Do Skilled Elementary Teachers Hold Scientific Conceptions and Can They Accurately Predict the Type and Source of Students’ Preconceptions of Electric Circuits?

Holding scientific conceptions and having the ability to accurately predict students’ preconceptions are a prerequisite for science teachers to design appropriate constructivist-oriented learning experiences. This study explored the types and sources of students’ preconceptions of electric circuits. First, 438 grade 3 (9 years old) students were surveyed about their pre-instructional ideas on electric circuits and where they developed these ideas. Then, 76 elementary school teachers with master’s degrees in science education were selected and their content knowledge of electric circuits was documented. Next, they were asked to make predictions about the kind of preconceptions most grade 3 students would have about electric circuits and the most dominant source of these preconceptions. The results revealed that these skilled teachers held scientific conceptions for most of the questions surveyed; however, they inaccurately predicted the types and sources of the students’ prominent alternative preconceptions. Specifically, they underestimated the possibility of students holding scientific concepts and neglected the effect of students’ intuition on their conceptions. Implications for teaching and teacher education are discussed.     

Do Skilled Elementary Teachers Hold Scientific Conceptions and Can They Accurately Predict the Type and Source of Students’ Preconceptions of Electric Circuits?

Holding scientific conceptions and having the ability to accurately predict students’ preconceptions are a prerequisite for science teachers to design appropriate constructivist-oriented learning experiences. This study explored the types and sources of students’ preconceptions of electric circuits. First, 438 grade 3 (9 years old) students were surveyed about their pre-instructional ideas on electric circuits and where they developed these ideas. Then, 76 elementary school teachers with master’s degrees in science education were selected and their content knowledge of electric circuits was documented. Next, they were asked to make predictions about the kind of preconceptions most grade 3 students would have about electric circuits and the most dominant source of these preconceptions. The results revealed that these skilled teachers held scientific conceptions for most of the questions surveyed; however, they inaccurately predicted the types and sources of the students’ prominent alternative preconceptions. Specifically, they underestimated the possibility of students holding scientific concepts and neglected the effect of students’ intuition on their conceptions. Implications for teaching and teacher education are discussed.

     

Teaching the teacher: exploring STEM graduate students’ nature of science conceptions in a teaching methods course

ABSTRACT

Graduate students regularly teach undergraduate STEM courses and can positively impact students’ understanding of science. Yet little research examines graduate students’ knowledge about nature of science (NOS) or instructional strategies for teaching graduate students about NOS. This exploratory study sought to understand how a 1-credit Teaching in Higher Education course that utilised an explicit, reflective, and mixed-context approach to NOS instruction impacted STEM graduate students’ NOS conceptions and teaching intentions. Participants included 13 graduate students. Data sources included the Views of Nature of Science (VNOS-Form C) questionnaire administered pre- and post-instruction, semi-structured interviews with a subset of participants, and a NOS-related course project. Prior to instruction participants held many alternative NOS conceptions. Post-instruction, participants’ NOS conceptions improved substantially, particularly in their understandings of theories and laws and the tentative nature of scientific knowledge. All 12 participants planning to teach NOS intended to use explicit instructional approaches. A majority of participants also integrated novel ideas to their intended NOS instruction. These results suggest that a teaching methods course for graduate students with embedded NOS instruction can address alternative NOS conceptions and facilitate intended use of effective NOS instruction. Future research understanding graduate students' NOS understandings and actual NOS instruction is warranted.     

