Students’ conceptions and the learning of science

This introductory article to the Special Issue of the International Journal of Science Education attempts to review the theoretical contexts for research into children's conceptions in science and to identify future directions for research programmes in this field.     

University students’ and teachers’ conceptions of teaching and learning in the biosciences

In this study we compare university teachers’ and first-year students’ conceptions of teaching and learning at the Faculty of Environmental and Biological Sciences. The conceptions were analysed using data from open-ended questionnaires. The results showed that at the beginning of studies the gap between teachers’ and students’ conceptions of teaching and learning is substantial. This finding has important implications for the educational process. In order to enhance successful studying from the beginning of students’ university careers, it is important for teachers to become aware of the differences between students’ and teachers’ conceptions of learning.     

Preservice elementary teachers’ conceptions of science: science,theories and evolution∗∗

The intent of the present study is to describe preservice elementary teachers’ understanding of science and how certain contextual variables contribute to this understanding.

Eighty students in three sections of an elementary science methods course participated in the study by completing a questionnaire. Six questions dealt with knowledge of science, theories and evolution. In addition, a 21‐item rating scale covering various aspects of science and science teaching was included.

The major theme arising out of the data is how beliefs affect preservice teachers’ understandings of science. The anthropocentricity in the subjects’ definitions and purposes of science, theories and evolution is the most explicit and pervasive of the beliefs influencing the conceptualizations of science. The often vague and misinformed definitions of theories add a further dimension of how science is perceived. When evolution is introduced, both the anthropocentric view of science and the misunderstood notion of theory come together to confound the subjects’ understanding. When asked about the teaching of evolution, the subjects’ confusion concerning the nature of science becomes strikingly evident.

     

The nature of students’ informal science conceptions

Case studies have been constructed of primary school children's developing explanations of a range of air pressure phenomena. A range of conceptions relating to air pressure have been identified, and insights gained concerning the way these interrelate over time and over context. It was found that children are naturally generative in their construction of explanations, but that they use conceptions in quite complex and fluid ways. It is argued that naive conceptions maintain a valuable function as intuitive recognition elements that feed more sophisticated conceptions, and that generating a satisfying explanation for a phenomenon can involve having access to a range of interrelated conceptions. A range of contextual factors were identified, which influence the construction of explanations, and can act as barriers to the application of scientific conceptions.     

Characterizing children’s spontaneous interests in science and technology

This article reports the results of an analysis of 1676 science and technology questions submitted by Israeli children to a series of television programmes. It categorizes the children’s questions with reference to five different coding schemes: field of interest, motivation for asking the question, type of information requested, country‐specific aspects, and source of information. The results point to the popularity of biology, technology, and astrophysics over other sciences, indicate a shift in interests and motivation with age, and reflect a variety of gender‐related differences within the sample. The implications of the findings for some current trends in curriculum development and for informal science education are discussed with reference to the wider context of the pupils’ voice in education.     

A critical materialist entry into the comforts and dangers in defining academics’ of science teaching and learning research communities

Cultural Studies of Science Education - Research on science teaching and learning commonly makes use of reductionism to specify conditions of science learning. In my studies of...     

Evaluating and comparing Singaporean and Taiwanese eighth graders’ conceptions of science assessment

Background: Researchers have indicated that assessment practices and methods should support learners’ construction of meaningful understanding of knowledge. Understanding students’ conceptions of assessment will enable us to construct more realistic, valid and fair assessments. Learners’ conceptualization of assessment would be imperative to serve as an essential reference to evaluate their learning progress.

Purpose: This study evaluated and compared the Singaporean and Taiwanese middle school students’ conceptions of science assessment. Within-country gender comparisons were also explored.

Sample: 424 Taiwanese and 333 Singaporean eighth graders were invited for a cross-country comparison.

Design and methods: The participants completed a questionnaire named Conceptions of Science Assessment.

Results: The findings showed that the summative assessment dominates in the Taiwanese classrooms, while formative and summative assessment are usually perceived in Singaporean classrooms. The Singaporean students had a greater tendency than their Taiwanese counterparts to perceive the purpose of assessment as a way of reproducing knowledge, and the formative assessment as improving learning, problem-solving, and critical judgment. No gender differences were found among either the Singaporean or the Taiwanese students.

Conclusions: Educators in both countries should provide learners with more opportunities to experience process-oriented science assessment activities and de-emphasize the usage of examination-oriented practices to achieve the sophistication of conceptions.     

