Teachers’ Ideas About the Nature of Science: A Critical Analysis of Research Approaches and Their Contribution to Pedagogical Practice

This paper looks into research aimed to elicit teachers’ ideas about science through the development of resources as questionnaires, problematic tasks and interviews. It is focused on how those ideas are conceptualised and how such conceptualisations have been reflected in the methodological approaches adopted and the advantages and disadvantages of research instruments. This analysis suggests four broad categories to group studies considering substantially different perspectives on teachers’ knowledge. Drawing upon the general finding that teachers tend to develop stereotypical views connected to science, there is an attempt to respond to the question of why such views are not sustainable from an educational point of view. A salient conclusion is that the large majority of such research remains marginal in informing pedagogical practice and faces serious conceptual and methodological challenges. It is also claimed that those studies adopting pedagogical embedded view of ideas about science do illuminate the way forward. The paper ends with a discussion on the implications of teachers’ images of the world of science in their practice.     

Exploring the Construct of Pedagogical Discontentment: A Tool to Understand Science Teachers’ Openness to Reform

It is well established that many teachers are resistant to take up the messages of reform if these messages require them to substantially shift their teaching practices. What accounts for this resistance? One well established explanation is that teachers lacks the self-efficacy required to attempt something new in their teaching—they simply do not feel capable of effectively enacting the messages. However, there are a host of studies describing teachers with high self—efficacy who remain resistant to messages of change. The purpose of this article is to address the gap in the application of self-efficacy to understand the change or lack of change of science teachers’ practice through the introduction of a related construct, pedagogical discontentment. This construct reflects a state of cognitive conflict that exists when an individual recognizes a mismatch between her/his science teaching pedagogical goals and classroom practices. One potential result of this mismatch is that a teacher problematizes her teaching practices, prompting an increased receptivity to reform messages. Building on existing literature, we present vignettes of four hypothetical teachers who exemplify variations of pedagogical discontentment. When combined with self-efficacy, pedagogical discontentment provides a useful lens to understand teachers’ consideration and adoption of messages of reform.     

Middle School Science Teachers’ Confidence and Pedagogical Practice of New Literacies

Due to the rapid advancements of information and communication technologies (ICTs), educational researchers argue that multimodal and new literacies should become common practices in schools. As new ICTs emerge and evolve, students need the new literacies skills and practices to successfully participate fully in the civic life of a global community. Are teachers prepared to integrate ICTs in the classroom to develop students’ new literacies skills? The purpose of this study is to suggest a new literacies framework that guides ICTs integration and supports scientific inquiry, as well as investigate middle school teachers’ confidence to practice new literacies in science classrooms. The study adopted mixed-methodology design, surveyed 32 middle school science teachers’ ICTs and new literacies skills, and randomly observed 15 teachers’ new literacies practices in the classrooms. The results revealed that even though teachers have high confidence in using ICTs, the meaningful technology integration and new literacies practices were scarcely observed in their classroom practices.     

Science Teachers’ Pedagogical Discontentment: Its Sources and Potential for Change

This research explored science teachers’ pedagogical discontentment and described its role in teachers’ consideration of new teaching practices. Pedagogical discontentment is an expression of the degree to which one is discontented because one’s teaching practices do not achieve one’s teaching goals. Through a series of structured interviews conducted with 18 practicing science teachers of various grade levels, content areas, routes of preparation, and amount of experience, areas of commonality in the teachers’ pedagogical discontentment were identified. The common areas of pedagogical discontentment include the ability to teach all students science, science content knowledge, balancing depth versus breath of instruction, implementing inquiry instruction, and assessing science learning. We draw implications for using this construct to craft more effective professional development.     