Reflecting on Scientists’ Activity Based on Science Fiction Stories Written by Secondary Students

In this article the authors resort to a qualitative analysis of the plot of science fiction stories about a group of scientists, written by two 11th‐grade Earth and Life Science students (aged 17), and to semi‐structured interviews, with the double purpose of diagnosing their conceptions of the nature of science (namely, as regards scientists’ activity), and discussing the potentialities of this methodology in terms of research and education in science. The adopted methodology proved particularly effective in diagnosing the students’ conceptions of scientists’ characteristics, scientific activity, and science–technology–society interactions. The limited content of certain conceptions and a certain lack of knowledge on the part of the students concerning the processes and the epistemology of science highlight the need to pay explicit attention in science classes to the nature of scientific activity. Some of the ideas brought up by the students clearly show the influence of stereotypes and catastrophic scenarios depicted in films, television programs, and books, revealing media’s limitations when divulging scientific and technological themes to the general public and stressing the need for the school to promote a critical debate about science and technology images conveyed by the media.     

Minority Preservice Teachers’ Conceptions of Teaching Science: Sources of Science Teaching Strategies

This study explores five minority preservice teachers’ conceptions of teaching science and identifies the sources of their strategies for helping students learn science. Perspectives from the literature on conceptions of teaching science and on the role constructs used to describe and distinguish minority preservice teachers from their mainstream White peers served as the framework to identify minority preservice teachers’ instructional ideas, meanings, and actions for teaching science. Data included drawings, narratives, observations and self-review reports of microteaching, and interviews. A thematic analysis of data revealed that the minority preservice teachers’ conceptions of teaching science were a specific set of beliefs-driven instructional ideas about how science content is linked to home experiences, students’ ideas, hands-on activities, about how science teaching must include group work and not be based solely on textbooks, and about how learning science involves the concept of all students can learn science, and acknowledging and respecting students’ ideas about science. Implications for teacher educators include the need to establish supportive environments within methods courses for minority preservice teachers to express their K-12 experiences and acknowledge and examine how these experiences shape their conceptions of teaching science, and to recognize that minority preservice teachers’ conceptions of teaching science reveal the multiple ways through which they see and envision science instruction.     

Students’ Conceptions About ‘Radiation’: Results from an Explorative Interview Study of 9th Grade Students

One basis of good teaching is to know about your students?? preconceptions. Studies about typical ideas that students bring to the science classroom have been and continue to be a major field in science education research. This study aims to explore associations and ideas that students have regarding ??radiation??, a term widely used in various fields and necessary to understand fundamental ideas in science. In an explorative study, the perceptions of 50 high school students were examined using semi-structured interviews. The students were 14?C16?years old and were chosen from 7 different high schools in an urban area in Austria. Following an interview guideline, students were asked about their general associations with the term ??radiation?? as well as about their general understanding of different types of radiation. A qualitative analysis of these interviews following the method of Flick (2009) revealed that the students?? associations were, to a great extent, very different from the scientific use of the term. Several conceptions that could inhibit students?? learning processes could be identified. Consequences for the teaching of the topic ??radiation?? in science lessons, which are based on these preconceptions, are presented in the conclusion.     

The Role of Intuitive Rules in Science and Mathematics Education

During the last two decades many researchers in mathematics and science education have studied students’ conceptions and ways of reasoning in mathematics and science. Most of this research is content‐specific. It was found that students hold alternative ideas that are not always compatible with those accepted in science. It was suggested that in the process of learning science or mathematics, students should restructure their specific conceptions to make them conform to currently accepted scientific ideas. In our work in mathematics and science education it became apparent that some of the alternative conceptions in science and mathematics are based on the same intuitive rules. We have so far identified two such rules: “More of A, more of B”, and “Subdivision processes can always be repeated”. The first rule is reflected in subjects’ responses to many tasks, including all classical Piagetian conservation tasks (conservation of number, area, weight, volume, matter, etc.) in all tasks related to intensive quantities (density, temperature, concentration, etc.) and in all tasks related to infinite quantities. The second rule is observed in students’, preservice and inservice teachers’ responses to tasks related to successive division of material and geometrical objects and in seriation tasks. In this paper, we describe and discuss these rules and their relevance to science and mathematics education.     

