods: The study concerned students’ writing about their degree projects in two genres: scientific writing and popular science writing. The data consisted of documented teacher feedback on the students’ popular science texts. It also included students’ and teachers’ answers to questionnaires about writing and feedback. All data were collected during the spring of 2012. Teachers’ feedback, actual and recalled – by students and teachers, respectively – was analysed and compared using the so-called Canons of rhetoric.
Results: While the teachers recalled the given feedback as mainly positive, most students recalled only negative feedback. According to the teachers, suggested improvements concerned firstly the content, and secondly the structure of the text. In contrast, the students mentioned language style first, followed by content.
Conclusions: The disagreement between students and teachers regarding how and what feedback was given on the students texts confirm the need of improved strategies for writing training and feedback-giving in science education. We suggest that the rhetorical meta-language might play a crucial role in overcoming the difficulties observed in this study. We also discuss how training of writing skills may contribute to students’ understanding of their subject matter. 相似文献
Purpose: In the current study, the purpose was to investigate the relations among perceived teacher affective support (PTAS), academic emotions (academic enjoyment, academic anxiety, and academic hopelessness), academic self-efficacy and behavioural engagement in elementary school science classrooms in Turkey.
Sample: A total of 633 fourth- and fifth-grade students in eight elementary schools in Istanbul, Turkey were participated in the study.
Design and methods: A self-report questionnaire was administered to participating students. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling.
Results: Findings showed that PTAS was both directly and indirectly related to the given variables. PTAS was found to be significantly positively associated with students’ academic enjoyment, academic self-efficacy and behavioural engagement and significantly negatively related to their academic anxiety and academic hopelessness in science classrooms. An important finding is that the total effect of PTAS on behavioural engagement, a factor strongly associated with academic success in all disciplines, was as strong as the effect of students’ perceived academic self-efficacy beliefs in science.
Conclusions: Findings suggest that PTAS may help promoting positive emotions and motivation among students in science classrooms, eventually leading to more desirable attitudes and achievement outcomes in science. Teacher affective support deserves greater recognition from researchers, educational policy-makers, administrators and teachers to build better learning conditions for all students. 相似文献
Purpose/Hypothesis: This study offers teaching strategies and their corresponding instructional sequences based on Lakatosian Methodology, and examines the effects of a Lakatosian Conflict Map using pre-service elementary teachers’ conceptual understandings of the causes of seasons.
Design/Method: The Lakatosian Conflict Map was applied to concepts of seasonal change held by pre-service elementary teachers.
Results: Most pre-service elementary teachers consistently protect their hard-core beliefs about seasonal change by offering auxiliary hypotheses related to earth’s elliptical orbit and the tilt of its rotational axis in response to activities designed to promote conceptual change around knowledge related to the cause of the seasons. Specifically, the critical event rather than the discrepant event in the Lakatosian Conflict Map was conducted in a Lakatosian conflict group and these students were allowed to explicitly express their representations about the phenomena derived from these events. The result of this study is that instruction using the new Lakatosian Conflict Map produced more favorable outcomes in terms of conceptual change than traditional instruction.
Conclusions: This research concludes that the Lakatosian Conflict Map can help science teachers and students resolve the conflicts between students’ existing ideas and target scientific concepts. 相似文献
Purpose: The study aims to find out primary school students’ perceptions of microorganisms and to analyze whether theoretical or practical teaching interventions produce different levels in student’s learning about this topic.
Sample: The sample consisted of 199 primary students in 2nd (aged 7–8) and 6th (11–12) grades from two public schools in Albacete (Spain).
Design and method: This study uses a pre- and post-intervention questionnaire to evaluate the knowledge of students on the issue of microorganisms. We compare differences by age and two teaching–learning intervention methodologies: theoretical and practical.
Results: Results from the pre-test showed a poor understanding and several misconceptions. Children have a limited and negative view of microorganisms, mainly derived from non-formal learning. Both types of intervention provided an improvement in knowledge, but closed questions did not reveal clear statistically significant differences between methods. Open questions showed how the scientific use of the language and quality of verbalization is much better in the groups that received a practical intervention.
Conclusion: The findings can be a starting point for curriculum planners and for teachers interested in engaging students in science learning. 相似文献
Design: Four hundred and forty-five teachers completed questionnaires that examined a variety of aspects of reciprocal relations between teachers and school management.
Findings: The model explains 44% of the variance in authentic teacher–principal communication. The principal’s communication pattern with teachers, with two sub-components, represents a dominant factor in teacher willingness to share information. Leadership style represents only an indirect factor. 相似文献
Design/Method: The study was carried out in two classes working with inquiry and the events that took place in the classroom were filmed. In the study, we have chosen to use the technical term proximate purposes for the student-oriented purposes, and ultimate purposes for the scientific purposes. Together, these two types of purposes form the organisational purposes for the classes. Proximate purposes work in such a way that students can use their language and relate to their experiences as ends-in-view. To examine how organising purposes can be used to analyse progressions, we discuss examples from two different lessons.
Result: The study shows the importance of proximate purposes working as ends-in-view and also demonstrates how the teacher and students may create continuity in teaching to enable progression as a part of a teaching sequence.
Conclusions: To create continuity, it was essential that the teacher scaffolded the students in ways which allowed the students to explicitly differentiate between what was relevant or not, about the proximate purposes in relation to the ultimate purpose. 相似文献
Purpose: This study aims to develop a NOSvs for assessing prospective teachers’ views of the nature of science and to analyse their psychometric properties.
Sample: A total of 565 prospective teachers participated in the study.
Design and methods: The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) Index and Bartlett’s Sphericity Test were used in this study. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to determine the construct validity of the scale. Cronbach’s Alpha (α) coefficient was calculated for the reliability of the study.
Results: It was consequently found that the KMO was larger than .50. That Bartlett’s Sphericity Test was also statistically significant. The items with item-total correlations smaller than .30 were removed from the scale. Cronbach’s α values calculated for each sub-scale were above .70. In consequence of the first CFA performed, fit indices were found to be below the expected level. For this reason, three more items with the least item-total correlations were removed from the scale. Following the CFA, the final form of the scale included 36 items and five sub-scales. 相似文献