The Influence of Metacognitive Training on Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Conceptions of Nature of Science

This study assessed the influence of training in, and use of, metacognitive strategies on the development of prospective elementary teachers’ views of nature of science (NOS). Participants were 49 students (92% female) enrolled in two sections of an elementary science methods course. The sections were randomly assigned to an intervention group and a comparison group. Students in both groups were engaged with explicit‐reflective NOS instruction, which focused on the empirical, tentative, theory‐driven, inferential, and creative NOS. Additionally, students in the intervention group received instruction in, and used, three metacognitive strategies during their engagement with thinking about NOS. The Views of Nature of Science Questionnaire—Form C and the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory were respectively used to assess participants’ views of NOS and metacognitive awareness at the beginning and conclusion of the study. Data analyses indicated that significantly more students in the intervention group explicated more informed views of the target aspects of NOS. Moreover, these substantial changes were coupled with significantly increased Metacognitive Awareness Inventory scores for the intervention group participants. The results point to a relationship between improved metacognitive awareness and the development of informed understandings of NOS.     

Production and consumption of university Linked Data

Linked Data increases the value of an organisation's data over the web by introducing explicit and machine processable links at the data level. We have adopted this new stream of data representation to produce and expose existing data within The Open University (OU) as Linked Data. We present in this paper our approach for producing the data, based on well-defined workflows at the organisation as well as the technical levels. We also discuss the data already available to consume, and show the potential improvements that Linked Data brings by presenting three applications: (1) the OU Expert Search system for finding experts at the OU based on a specified topic of interest, (2) the Social Study application to identify potential courses for students based on their Facebook profile information, and (3) the Linked OpenLearn application that helps students identify related media and courses to OpenLearn units at the OU. Before concluding the paper, we show the potential benefits and an approach towards interlinking data beyond The Open University with other universities, using a common categorisation scheme.     

The Nature of Science and Science Education: A Bibliography

Research on the nature of science and science education enjoys a longhistory, with its origins in Ernst Mach's work in the late nineteenthcentury and John Dewey's at the beginning of the twentieth century.As early as 1909 the Central Association for Science and MathematicsTeachers published an article – A Consideration of the Principles thatShould Determine the Courses in Biology in Secondary Schools – inSchool Science and Mathematics that reflected foundational concernsabout science and how school curricula should be informed by them. Sincethen a large body of literature has developed related to the teaching andlearning about nature of science – see, for example, the Lederman (1992)and Meichtry (1993) reviews cited below. As well there has been intensephilosophical, historical and philosophical debate about the nature of scienceitself, culminating in the much-publicised Science Wars of recent time. Thereferences listed here primarily focus on the empirical research related to thenature of science as an educational goal; along with a few influential philosophicalworks by such authors as Kuhn, Popper, Laudan, Lakatos, and others. Whilenot exhaustive, the list should prove useful to educators, and scholars in otherfields, interested in the nature of science and how its understanding can berealised as a goal of science instruction. The authors welcome correspondenceregarding omissions from the list, and on-going additions that can be made to it.     

Examining the Representations of NOS in Educational Resources

Science & Education - Researchers have raised concerns about teachers’ ability to embed nature of science (NOS) in their science instruction, a complicated situation that is certainly...     

Effectual Reasoning and Innovation among Entrepreneurial Science Teacher Leaders: a Correlational Study

This is one of the first studies to examine the educational entrepreneur in K-12 public schools and the first to present an instrument designed to measure entrepreneurial thinking among teachers using a type of reasoning, effectual reasoning, which has been proposed in the business literature on entrepreneurs. This study situates entrepreneurial thinking within the K-12 education arena and examines the relationship between high school and middle school teachers’ use of effectual reasoning and their corresponding implementation of high, medium, or low levels of innovation in STEM areas within their classrooms, districts, or across districts. Our findings correlated higher use of effectual reasoning, a component of entrepreneurial thinking, with higher levels of implementation of innovations among teachers within an NSF grant, Entrepreneurial Leadership in STEM Teaching and learning, which centered on deeper content, reform-oriented pedagogies, and entrepreneurial thinking. We found that high innovators viewed uncertainty’ differently than low innovators by associating it with more positive cognitive structures and that innovators at different levels hold distinct notions of what constitutes high and low risk innovations. Contrary to the common notion that entrepreneurs are high-risk takers, results reveal that the types of innovations perceived by high innovators as low risk are viewed as high risk by low innovators. Furthermore, the results are consistent with the idea that entrepreneurs do certain types of things to lower/manage the risk of innovations before and, if necessary, during the implementation of an innovation. NSF: Award 0831820     

The impact of technology on the enactment of “inquiry” in a technology enthusiast's sixth grade science classroom

This study investigated the impact of the use of computer technology on the enactment of “inquiry” in a sixth grade science classroom. Participants were 42 students (38% female) enrolled in two sections of the classroom and taught by a technology‐enthusiast instructor. Data were collected over the course of 4 months during which several “inquiry” activities were completed, some of which were supported with the use of technology. Non‐participant observation, classroom videotaping, and semi‐structured and critical‐incident interviews were used to collect data. The results indicated that the technology in use worked to restrict rather than promote “inquiry” in the participant classroom. In the presence of computers, group activities became more structured with a focus on sharing tasks and accounting for individual responsibility, and less time was dedicated to group discourse with a marked decrease in critical, meaning‐making discourse. The views and beliefs of teachers and students in relation to their specific contexts moderate the potential of technology in supporting inquiry teaching and learning and should be factored both in teacher training and attempts to integrate technology in science teaching. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach     

Bicultural Work Motivation Scale for Asian American college students

The bicultural work motivations of Asian Americans have not yet been comprehensively captured by contemporary vocational constructs and scales. For this study, we conducted two studies on the initial reliability and validity of the Bicultural Work Motivation Scale (BWMS) by combining qualitative and quantitative methods. First, a pilot study was conducted with 14 Asian American college students to assess their motivation to work, and items were generated from the themes developed in the qualitative analysis. Results from the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a stable four-factor structure of the BWMS: Honoring Parents, Family Financial Obligation, Fulfilling Personal Interest, and Being Independent. Adequate reliability and evidence for concurrent and discriminant validity are presented. Implications of the scale for further vocational assessment and research are discussed.     

Developing and acting upon one's conception of the nature of science: A follow‐up study

This study aimed to delineate the factors mediating the translation of preservice teachers' conceptions of the nature of science into instructional planning and classroom practice. Additionally, the study assessed the influence of temporally separating teaching preservice teachers about the nature of science and teaching them how to address it instructionally. This latter intervention was based on the results of a previous investigation. Prior to student teaching, the 13 participants responded to an open‐ended questionnaire designed to assess conceptions of the nature of science. Throughout student teaching, daily lesson plans, classroom videotapes, portfolios, and supervisors' weekly clinical observation notes were collected and searched for explicit instances of nature of science planning and/or instruction. Following student teaching, participants were interviewed to validate their responses to the open‐ended questionnaire, identify factors that mediate the translation of their conceptions of the nature of science into classroom teaching, and explicate their pedagogical preferences for teaching the nature of science. Participants possessed adequate understanding of several aspects of the nature of science and, contrary to the results of the earlier investigation, most did not conflate the nature of science with science processes. Furthermore, several participants explicitly addressed some aspects of the nature of science during classroom instruction. Participants, however, failed to include the nature of science among their instructional objectives and did not make a concerted effort to assess student understandings. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 563–581, 2000