Students’ Alternative Frameworks and Teaching Strategies: a pilot study

Research has shown that students’ alternative conceptions in science are quite resistent to change, which indicates that the teaching strategies used are not appropriate and that new strategies should be implemented in order to promote conceptual change. This pilot study was carried out with 100 Portuguese 5th grade students and aims: (a) to investigate a teaching strategy geared to the students’ conceptual change, taking into account their misconceptions about scientific ideas; (b) to promote a better attitude towards science. The results of this study indicate that the teaching approach based on the pupils’ alternative ideas and that makes them reflect on their own work and ideas, seemed to increase learning of scientific concepts related to the topic ‘properties and corpuscular model of the air’ and consequently favoured conceptual change better than a ‘traditional’ approach.     

Conceptual Resources for Learning Science: Issues of transience and grain‐size in cognition and cognitive structure

Many studies into learners’ ideas in science have reported that aspects of learners’ thinking can be represented in terms of entities described in such terms as alternative conceptions or conceptual frameworks, which are considered to describe relatively stable aspects of conceptual knowledge that are represented in the learner’s memory and accessed in certain contexts. Other researchers have suggested that learners’ ideas elicited in research are often better understood as labile constructions formed in response to probes and generated from more elementary conceptual resources (e.g. phenomenological primitives or ‘p‐prims’). This ‘knowledge‐in‐pieces perspective’ (largely developed from studies of student thinking about physics topics), and the ‘alternative conceptions perspective’, suggests different pedagogic approaches. The present paper discusses issues raised by this area of work. Firstly, a model of cognition is considered within which the ‘knowledge‐in‐pieces’ and ‘alternative conceptions’ perspectives co‐exist. Secondly, this model is explored in terms of whether such a synthesis could offer fruitful insights by considering some candidate p‐prims from chemistry education. Finally, areas for developing testable predictions are outlined, to show how such a model can be a ‘refutable variant’ of a progressive research programme in learning science.     

Lasting effects of instruction guided by the conflict map: Experimental study of learning about the causes of the seasons

This study was based on the framework of the “conflict map” to facilitate student conceptual learning about causes of the seasons. Instruction guided by the conflict map emphasizes not only the use of discrepant events, but also the resolution of conflict between students' alternative conceptions and scientific conceptions, using critical events or explanations and relevant perceptions and conceptions that explicate the scientific conceptions. Two ninth grade science classes in Taiwan participated in this quasi‐experimental study in which one class was assigned to a traditional teaching group and the other class was assigned to a conflict map instruction treatment. Students' ideas were gathered through three interviews: the first was conducted 1 week after the instruction; the second 2 months afterward; and the third at 8 months after the treatment. Through an analysis of students' interview responses, it was revealed that many students, even after instruction, had a common alternative conception that seasons were determined by the earth's distance to the sun. However, the instruction guided by the framework of the conflict map was shown to be a potential way of changing the alternative conception and acquiring scientific understandings, especially in light of long‐term observations. A detailed analysis of students' ideas across the interviews also strongly suggests that researchers as well as practicing teachers need to pay particular attention to those students who can simply recall the scientific fact without deep thinking, as these students may learn science through rote memorization and soon regress to alternative conceptions after science instruction. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 42: 1089–1111, 2005     

Students’ conceptions of biology

The argument in this paper has two parallel strands. One describes students’ conceptions of biology; the other uses Habermas’ epistemological framework as a way of suggesting alternative curricular questions. The two strands are brought together, since the research methodology is the situational‐interpretive curriculum orientation, and the findings are considered from this orientation. Thus, the data from the first strand is examined from the second strand, and consequently, new questions arise.

With traditional knowing, science education researchers “know” how students conceive of the science they are learning by having students react to statements of the researcher's conception of science. This way of knowing has been criticized because it depends upon the researcher's set of ways of looking at students’ conceptions. As such, it does not treat students’ knowledge as a first‐order phenomena; knowing is, rather, a second‐order phenomena since it is filtered through another person's conceptions. In this study the Habermasian framework is used as an alternative perspective of knowledge which allows students’ conceptions to be examined at the level at which the conceptions were constructed.