Preservice Teachers’ Connections of Pedagogical Knowledge to Mentoring At-Risk Adolescents: Benefits and Challenges

Providing authentic encounters with secondary students may be a way to provide a realistic image of students’ academic challenges, and enhance preservice teachers’ skills, knowledge, and dispositions to better address the needs of their future academically, linguistically, socially, and culturally unique students. The purpose of our study was to examine preservice teachers’ experiences in mentoring at-risk high school adolescents. Specifically, we sought to identify the connections to pedagogy associated with their mentoring experience. Major findings generated five themes: (a) relationship building, (b) academic immediacy, (c) embracing a professional lens, (d) a student-centered pedagogical philosophy, and (e) self-efficacy.     

“We’re Here to Learn to Speak French”: An Exploration of World Language Teachers’ Beliefs About Students and Teaching

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore five world language teachers’ beliefs about their students, their attributions about student enrollment, and their reported teaching practices. Findings represent a continuum of critical practice in that three teachers appeared to espouse deficit thinking and stereotypes about students of color, and color-evasiveness or colorblindness as an approach to teaching. Two teachers appeared to espouse beliefs that may be more representative of inclusive classrooms, and these teachers reported advocacy work for certain student groups and efforts to develop students’ critical consciousness in their classrooms. Findings are contextualized via critical lenses, and implications for language teacher education and policy are discussed.     

Teachers’ Enactments of Workplace Conditions and Their Beliefs and Attitudes toward Reform

This study builds on two assumptions regarding agency in teachers' workplace learning. (1) While teachers enact school reform in daily school and classroom practice, they actively redefine the reform. (2) In this learning process, in which working and learning are integrated, teachers reinterpret and reinvent the workplace conditions in their school. These workplace conditions function as enabling and/or constraining environments for learning. Teachers' perception of workplace conditions in their schools and their definitions of and attitudes toward reform are regarded as more or less integrated results of and conditions for workplace learning. As such, they are expected to be related. The question in this article is if this relationship can be demonstrated. Data are collected in a comparative case study of 18 secondary school teachers in the context of the reform of students' active and self-directed learning. Results show that schools as learning environments are interpreted by teachers as complex and multidimensional, rather than dual ideal types. Teachers' definitions of and attitudes toward reform are related to their perceptions of workplace conditions in the predicted direction.     

Intended Consequences: Challenging White Teachers’ Habitus and Its Influence in Urban Schools Implementing an Arts-Based Educational Reform

Reform efforts like the urban, arts-based initiative Project ARTS are designed to provide intentional, equitable methods of improving students’ learning, yet few urban educators have been sufficiently trained to recognize differences in habitus between themselves and their students. For equitable reform to occur teachers must understand their own habitus and the habitus-forming experiences of their students. In this paper, we analyze qualitative project data using Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts of cultural capital, field, habitus, symbolic violence and misrecognition to explore teachers’ and students’ experiences in order to determine the extent to which power and privilege begin to be challenged within participating schools. We explore the ways in which teacher habitus has shifted to recognize, include or become empathetic to student habitus as a result of Project ARTS curricula, co-teaching and professional development while also considering the possibility the program produces unintended consequences at odds with the project’s mission: reproducing the status quo by advancing the cultural capital of teachers rather than that of students. Finding markedly fewer teacher narratives confirming the social reproduction of inequitable power relationships than when the project began, we conclude by discussing the transformation of teacher habitus, student outcomes, and school climate after 5 years of Project ARTS participation, proposing implications for urban teachers and leaders, their communities, and policymakers intent upon implementing equitable educational reform and the social transformation reform intends.     

Teaching Genetics in Secondary Classrooms: a Linguistic Analysis of Teachers’ Talk About Proteins

