Inquiry-Based Science Education Competencies of Primary School Teachers: A literature study and critical review of the American National Science Education Standards

Inquiry-based science education is an important innovation. Researchers and teachers consider it to be stimulating for pupils’ application of research skills, construction of meaning and acquiring scientific knowledge. However, there is ambiguity as to what competencies are required to teach inquiry-based science. Our purpose is to develop a profile of professional competence, required for effective inquiry-based science teaching in primary schools in the Netherlands. This article reviews literature and compares the outcomes to the American National Science Education Standards (NSES). In so doing, it seeks to answer the following research questions: What elements of competencies required by primary school teachers who teach inquiry-based science are mentioned, discussed and researched in recent literature? To what extent are the American NSES (introduced 15 years ago) consistent with elements of competencies found in recent literature? A comprehensive literature review was conducted using Educational Resources Information Centre and Google Scholar databases. Fifty-seven peer-reviewed scientific journal articles from 2004 to 2011 were found using keyword combinations. Analysis of these articles resulted in the identification and classification of 22 elements of competencies. This outcome was compared to the American NSES, revealing gaps in the standards with respect to a lack of focus on how teachers view science teaching and themselves as teachers. We also found that elements of competencies are connected and poor mastery of one may affect a teacher's mastery of another. Therefore, we propose that standards for the Netherlands should be presented in a non-linear, holistic, competence-based model.     

What are we trying to understand and improve? Educational research as Leerlaufreaktion. 1

The problems that educational research are supposed to solve have been poorly analyzed and the basic phenomena that we are trying to understand have not been clearly described. Educational experimenters often resemble Leerlaufreaktionen in lower animals, i.e., complex, highly integrated activities that take place despite the absence of an appropriate environmental occasion.

We have tended to forget the practical origins of science and have allowed ourselves to be dominated by overly abstract ideas that betray our goals. Experimenters require tangible events to think and wonder about in order to improve their intuitions and in order to generate and test ideas that will deepen our understanding of nature and make a real difference in the practical world. Better observations of what actually goes on in instructional situations are therefore needed and more detailed records of teaching and learning must be kept. An instructional record‐keeping system called a course memory is described.     

Reflections on the Field: Aspirations of Learning Science and the Practical Logic of Instructional Enterprises

Over 100 years of learning and cognition research have had only modest cumulative impact on teaching, while many other practical domains such as agriculture have shown a steady growth in widely accepted, research-informed practices. Several reasons have been advanced for the painfully slow adoption of science-based instructional procedures. One important but not widely recognized obstacle is proposed here, namely, that the aims of fundamental learning and teaching research do not mesh well with the practical logic of schools. Basic learning research tends to focus on efficiency, i.e., how much can be learned from a given amount of effort or time but teaching efficiency is not a strong concern for schools. This is because they generally focus on global year-end results while the efforts required at the tactical lesson level are only loosely monitored. School administrators tend to reckon costs in terms of the number of engaged teachers and not in the difficulty of each teacher’s job. For these reasons, schools can be expected to have only nominal interests in science-informed, close management of tactical pedagogic units. Psychological work on labor saving possibilities, such as research-based instructive products, is more likely to be readily welcomed than improvements in lesson efficiency, especially in middle and high schools. Instructional enterprises in which the cost and the benefits of instruction are borne by the same agency, such as industrial training, are the most likely consumers of efficiency-related basic cognitive research.

Conferences

Ohne Zusammenfassung

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ConferencesCongrés

     

Innovative Partnerships in the Knowledge Industry

The authors are concerned that, on one hand, the public universities in the United Kingdom and in other developed countries are becoming increasingly overcrowded (massified) and, on the other hand, underfunded. At the same time, numerous students who have had, in many cases, to pay large sums of money for their education, as in Canada, cannot find jobs when they graduate. Yet, increasingly, large corporations are creating in‐house training programmes and, in some cases, corporate universities. The conclusion is that academe is not providing the trained personnel that industry wishes (and needs) to hire. Why are universities apparently unable to fill the gap? A solution would be more targeted governmental steering of higher education. However, the majority of job creators in technological societies are small‐ and medium‐size enterprises. They cannot create their own training programmes, much less their own corporate universities. They must rely on higher education institutions both to provide them with skilled personnel with initial qualifications and then to provide further training. Higher education must seize this potential market.