The study suggests that students conceptualize biology from three distinct philosophical positions; but when these positions are considered from the Habermasian framework, they all are examples of the empirical‐analytic tradition. As such, the students’ conceptions have not gone beyond explanatory knowledge, and this raises questions about the curriculum.     

Students' Meaning‐making of Socio‐scientific Issues in Computer Mediated Settings: Exploring learning through interaction trajectories

This article reports on a study concerning secondary school students’ meaning‐making of socio‐scientific issues in Information and Communication Technology‐mediated settings. Our theoretical argument has as its point of departure the analytical distinction between ‘doing science’ and ‘doing school,’ as two different forms of classroom activity. In the study we conducted an analysis of students working with web‐based groupware systems concerned with genetics. The analysis identified how the students oriented their accounts of scientific concepts and how they attempted to understand the socio‐scientific task in different ways. Their orientations were directed towards finding scientific explanations, towards exploring the ethical and social consequences, and towards ‘fact‐finding.’ The students’ different orientations seemed to contribute to an ambivalent tension, which, on the one hand, was productive because it urged them into ongoing discussions and explicit meaning‐making. On the other hand, however, the tension elucidated how complex and challenging collaborative learning situations can be. Our findings suggest that in order to obtain a deeper understanding of students’ meaning‐making of socio‐scientific issues in Information and Communication Technology‐mediated settings, it is important not only to address how students perform the activity of ‘doing science.’ It is equally important to be sensitive with respect to how students orient their talk and activity towards more or less explicit values, demands, and expectations embedded in the educational setting. In other words, how students perform the activity of ‘doing school.’     

Lakatos’ Scientific Research Programmes as a Framework for Analysing Informal Argumentation about Socio‐scientific Issues

The purpose of this study is to explore how Lakatos’ scientific research programmes might serve as a theoretical framework for representing and evaluating informal argumentation about socio‐scientific issues. Seventy undergraduate science and non‐science majors were asked to make written arguments about four socio‐scientific issues. Our analysis showed that the science majors’ informal arguments were significantly better than the non‐science majors’ arguments. In terms of the resources for supporting reasons, we find that personal experience and scientific belief are the two categories that are generated most often in both groups of the participants. Besides, science majors made significantly greater use of analogies, while non‐science majors made significantly greater use of authority. In addition, both science majors and non‐science majors had a harder time changing their arguments after participating in a group discussion. In the study of argumentation in science, scholars have often used Toulmin’s framework of data, warrant, backing, qualifiers, claims, and rebuttal. Our work demonstrates that Lakatos’ work is also a viable perspective, especially when warrant and backing are difficult to discern, and when students’ arguments are resistant to change. Our use of Lakatos’ framework highlights how the ‘hard core’ of students’ arguments about socio‐scientific issues does, indeed, seem to be protected by a ‘protective belt’ and, thus, is difficult to alter. From these insights, we make specific implications for further research and teaching.     

Describing Changes in Undergraduate Students’ Preconceptions of Research Activities

Research has shown that students bring na?ve scientific conceptions to learning situations which are often incongruous with accepted scientific explanations. These preconceptions are frequently determined to be misconceptions; consequentially instructors spend time to remedy these beliefs and bring students' understanding of scientific concepts to acceptable levels. It is reasonable to assume that students also maintain preconceptions about the processes of authentic scientific research and its associated activities. This study describes the most commonly held preconceptions of authentic research activities among students with little or no previous research experience. Seventeen undergraduate science majors who participated in a ten week research program discussed, at various times during the program, their preconceptions of research and how these ideas changed as a result of direct participation in authentic research activities. The preconceptions included the belief that authentic research is a solitary activity which most closely resembles the type of activity associated with laboratory courses in the undergraduate curriculum. Participants' views showed slight maturation over the research program; they came to understand that authentic research is a detail-oriented activity which is rarely successfully completed alone. These findings and their implications for the teaching and research communities are discussed in the article.     