This study investigates Swedish biology teachers’ inclusion of proteins when teaching genetics in grade nine (students 15–16 years old). For some years, there has been a call to give attention to proteins when teaching genetics as a means of linking the concepts ‘gene’ and ‘trait’. Students are known to have problems with this relation because the concepts belong to different organizational levels. However, we know little about how the topic is taught and therefore this case study focuses on how teachers talk about proteins while teaching genetics and if they use proteins as a link between the micro and macro level. Four teachers were recorded during entire genetics teaching sequences, 45 lessons in total. The teachers’ verbal communication was then analyzed using thematic pattern analysis, which is based in systemic functional linguistics. The linguistic analysis of teachers’ talk in action revealed great variations in both the extent to which they used proteins in explanations of genetics and the ways they included proteins in linking genes and traits. Two of the teachers used protein as a link between gene and trait, while two did not. Three of the four teachers included instruction about protein synthesis. The common message from all teachers was that proteins are built, but none of the teachers talked about genes as exclusively encoding proteins. Our results suggest that students’ common lack of understanding of proteins as an intermediate link between gene and trait could be explained by limitations in the way the subject is taught.     

Identifying Science Teachers’ Perceptions of Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK)

The application of information and communication technology in instruction is highly emphasized in the contemporary education of science teachers. This paper hence aims to explore science teachers’ perceptions of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) addressing teachers’ perceptions of the affordances of technology application in instruction. A total of 222 pre- and in-service science teachers in Singapore were surveyed. Structural equation models analysis was utilized to examine the model of TPACK involving the seven factors of technological knowledge (TK), pedagogical knowledge (PK), content knowledge (CK), technological content knowledge (TCK), technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), as well as synthesized knowledge of technology, pedagogy, and content (TPC). The results confirm the seven-factor model and indicate that the science teachers’ perceived TPC significantly and positively correlated with all the other TPACK factors. This paper further reveals the relationships between the science teachers’ perceptions of TPACK and their demographic characteristics such as teaching experience, gender, and age. The findings indicate that female science teachers perceive higher self-confidence in pedagogical knowledge but lower self-confidence in technological knowledge than males. Further, female in-service science teachers’ perceptions of TK, TPK, TCK, and TPC significantly and negatively correlate with their age.     

What Jim Crow’s Teachers Could Do: Educational Capital and Teachers’ Work in Under-resourced Schools

This article explains how Jim Crow’s teachers—former teachers of legally segregated schools for blacks—prepared and motivated disadvantaged students in spite of funding and resource deprivation. According to the author, black teachers fashioned situated pedagogies for the acquisition of educational capital that could be used in exchange for jobs, rights, and social power. Findings reveal three strategies of opportunity which provide some clues to how urban teachers today can educate poor children of color in under-resourced schools, such as generating materials and supplies, situating curriculum and instruction, and mobilizing human resources. The analysis draws upon 44 oral history interviews with former teachers in the coastal plains of North Carolina, as well as secondary historical sources.     

Teachers and the State: forming and re‐forming ‘partnership’

Teachers in the English and Welsh State education system have experienced a changing and turbulent relationship with the State in recent decades. This article adopts a historical analysis and argues that the concept of ‘partnership’ is key to understanding the relationship between teachers and the State in the period since the Second World War. Initially a partnership based on a commitment to welfarist values, professional autonomy and collective bargaining; this has been systematically dismantled and reconstructed as a ‘social partnership’ based on teacher union involvement in workforce reform coupled with a significantly more managerialist conception of professional accountability. Re‐engineering the terms of its partnership with teachers has been central to the State’s restructuring of public education along neo‐liberal lines.     

Language in Science Classrooms: An Analysis of Physics Teachers’ Use of and Beliefs About Language

The world over, secondary school science is viewed mainly as a practical subject. This may be one reason why effectiveness of teaching approaches in science education has often been judged on the kinds of practical activity with which teachers and students engage. In addition to practical work, language??often written (as in science texts) or oral (as in the form of teacher and student talk)??is unavoidable in effective teaching and learning of science. Generally however, the role of (instructional) language in quality of learning of school science has remained out of focus in science education research. This has been in spite of findings in empirical research on difficulties science students encounter with words of the instructional language used in science. The findings have suggested that use of (instructional) language in science texts and classrooms can be a major influence on the level of students?? understandings and retention of science concepts. This article reports and discusses findings in an investigation of physics teachers?? approaches to use of and their beliefs about classroom instructional language. Direct classroom observations of, interviews with, as well as content analyses of the participant teachers?? verbatim classroom talk, were used as the methods of data collection. Evidence is presented of participant physics teachers?? lack of explicit awareness of the difficulty, nature, and functional value of different categories of words in the instructional language. In conclusion, the implications of this lack of explicit awareness on the general education (initial and in-service) of school physics teachers are considered.     