Higher education ‘massification’ and challenges to the professoriate: do academics’ conceptions of quality matter?

Ensuring and assuring the quality of higher education have become dominant policy discourses in many jurisdictions across the globe. Yet, the pressures of massification and its attendant problems mean that academics now have increasingly demanding roles to improve student learning, particularly so in systems ravaged by a paucity of resources. The study reported in this article explores the experiences of and the challenges faced by academics in a large public university in Ethiopia during a period of graduate education expansion. The study found that academics hold onto ‘exceptional’ and ‘transformative’ notions of quality as they made judgements about the quality of education, which they saw as declining since the onset of expansion. As well, academics associated the entire expansion effort with burden, alienation, enhanced workload and loss of autonomy for the professor. The study suggests that policies intended to improve the quality of higher education should, inter alia, attend to the concerns of front-line academics.     

Boundaries and selves in the making of ‘science’

Relying on ideas from practice theory and critical autobiography, I use this article first to tell, and then to analyse, a story about trying to publish a book whose contents are in some ways marginal to what is normally considered science or science education. During the publishing process, what counts as science got tangled up with what counts as “credible” science, “marketable” literature, and academic competence. As a result, a book and a person (me) dedicated to expanding the boundaries of science also became contributors to those very same boundaries.     

An exploratory study of students’ constructions of gender in science,engineering and technology

Despite an appreciation of the need to increase gender sensitivity and awareness among tertiary students in the field of science, engineering and technology (SET), there is a paucity of research that explores how students in this field construct gender. A greater understanding of such constructions can assist in transforming gender relations and creating a more gender‐sensitive learning environment for SET students. This paper explores SET students’ constructions of gender and the discourses they draw on when constructing female participation in SET. Focus group discussions were conducted with male and female students from an urban South African university. A discourse analysis identified various restrictive discourses that resist female participation in SET and value traditional gender roles for men and women, as well as more marginal voices that support gender equity. The paper concludes with recommendations for interventions aimed at challenging restrictive constructions of gender in higher education.     

Student‐teachers’ conceptions of science,teaching and learning: a case study in preservice science education

The resort to experiment is considered to be essential for teaching physics. But it often consists of an inductivist method where students are supposed to be able to find physical laws by observing phenomena. In fact it is not as easy for the students as it is for the physicist. We propose and test another way. When studying a new phenomenon, an initial discussion is performed between students in the class. They can propose various (eventually contradictory) explanatory models. Experiments are then used to make a choice between these models. Sequences in class situation are described, with learning behaviour and results reported for pupils in French schools (grades 6 and 8, 11‐14‐year olds).     

Pupils’ conceptions of force in inanimates and animates

The objective of this work was to highlight the conceptions of force held by students aged 10–17 years old, in situations where animate and inanimate objects interact. In the proposed experimental situations, we varied parameters such as the motion and position of an object and the agent’s effort. We asked questions about both inanimate and animate objects. Results show that pupils are able to use a small number of conceptions coherently, but that these are influenced by the context. For inanimate objects, conceptions develop gradually. Initially, force is regarded as a property of objects related to their weight and/or motion/position. With age, however, pupils begin to regard it as a process of interaction. For animates, conceptions evolve much more slowly, insofar as all pupils consider force to be a human property related to the result that is obtained and/or the agent’s effort.     

The influence of teachers’ conceptions of teaching and learning on their technology acceptance

Prior research has attempted to incorporate different personal variables within extant theories of technology acceptance models (TAMs). This study further extends TAM by incorporating teachers’ conceptions of teaching and learning (CoTL) in two forms: constructivist and traditional conceptions. The moderating effects of teachers’ demographic variables including age, gender, teaching experience, teaching level, and technology experience were tested. Our findings demonstrated that incorporating CoTL could provide a richer and more nuanced understanding of technology acceptance, although no moderating effects on any demographic variables were found.     

Biopolitics and the ‘subject’ of labor in science education

Viewing science education as a site of biopolitical engagement—intervention into forces that seek to define, control, and exploit life (biopower)—requires that science educators ask after how individuals and populations are governed by technologies of power. In this paper, I argue that microanalyses, the analysis of everyday practices and discourses, are integral to biopolitical engagement, are needed to examine practices that constitute subjectivities and maintain oppressive social conditions. As an example of a microanalysis I will discuss how repetitive close-ended lab/assessment tasks, as well as discourses surrounding careers in science, can work to constitute students as depoliticized, self-investing subjects of human capital. I also explore the relationship between science education, (bio)labor and its relation to biopolitics, which remains an underdeveloped area of science education. This paper, part of my doctoral work, began to take shape in 2011, shortly after the 2008 economic crisis achieved a tiny breached in the thick neoliberal stupor of everyday (educational) life.     