Students’ Representations of Scientific Practice during a Science Internship: Reflections from an activity‐theoretic perspective

Working at scientists’ elbows is one suggestion that educators make to improve science education, because such “authentic experiences” provide students with various types of science knowledge. However, there is an ongoing debate in the literature about the assumption that authentic science activities can enhance students’ understandings of scientific practice. The purpose of the study is to further address the debate in terms of the ethnographic data collected during an internship programme for high school students right through to their public presentations at the end. Drawing on activity theory to analyse these presentations, we found that students presented scientific practice as accomplished by individual personnel without collaboration in the laboratory. However, our ethnographic data of their internship interaction show that students have had conversations about the complex collaborations within and outside the laboratory. This phenomenon leads us to claim that students experienced authentic science in their internships, but their subsequent representations of authentic science are incomplete. That is, participating in authentic science internships and reporting scientific practice are embedded activities that constitute different goals and conditions rather than unrefracted reflections of one another. The debate on the influence on students’ understanding of science practice is not simply related to situating students in authentic science contexts, but also related to students’ values and ideology of reporting their understanding of and about science. To help students see these “invisible” moments of science practice is therefore crucial. We make suggestions for how the invisible in and of authentic science may be made visible.     

A systematic review of trends and findings in research employing drawing assessment in science education

ABSTRACT

In this study, we reviewed 76 journal articles on employing drawing assessment as a research tool in science education. Findings from the systematic review suggest four justifications for using drawing as a type of research tool, including assessment via drawing as (a) an alternative method considering young participants’ verbal or writing abilities, and affective or economic reasons, (b) a unique method that can reveal aspects not easily measured by other methods, (c) a major method that reflects characteristics of science subjects, and (d) a formative assessment to diagnose students’ ideas to benefit their learning. Furthermore, five research trends of studies using drawing as assessment tools are identified, including: (a) students’ conceptions of scientists from the Draw-a-Scientist-Test (DAST) and evolving studies, (b) students’ understanding or mental models of science concepts, (c) participants’ conceptions of science learning or teaching, (d) students’ inquiry abilities and modelling skills via drawing, and (e) technology to support drawing. For each trend, we synthesised and commented on the current findings. A framework conceptualising phases and issues when designing research and instruments employing drawing assessments is proposed. The review provides insights into the design and future direction of research employing drawing assessments in science education.     

Conflict within dyadic interactions as a stimulant for conceptual change in physics

Research suggests that conventional teaching techniques have proved largely ineffective for dealing with the problem of science students’ misconceptions or alternative frameworks. This paper reports an investigation whereby inter‐personal conflict within dyadic interactions is used as a strategy for promoting development towards correct scientific conceptions in specific areas of electrical circuits and mechanics amongst first‐year tertiary physics students. The data indicate that a large number of physics students at the tertiary level hold non‐scientific conceptions of these physical phenomena. The dyadic interaction strategy proved effective as a means of encouraging students to actively and closely consider their own thinking about basic physical concepts. Further, results highlight the importance of inter‐personal conflict in the process of conceptual change.     

Conceptualizing climate change in the context of a climate system: implications for climate and environmental education

Today there is much interest in teaching secondary students about climate change. Much of this effort has focused directly on students’ understanding of climate change. We hypothesize, however, that in order for students to understand climate change they must first understand climate as a system and how changes to this system due to both natural and human influences result in climatic and environmental changes and feedbacks. The purpose of this article is to articulate a climate system framework for teaching about climate change and to stimulate discussion about what secondary students should know and understand about a climate system. We first provide an overview of the research on secondary students’ conceptions of climate and climate change. We then present a climate system framework for teaching about climate and climate change that builds on students’ conceptions and scientific perspectives. We conclude by articulating a draft conceptual progression based on students’ conceptions and our climate system framework as a means to inform curriculum development, instructional design, and future research in climate and environmental education.