Explaining Student Achievement: the Influence of Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Statistics

Statistics is an increasingly important component of the mathematics curriculum. StatSmart was a project intended to influence middle-years students’ learning outcomes in statistics through the provision of appropriate professional learning opportunities and technology to teachers. Participating students in grade 5/6 to grade 9 undertook three tests, a pre-test, a post-test and a longitudinal retention test over a period of 2 years. Their teachers completed a survey that included items measuring pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for teaching statistics. Despite the development of valid instruments to measure both student and teacher content knowledge and teachers’ PCK, linking teachers’ knowledge directly to students’ learning outcomes has proved elusive. Multilevel modelling of results from 789 students for whom there were 3 completed tests and measures from their teachers indicated that students’ outcomes were influenced positively by their initial teacher’s PCK. Extended participation of teachers in the project also appeared to reduce negative effects of changing teachers.     

‘A very pushy kind of folk’: Educational Reform 1944 and the Catholic Laity of England and Wales

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century control over their schools was central to the sense of a Catholic identity for English Catholics, and its defence was a priority of their bishops. The 1944 education act threatened the financial viability of these schools. Between 1942 and 1944 the divided and uncertain response of the Catholic Hierarchy of England and Wales to the state’s proposals for educational reform opened the way for the intervention of lay catholics into the education debate. The Sword of the Spirit movement is commonly remembered as the central organization for lay initiative in Church affairs. However, for Catholics and for participants in the education debate the organization known as the Catholic Parents’ and Electors’ Association (CPEA) was far more significant. From local initiatives in Ilford, south‐east London, and Bradford, in the north, between 1940 and 1942, the CPEA expanded, until by 1944 it could claim a nationwide membership running into tens of thousands, as well as the enthusiastic support of the Catholic press. It engaged in vigorous political activity, in most cases without the sanction of clerical authority. To some extent the movement troubled Catholic authority as much as the education issue itself. With the re‐establishment of authority, following the appointment of a new cardinal‐archbishop of Westminster the movement foundered but was by no means extinguished. It embodied the extending power within the Catholic community of an urban middle class, related to, but increasingly distinct from, the growing Catholic professional elite exemplified by the growth of the Newman Association. The CPEA could be harnessed by the clerical leaders of the Catholic community, but its history indicates the social, psychological and political stresses attendant on educational change in a minority community.     

Teaching Objectives in Chemistry: a Comparison of Teachers’ and Students’ Priorities

Summaries

English

An inventory which consisted of 12 objectives of chemistry teaching was constructed from lists compiled from the responses of 12th‐grade students and given to 10th, 11th and 12th graders and to their teachers. All four groups were asked to rank the objectives according to their order of significance.

The analysis of the order of rankings gives an insight into what are considered as the most important and interesting aspects of chemistry by students and by teachers.

The use of an objectives questionnaire in this manner is recommended to curriculum developers as part of the process of development and implementation of any curriculum. This may help to make the subject matter more suitable for the needs of both students and teachers.     

Equalization of the Burden of Capital Outlay in a State’s Minimum Educational Program

ABSTRACT

The author aimed to investigate the variability in science achievement as a function of student-, school- and country-level factors. Achievement scores of 134,123 eighth-grade students from 4,511 schools of 29 countries who participated in the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study were analyzed. Multilevel modeling results showed that science achievement was driven largely by student-level factors. Students scored higher when they had more self-confidence in learning science, came from home with a higher level of family background, were boys, spent less time on nonacademic activities, and did job at home. Schools averaged higher when they had positive school climate, were located in urban areas, and there was no problem with attendance at school and shortages in resources for science instruction.