The transformation of China’s key science and technology universities in the move to mass higher education

China’s key science and technology universities are modelled on the French école Polytechnique. As such, they are utilitarian institutions, rooted in the concept of cultivating manpower for society’s economic progress, and tending to ignore the development of the individual. As China’s elite higher education system took in a rapidly increasing number of students in the recent massification process, China’s key science and technology universities underwent reform to become more comprehensive in curricular offerings and more research-oriented in function. The authors have uncovered an interesting phenomenon: Despite repeated discussion in academic circles, this transformation was never actually a conscious strategic choice for universities. Only when the Chinese government launched a program of higher education “massification” did universities develop their own unique reform strategies in a move to become more comprehensive and more research oriented. The authors have adopted a multi-stream analysis framework to describe and analyze three case study universities: University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), and Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University (NWAFU). It was found that Chinese universities already have quite a high level of autonomy, but that the government still has the power to make strategic decisions. Each university’s decision-making mechanism has been an independent process within the constraints of the political economic structure over this period, and policy-making has combined top-down and bottom-up processes.     

Middle and high school students’ conceptions of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies

Both scientists and policy-makers emphasize the importance of education for influencing pro-environmental behavior and minimizing the effects of climate change on biological and physical systems. Education has the potential to impact students’ system knowledge – their understanding of the variables that affect the climate system – and action knowledge – their understanding of behaviors that can impact the system. Research on climate change education has largely focused on system and action knowledge that address mitigation while overlooking equally necessary adaptive responses. This study used a pre/post-test format to identify aspects of middle and high school students’ climate system knowledge and action knowledge of both mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. Results indicate that adolescents currently conflate climate change mitigation strategies with unrelated environmental problems far less than in previous surveys. However, students demonstrated limited understanding of adaptive responses to climate change. After engaging in an instructional unit on climate change, students expressed stronger system and action knowledge, but significant misconceptions remained that conflated mitigation of and adaptation to climate change.     

Determining the factors that influence parents’ views about science and technology

Background: Children generally adopt the behaviours and attitudes they see in their home environment. Because of this, education provided in the school can be effective, as long as it is supported at home and by extension to the entire environment where the child interacts. Isolating the family from school influences the continuance of the school’s educational impact. In this sense, families do have a significant impact on their child’s attitude about.

Purpose: The objective of this study is to determine how parents view science and technology, the factors that influence their views (gender, age, educational level), and the relationship between these opinions and the students’ science academic achievement.

Sample: The present study was conducted with the parents of 169 students attending randomly chosen primary schools in a city in western Turkey.

Design and methods: The ‘Scale for Determining Views of Parents regarding Science and Technology’ (SFDVPAST) was developed by the researchers and used in the present study. The scale’s reliability was 0.88. Data obtained from SFDVPAST were analysed with SPSS 11.5 using frequency (f), percentage (%), average (X), standard deviation (SD), one-way MANOVA, a univariate ANOVA for each dependent variable as a tracking test, and simple linear regression analysis to determine the relationships.

Results: At the completion of this study, findings indicated that gender does not have an impact on how parents view science and technology, but age and educational level do impact parents’ views on this topic. The science academic achievement of the student correlates with the views of his/her parents on science and technology.

Conclusions: Parents’ views towards science and technology have affected their age and education level, but have not affected their sex. In addition, parents’ positive view towards science and technology has affected their science academic achievement of the students.     

The effect of a ‘Science,Technology and Society’ course on prospective teachers’ conceptions of the nature of science

The aim of this study is to assess prospective teachers’ views of some aspects of the nature of science (NOS) and the effects of a “Science, Technology and Society” (STS) course embedded with scientific investigation (SI) on these views. A questionnaire consisting of 13 items was given to 212 prospective teachers enrolled in a STS course before and after teaching. During the semester, participants were engaged in a specially designed pilot SI combined with explicit NOS instruction. Majority of the participants held traditional views of the target NOS aspects at beginning of the study. After the course there were significant changes in the conceptions of prospective teachers in majority target aspects of NOS as the results of a Sign test indicate. We suggest that the more suitable SI, performed in an active learning environment, related to target aspects of NOS must be selected to develop the more constructivist views about the NOS.